While we can’t forever capture in amber all that passes through time, what we can do is hope for the Resurrection and leave mementos of ourselves for those that follow. | Continue reading
Old times there are not forgotten—a trait that cuts both ways. It is good to hang on to good traditions, bad to hang on to bad. | Continue reading
A tended garden inevitably involves some choices, as well as planning which tree species will fruit better with more sunshine. | Continue reading
We speak to connect with ideas and with the Divine. Of all the speeches I have heard in-person and not in a movie, or play, recording, or manuscript, a few have reached the pinnacle of being inspirational. | Continue reading
It’s children that make the neighborhood, and when children are outdoors, you’ll want porches in the front of your houses, so that you can see the streets where they often play, as we did. | Continue reading
“Inside the Dissident Fringe, Where the New Right Meets the Far Left, and Everyone’s Bracing for Apocalypse.” James Pogue goes to the American West to investigate how opposition to globalism has brought together a strange mix of nationalists and localists and preppers, some of wh … | Continue reading
Certainly there is a need for a national conversation and national solutions... But reading The Other Side of Prospect, one is left with the sense that the ultimate authors of Newhallville’s future revitalization, if it is to occur, will be its community members | Continue reading
Thomas’s novel suggests that those who would answer these difficult vocations well must learn to look through the pain and see the light shining through. | Continue reading
We should not reject the good fruits of our modern era, but let us also not neglect the good it does young bodies and minds to run up and down the cliffs, to have a mountain to rest the eyes against, and to sometimes simply be outside without parental interference. | Continue reading
Holly Ordway is the first returning guest on Cultural Debris. Holly and I discuss her most recent book Tales of Faith: A Guide to Sharing the Gospel Through Literature. Holly and I discuss the value of literature, receiving vs using stories, why reading fiction can be a dangerous … | Continue reading
eading Cheap Land Colorado makes you wonder how we can make more space for human flourishing among the poor and on the edges of society? Conover’s approach to the San Luis Valley might offer us a starting point. | Continue reading
“A Wild Christianity.” Paul Kingsnorth considers what we can learn from the cave Christians and their rich legacy: “In a time when the temptation is always toward culture war rather than inner war, I think we could learn something from our spiritual ancestors. What we might learn … | Continue reading
I think, I know, that Washington exemplified a whole-hearted devotion to his students. He was concerned, as I am, to educate the whole person of the student, not merely to train children to someday earn a good salary or support themselves. | Continue reading
As I learn how to be a sticker, I hope to continually see the beauty of Battle Creek, no matter its faults. I want to persist in finding the good in my city, to be motivated by affection and love for it, and to be faithful to the place God’s called me to. | Continue reading
“We seem to be born homesick, and that homesickness is meant to lead us into a life of pilgrimage.” Walker Percy Black Mountain, NC. Where are you going? At its core, an education seeks to answer that question. Where are you going and where do you want to go? Every educational ph … | Continue reading
We should aim to conserve what is deepest and true, not just what happens to have immediately preceded the present. It should be the conservative’s task to reconnect the manner of our lives and the institutions of our civilization—schools, colleges, churches, governments—to the s … | Continue reading
“Creatures That Don’t Conform.” You don’t have to agree with Lucy Jones’s politics or philosophy to share her amazement at slime mold (and don’t miss Barry Webb’s photographs): “They can humble us—with their complexity which is beyond our understanding. We think we have mastered … | Continue reading
Purdy has a palpable affection for what he calls “the preservative work of being together.” Beginning again from that affection might allow Purdy and his readers to find a fuller “response to political nihilism,” to listen for the voice that Two Cheers is wanting. | Continue reading
The success of Wildsam is a reminder that many people want to experience the real. Every day we are marketed generic and homogenous products and destinations, but there is an audience for something different. | Continue reading
Out on the wrinkled sea, the high notes come shimmering over the cold waves, and 72-year-old Dana Gioia says, “Meet me at the Lighthouse.” | Continue reading
Temperamentally and vocationally, I was in the wrong place. Yet I don’t regret a single day I spent there—not only because I met my wife, but because I learned to relish a simple, quiet way of living that many around us seem anxious to exceed. | Continue reading
“Watch the Great Fall.” Paul Kingsnorth acknowledges his own tendencies toward nostalgia and draws on some fine poets to articulate the proper posture toward decline: “The theologies of Zen, Orthodoxy, Mark Anthony and Robinson Jeffers differ wildly, and yet they alight, all of t … | Continue reading
Kevin Gutzman is Professor of History at Western Connecticut State University. He has published half a dozen books on Jefferson, Madison, and the Constitution. His latest book is The Jeffersonians. Cultural Debris Patreon – Support the podcast! Cultural Debris logo by Rachael Sin … | Continue reading
Any reformation requires a standard. How else could you measure progress? The standard of reviving classical learning should plainly include those revered authors who inspired and contributed to that tradition. | Continue reading
