Whether the experience goes beautifully or our best-laid plans go awry, hand cranking ice cream with a few dozen kids is a whole lot more powerful than dithering in paralyzing despair. As always, and as we so often forget, the light wins out. | Continue reading
A robin or chicken that seems to die in a totally senseless way is viewed by humans only in its individuality, without seeing the universal order underlying this suffering. | Continue reading
But there is something more going on. We also face a new “transcendent reality,” as Klass puts it, in which we see the spiritual world with new eyes. This may include changed views of the sacred, nature, and time itself. | Continue reading
“Hope for the Organization Kid.” Joshua Hochschild revisits David Brooks’ classic 2004 essay on college students and considers what’s changed in the two decades since: “I doubt that the keenest college students will embrace AI as another shortcut to thinking. Twenty-three years a … | Continue reading
Andrew Petiprin is co-author of a new book from Word on Fire called Popcorn With the Pope, which examines all the movies on the 1995 Vatican movie list. Did you know there was a 1995 Vatican movie list? Me, either! Andrew is a former fellow at Word on Fire, a co-founder of the Sp … | Continue reading
This talk was delivered earlier this year at a conference on wellbeing held at the Sorbonne. | Continue reading
Disagreements aside, however, Byung-Chul's argument remains a valuable one: the cultures of consumption that rule the modern world are death to the cultures of community that give life meaning. | Continue reading
As-Long-As-Your’re-Happy . . . Follow-Your-Heart . . . Be-True-To-Yourself . . . Believe-In-Yourself . . . Live-Your-Truth . . . Be-Your-Best-Self . . . Do-What-You-Love — the aphorisms of our day are elegant. They sound like beautiful advice. They’re certainly enticing. Who woul … | Continue reading
Seen through his most redemptive lens, Bjartur stands as a cautionary tale for those who would pursue independence as an end in itself. | Continue reading
In his brief and not altogether satisfying rejoinder to the question, “why write?” Berry says, “To serve that triumph I have done all the rest,” and he ends the poem there. “That triumph” is the triumph of the way of love, the life of silence. | Continue reading
“Our Draymond Green Problem.” Elizabeth Stice draws on Draymond Green and Hannah Arendt to consider what responsibilities we might have for our allies: “What we need then is not exactly less politics, it is more “civic virtue,” which will involve a kind of politics. We actually h … | Continue reading
Our mothers and our children will always be part of our lives, in life and death. Surprisingly, grief does not dominate our existence, it informs it. | Continue reading
In our daily lives, we need activities that aren’t driven by our left hemispheres. We need leisure (as understood by Josef Pieper). We need to waste time. We need to do nothing . . . a thing that rankles the left hemisphere’s productive disposition. | Continue reading
Let’s point to the wiser and the well off and ask people if they want what those people have–often they do. Many times, those people have a love for the liberal arts. | Continue reading
Arched doorways, private courtyards, personal craftsmanship, a sense of place, and almost everything else we love about buildings has been taken away by the modernist ethos intent on depriving the public of a choice, as architects are left unchecked to focus more on how their bui … | Continue reading
Longtime ghostwriter Nancy French tells her own tale in the Ghosted: An American Life. French was raised in rural Tennessee and would later provide the words behind famous talking heads but found her own enchanting voice amid political and personal tumult. Highlights 1:15 Mud pie … | Continue reading
Reading for the shape of a life can be medicinal, especially when we allow that life to diagnose and heal ourselves. And maybe then that understanding can encourage doctors of all kinds–but especially scholars of the humanities–to think differently about their life. | Continue reading
“Is Ethical Shopping Only for Hipsters?” Kate Lucky wrestles with ethical shopping, effective charity, and the upside down extravagance of the Kingdom of God: “We anticipate an abundant new earth, and pray for its arrival. Also, we accommodate the world we have now. I aim to give … | Continue reading
What We Can Learn from a Society Where Community Still Matters | Continue reading
I am convinced that the busyness of our age detracts from our ability to see the worthy work we do, to see ourselves as whole persons. Filling our days does not necessarily lead to fulfillment. | Continue reading
Dodging deceptive design in the age of Big everything | Continue reading
When we refuse to engage our fellow citizens, we are also taking a public position. There is such a thing as non-partisan economics. But there is no such thing as non-political economics. | Continue reading
Perhaps we need nothing more and nothing less than a continual return to the Gospel, via all the means already available to us. We could start with St. Paul’s reminder that “covetousness . . . is idolatry” (Col. 3:5) | Continue reading
“Ending Agriculture isn’t the Climate-Crisis Solution Some Think It Is.” Taras Grescoe weighs in on the debate about lab-grown protein and makes a sensible defense of farming: “we need to forget about techno-mirages. Lab-grown protein, like the hyperloop and flying cars, will pro … | Continue reading
