Matter, Gurus, and Lambing

“Matter Matters.” Paul Kingsnorth kicks off a new series at his Substack exploring ancient holy sites in Europe: “I’ve always been fascinated by how humans interact with their landscapes: what they build, how they relate to nature, and how their belief systems manifest in the phy … | Continue reading


@frontporchrepublic.com | 3 hours ago

In Praise of the Inefficient

This year I’m renewing my commitment to the sentence. | Continue reading


@frontporchrepublic.com | 1 day ago

Thomas M. Ward On Boethius & Stoicism

Professor Thomas M. Ward teaches at Baylor University. He is a philosopher who focuses on Medieval thought, especially the work of John Duns Scotus. He is the author most recently of After Stoicism: Last Words of the Last Roman Philosopher from Word on Fire. We discuss that book, … | Continue reading


@frontporchrepublic.com | 1 day ago

The Maps of Our Lives Point Homeward

Older and wiser, I have long learned that for all the times I wanted to visit far-away places, there is no place like home. | Continue reading


@frontporchrepublic.com | 2 days ago

Reflection in a Glass Wall

The reflection looked like a vintage motion picture, only without those stilted movements. | Continue reading


@frontporchrepublic.com | 3 days ago

Virgil and the Christial Imagination

love is the most powerful force in the world. | Continue reading


@frontporchrepublic.com | 4 days ago

Crafting the Ideal School: Finding a Balance Between High-Tech and the Hands

it is through the arts alone that the various branches of learning touch human life. | Continue reading


@frontporchrepublic.com | 5 days ago

Hospitality, AI, and Rivers

“How do I Kill my Microsoft Copilot?” Sam Leith is not particularly fond of Microsoft’s new AI helper: “As far as Big Tech is concerned, no crap idea is so crap that it can’t be tried again, and learning from your mistakes is for losers, Clippy is back. He’s now called Copilot. A … | Continue reading


@frontporchrepublic.com | 7 days ago

How to Raise Readers, in Thirty-Five Steps

It is not too much to say that everything in our culture pushes against habits | Continue reading


@frontporchrepublic.com | 8 days ago

The AI Invasion: For Humans, It’s Becoming Harder to Write

No question about it: For writers like me, who would like nothing more than to do our own writing and thinking with dignity and intellectual honesty, it’s becoming harder to write—at least on a computer. | Continue reading


@frontporchrepublic.com | 9 days ago

Romanticism and the Soul of Learning

Conservatives should reconsider the lessons of Romanticism. | Continue reading


@frontporchrepublic.com | 10 days ago

On Courage

"the virtue of courage has always been of special importance for young people, and that it is especially important for young people today." | Continue reading


@frontporchrepublic.com | 11 days ago

The Biblical Case for Conservation

The Bible tells us there is life within the Kingdom—life for us and life for what is around us. | Continue reading


@frontporchrepublic.com | 12 days ago

Media, Meat, and Life

“Last Boys at the Beginning of History.” This essay by Mana Afsari defies summary. Let me just say it is very good: “I was begging to be given values, community, a purpose, a vocation—and found none. Instead my teachers repeated what they’d heard on the news. In due time, by forc … | Continue reading


@frontporchrepublic.com | 14 days ago

Lament for a Post-National Canada

"Canada has become a country much practiced at outrage." | Continue reading


@frontporchrepublic.com | 15 days ago

Gárces’s Travels: A Review of Jeremy Beer’s Beyond the Devil’s Road

Much might be said about the neglect of the history of the American Southwest | Continue reading


@frontporchrepublic.com | 16 days ago

Harr’ today, gone tomorrow

However, the widespread association of these events with the closing of the Hotel Harrington has overshadowed the preceding history of the hotel | Continue reading


@frontporchrepublic.com | 17 days ago

Hannibal is at the Gates: Gambling in America

With the current state of sports betting, companies have managed to secure a largely unregulated, highly profitable, vice-driven field of operations. | Continue reading


@frontporchrepublic.com | 18 days ago

Philosophy in the Ruins

As long as we do live philosophical lives and share in that life with others, we can sprout a philosophical culture from the ruins of the one dominated by the philistines | Continue reading


@frontporchrepublic.com | 19 days ago

Seamus Heaney, Isolation, and the Catholic Worker

“Educating Humans.” I’m relishing the new issue of Plough. Alex Sosler has a great essay on trade schools, Tim Maendel describes one teacher’s creative ways of teaching his students to care for and conserve their place, and there are several other excellent pieces. “Walk on Air A … | Continue reading


@frontporchrepublic.com | 21 days ago

Marking the Year on Two Calendars: An Interview with Matthew Miller

Knowledge is a path to love, and so I’m bound to say that the book did change my affection for the place. | Continue reading


@frontporchrepublic.com | 22 days ago

Facing a New Year of Grief

Grief is not a process to work through, a disorder to heal, a condition to treat, or an illness to cure. | Continue reading


@frontporchrepublic.com | 23 days ago

The Hope of the American Republic: Local Coffee Shops

Because of coffee’s popularity, coffee shops can draw people together like very few other modern institutions. | Continue reading


@frontporchrepublic.com | 24 days ago

Agrarian Voices Lecture

FPR’s own Jason Peters will be giving an Agrarian Voices Lecture later this month at the Berry Center. If you’re near New Castle on Jan. 23rd, consider going in person to heckle him. If not, rumor has it there may be a video recording posted at a later date. | Continue reading


@frontporchrepublic.com | 25 days ago

Educating Hands for Human Flourishing? or Economic Growth?