The After Virtual conference podcast series closes with a focus on civics and cemeteries. Mark Mitchell, author of Plutocratic Socialism, talks on, well, plutocrats and socialism (plus the importance of property ownership to maintaining the republic). Rachel Ferguson, author of … | Continue reading
Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams, instead of the tough fiber of the human heart…. A friend therefore is a sort of paradox in nature…. Let him be to thee forever a sort of beautiful enemy, untamable, devout … | Continue reading
I am not now lamenting my station, which is a kind of existential loneliness, though at times I do. I’m putting it down in writing because I know for certain that in this loneliness I’m far from alone. | Continue reading
How else does their work inspire you to think differently about your own relationship to your own places? Take action in your own property, if you have it, and in your local community. | Continue reading
“Ronald Blythe Obituary.” Patrick Barkham remembers a great localist writer: “Never out of print and read and studied around the world, Akenfield made Blythe famous and perhaps overshadowed the many other fruits of his long years of writing–short stories, poems, histories, novels … | Continue reading
By contrast, developing skill through direct contact with nature increases our confidence, efficacy, and even patience. Although fry cooks have a shorter learning curve than motorcycle mechanics or hockey players, all three experience the freedom of agency and causal influence on … | Continue reading
Having experienced pregnancy and childbirth with both a traditionally trained OB/GYN and with midwives, the philosophical differences are abundantly clear. | Continue reading
Being a teacher is a demanding job, whether in a college, school, or home setting. It requires tremendous energy, responsiveness, and mental flexibility. It requires that you, the teacher, also be willing to let yourself be taught. | Continue reading
Though the metaphor sounds alarmist, an unimaginable tsunami is barreling down on a complacent world. We may have time to adjust, who knows? | Continue reading
I enjoy certain utilitarian advantages by heating with wood, but I also prefer the habits of mind—attention, connection, succession, frugality—that my woodpile’s growth and contraction inspires. | Continue reading
My guest is Raj Bhakta. Raj is a true practitioner of the art of cultural debris. From founding one of the first premium whiskey brands, Whistle Pig—based out of Vermont, of all places—to buying an actual college at auction, Raj is not one to limit himself. We talk about all of t … | Continue reading
Accompanying the poor or inhabiting their number, the honest among us recognize our own fundamental impoverishment. Bernanos, a father and husband who long depended on others for sustenance, inhabited the paradox of Christianity. | Continue reading
The reader may be none the wiser regarding the definition of fascism, but this book affords a wisdom and moderation of sorts all the same, one that stems from the awareness that in popular rhetoric, fascism is a word full of sound and fury, signifying not much. | Continue reading
Changing the phrase “field work” to “practicum” is, without more comprehensive action, a perfect illustration of cheap grace. It costs USC nothing more than some online eye-rolling to do. | Continue reading
What keeps me on one side rather than the other is my belief that if we had been living more fully in that real world, a lot of what we call “the pandemic” simply would not have occurred (perhaps including the virus itself, if we accept the increasingly compelling theory that it … | Continue reading
To know a particular hometown, with its triumphs and tragedies, its gains and losses, its names and namesakes, its heroes and eccentrics, its myths and peculiarities, its landmarks and symbols, its deliberations and disputes, is to know a part of America and to deepen one’s commi … | Continue reading
Nature is never pure in these poems; it is always responding to human care or lack-of-care, commodified, and, indeed, turned into a symbol by the poet herself. Emerson doesn't hide the grief that haunts this book; it is about the death of a child. | Continue reading
The penultimate session from the FPR conference After Virtual: The Art of Recovering Lost Goods addresses health. Philosopher Adam Smith from the University of Dubuque and medical doctor Brian Volck, author of Attending Others: A Doctor’s Education in Bodies and Words, take on … | Continue reading
We taste myth when we read Piranesi, because in the story, like in Barfield’s exploration of how the meaning of words changes over time, we are taken out of our modern sensibilities (if only for a moment), and thrust into an ancient mode of thinking. | Continue reading
Huckberry’s success speaks to a desire for adventure and relationship with the land within the American public. People want to go backpacking and hiking and ride their motorcycles across the vast expanses of these United States, or at least they think they do. | Continue reading
I’m helping to lead a study abroad trip in Rome for the next couple of weeks, so the Water Dipper will be on hiatus. But I plan to return at the end of January. “Wendell Berry Book Club.” Ashley Colby is convening an online book club to discuss Berry’s Need to Be Whole. Lots of [ … | Continue reading
The memory of pain has the power to protect our joy. The land, the place, the names, the people; these are what connect us to today and to every past day. | Continue reading
My guest is Os Guinness, long a resident of the Washington, D.C. area, Guinness was born in China and educated at Oxford. He is a prolific author, most recently of The Great Quest and Zero Hour America, both from IVP. In our conversation we discuss the cultural crisis in America … | Continue reading
To nurture small-scale local agriculture is to oppose the Maoist, Stalinesque, Hitlerian, Huxlian, Schwabian, Gatesian push to monopolize global food production. My cows plod the Underground. And I plod along with them. | Continue reading