There is something Augustinian in Lukacs’ view of the past—that in a real sense, or at least in a manner of speaking, it exists only in the present, for it is only in the present that by remembering we call the past from nothingness into being. | Continue reading
This is the story of a bruised soul touched by grace but still frustrated by the passivity that others continue to show in response to the unspeakable. | Continue reading
Joel Miller of Miller’s Book Review Substack reads and reviews a prodigious number of books for this regular Substack. Joel formerly served as vice president of acquisitions for Thomas Nelson Publishers. Joel and I discuss how to find time to read, how to choose what to read, and … | Continue reading
Human liberty is indeed a good. But liberty is the freedom to choose well, not just freedom from restraints. | Continue reading
After a pandemic took his son, the Bard would never be the same | Continue reading
All of this only touches the surface of Escaping the Housing Trap’s arguments and only begins the many productive discussions that should—and hopefully will!—follow in its wake. Buy and read the book, and join with your neighbors in talking about how Strong Towns can help make yo … | Continue reading
“‘This Will Finish Us.’” I finished reading Wendell Berry’s Unsettling of America this week with a group of students, so this heartbreaking essay by Stephanie McCrummen about how the Tanzanian government, oil money from the Gulf states, and “conservationists” are evicting Maasai … | Continue reading
Pruning is difficult because we are forced to make a conscious decision to remove something that has been part of a growing plant. But these cuts are necessary and even life-giving. | Continue reading
I must say that I did not want to write this review. I walked into the theatre with high hopes for Mr. Garland’s Civil War. I was hoping it would sober people to the actual horrors that a modern a civil war would entail. | Continue reading
As such, these papers provide the means for understanding how imperial concerns shaped the way Entente soldiers perceived themselves and the war. But even more importantly to my mind, the papers provide a window into the human soul and how humor springs eternal in the human breas … | Continue reading
No home but the Garden was there originally for man, once upon a very long time ago. No garage either was part of life before expulsion from Eden. | Continue reading
“The Liberalism of Refuge.” I think that Bryan Garsten’s notion of “refuge” isn’t robust enough to do all the work he’s asking it to do in this account, but he poses important and nuanced challenges to some forms of localism in this essay: “Liberal societies, I want to suggest, a … | Continue reading
The book is at its best when it embraces a more generous spirit. If one wishes to learn about traveling grain harvesters and to follow a literary description of the landscape, one will find it here. | Continue reading
In Lost Cause debates, President Biden should be wary of casting the first stone: his own history demonstrates the complicated relationship the country has with its deadliest war and the men who led it. | Continue reading
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Wendell Berry’s sprawling, uneven, brilliant, and sometimes frustrating The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice will likely not, I think, be widely remembered after he leaves us as his greatest, most important work. But it is … | Continue reading
In a funk no more, I was prepared to meet the smile of my daughters with a genuine smile of my own as they came out of practice. The graffiti was gadfly, but also gift. | Continue reading
“Adonai has compassion,” sang the psalmist, “for he understands how we are made, he remembers that we are dust.” Perhaps in our dust of grief, we see clearly for the first time. | Continue reading
“Angry Farmers Are Reshaping Europe.” While this New York Times article predictably frames European farmers’ frustrations through the lens of the “far right” and its rising political power, Roger Cohen provides a view of life on French farms: “if this farmer seemed passionate abo … | Continue reading
This addiction may involve us in all sorts of ironies, but we need to untangle these and distinguish between irresponsible or absurd ironies and tragic or inescapable ones. | Continue reading
Haidt’s book is a tour de force. I can give it no higher praise than to say I wish we could put this book in the hands of every parent, teacher, school administrator, schoolboard member, and legislator in the country. Haidt convincingly shows that mobile technology—mostly but not … | Continue reading
“Heeding lessons from farmers who persist in place, we can embrace these virtues. Rather than give up or get out, we can dig in. Rather than go big, we can go home." | Continue reading
I do not know where the future will take us. I’m not going to try and escape the risks in modern society, but I’m also not going to ignore them. I’m going to be right here, in the thick of it, and that’s where I want to be. | Continue reading
“In ‘Barons,’ Austin Frerick Takes on the Most Powerful Families in the Food System.” Twilight Greenaway interviews Frerick on the depressing stories of corporate power and government capitulation that his recent book chronicles: “What I call the “Wall Street Farm Bill” . . . is … | Continue reading
If an invisible world is a reality, then a creator is probable, as the deists suggest, and perhaps even plausible. God may well be really real, just as I had supposed in my childhood years. I believe so. | Continue reading