"Opportunities that were not available to some due to race, socioeconomic class, or gender became available through industrial education efforts" | Continue reading


@frontporchrepublic.com | 26 days ago

Milton, Babbitt, and Auden

“AI and All Its Splendors.” I continue my mulling on AI and its underlying temptations in this lengthy essay for Christianity Today. I aim to craft a book proposal this summer that gathers together and brings some order to the various responses to AI I’ve been thinking about in r … | Continue reading


@frontporchrepublic.com | 28 days ago

A Larger Category Than Political Allegiance

Humanity should remain a larger category than political allegiance even as we openly—and, one hopes, bravely—discuss and work through our politics. | Continue reading


@frontporchrepublic.com | 29 days ago

There’s No Place Like Home

We are desperately in need of a collective vision of what it means to love our homes. | Continue reading


@frontporchrepublic.com | 1 month ago

An Ordinary Citizen Honors A Man of Extraordinary Decency

He showed what was possible when people came together for a cause and acted out of decency. | Continue reading


@frontporchrepublic.com | 1 month ago

“The Sensation of Seeing”: How T.S. Eliot Defamiliarizes the Christmas Story

That which we most value is often that which most frequently slips into dull repetition. | Continue reading


@frontporchrepublic.com | 1 month ago

“As I Know by Love”: Wendell Berry’s Another Day

One might think that after forty-four years of writing these Sabbath poems, Berry would run out of things to say. But it seems that as long as the trees continue their silent conversion of light to soil, as long as the sun and the moon endure, as long as he has life and breath, B … | Continue reading


@frontporchrepublic.com | 1 month ago

The American Food System’s Very Bad Legacy

There’s little appetite for a response that begins with taking up our axes to clear the land for something better. | Continue reading


@frontporchrepublic.com | 1 month ago

Forbidden Questions

Whenever we see such an avoidance of questions like these, we are witnessing someone protecting an ideological dream world. | Continue reading


@frontporchrepublic.com | 1 month ago

A Modest Proposal: Classical Schools Should Embrace AI

If classical schools insist on banning AI in all forms, their kids will be left behind. | Continue reading


@frontporchrepublic.com | 1 month ago

Where Can Wisdom Be Found? -Gambling Pigeons, the Quest for Wisdom, and the Irreducibility of Poetry

Poetry must be experienced, and the experience of poetry is itself a means of searching, a kind of hunting, for wisdom. | Continue reading


@frontporchrepublic.com | 1 month ago

College Radio

We can gain something from the Ike Carters and the student DJs of our communities: a human connection, a community connection—not to mention great music. | Continue reading


@frontporchrepublic.com | 1 month ago

Why We Need Christmas Trees

Rituals are our allies in sorrow. They help us appreciate what brief time we had with our loved ones while acknowledging the years we will face without them. | Continue reading


@frontporchrepublic.com | 1 month ago

Welcoming a Baby in Advent

Like Mary and all Israel waiting for the Messiah, like a mother welcoming a child, we are to “wait for it with patience.” | Continue reading


@frontporchrepublic.com | 1 month ago

Against Bigness, Not Against Health Insurance

I believe in personal responsibility; insurance companies believe in impersonal responsibility. | Continue reading


@frontporchrepublic.com | 1 month ago

Progress, Tyson, and Messiah

I’ll be taking the next couple of weeks off for the Christmas holidays. Look for these to resume in January. “Can a Phone-Free Learning Environment Work? This College President Emphatically Says Yes.” Charlie Camosy talks with Wyoming Catholic College president Kyle Washut about … | Continue reading


@frontporchrepublic.com | 1 month ago

Lead Kindly Light

And so, feeling blessed by the rich experiences of my ministry, I stand at the start of a new year in the dying days of the old one. | Continue reading


@frontporchrepublic.com | 1 month ago

The Writing on the Wall

The writing may still be on the wall, but a different story is being written in our block. | Continue reading


@frontporchrepublic.com | 1 month ago

Tri Robinson Looks Back in Thanks  

After a life of physical and spiritual adventure, an innovative homesteading teacher and pastor turns green with gratitude. Highlights 1:00 California to Idaho (before everybody was doing it) 12:00 The plane, the plane! 19:00 Picture pages, picture pages 26:00 Raising the dead wi … | Continue reading


@frontporchrepublic.com | 1 month ago

William James’s Grief

Decades of sorrow and searching for clinical evidence have strengthened his resolve, tempered now by experiences that add up to more than disparate bits of empirical data. | Continue reading


@frontporchrepublic.com | 1 month ago

Confessions of a Caffeine Addict

My addiction, rather, is of a more respectable variety. | Continue reading


@frontporchrepublic.com | 1 month ago

Civilization, Family, and Charity

“Against Christian Civilization.” Paul Kingsnorth’s Erasmus Lecture is now out in essay form: “I believe there is wisdom to be found for us, in this disintegrating age, not in crusading knights or Christian nationalists, not in emperors or soldiers, but in the mystics, the asceti … | Continue reading


@frontporchrepublic.com | 1 month ago

Life in the Cyborg Age: A Conversation with Josh Pauling, Co-author of Are We All Cyborgs Now?: Reclaiming Our Humanity from the Machine

And Robin and I really hope that this book can be part of that movement to help people get outside the Machine, throw sand in its gears, and live as creatures—human beings, fully alive. | Continue reading


@frontporchrepublic.com | 1 month ago

The True Face of Justice is Compassion

He took the words of Jesus to heart—he rarely judged others. When he passed this year, he left a memory not of condemnation, but of mercy. | Continue reading


@frontporchrepublic.com | 1 month ago