“The Moses Option.” Paul Kingsnorth writes against the dangerous allure of activism: “What is the ‘solution’ to our modern ‘problem’? For a start, it is to stop thinking like that, because that is Machine thinking. We do not have a ‘problem’ that can be ‘solved’ by politics or wa … | Continue reading
Our need for privacy has been accentuated by the way we live, in which goods and services arrive seemingly out of the ether, things we’ve bought to consume, throw away, or do with what we wish. The faces and hands behind these goods are invisible to us. | Continue reading
Christianity spread because people actually believed Jesus was their Lord and Savior. They believed in miracles not metaphors. | Continue reading
Proper forgetting depends on the idea of a nation itself. For Renan, “a nation is a soul, a spiritual principle” built on two things, the past and the present. | Continue reading
To prove the American proposition, we must dedicate our lives to its truth with our deeds every day, and maybe someday with our lives themselves. | Continue reading
I belong to this place—if not for the next thousand years, at least for the summer. In such a displaced age, even that has to mean something. | Continue reading
“Left Behind in Grimsby.” Simon Cross narrates the tensions he experienced ministering in a neighborhood where he wasn’t stuck: “There’s a feeling of inadequacy that comes with knowing how little you can do to help people. Social pressures, lack of opportunities, chronic health c … | Continue reading
My grief would overwhelm me if I were not in God's grace. — Joan of Arc, February 24, 1431 | Continue reading
Between these extremes, however, is free choice within reasonable limits, which I believe makes the value of community and its deliberative fruits still possible, even within the reality of the fractured and deracinated world in which we are living. | Continue reading
However, in St. Thomas and the Forbidden Birds, James Matthew Wilson shows that the seeds of a rebirth of civilization are to be planted and nurtured in the soil of everyday life. | Continue reading
Like the very young and the very old among us, we must forget the learned delusion of independence that revolution prefers and accept the radical dependence of the human condition. | Continue reading
While she relates the years of kaleidoscopic confusion, she provides waypoints to keep the reader grounded: “This is where we are, and this is where we’re going.” | Continue reading
“Against Syncretism, For Christians Building Like Christians.” Jake Meador provides a good summary of and response to Paul Kingsnorth’s recent lecture: “Bucer’s measure of judging a Christian society was not its technological advancement, its political power, or its wealth; his m … | Continue reading
Automobiles shield you from the outside world, its sounds, its colors. But on my bike, I encounter my environment directly. | Continue reading
In other words, knowledge and reason are no match for our gargantuan vices. The giants passion and pride cannot be held at bay by the ignorance that prevails in public discourse and certainly not by the bluster it hides behind. | Continue reading
Her work is certainly redolent of sorrow and, as she describes it, the eternity that dwells within her. But her words also carry hope and surprising faith that she will see her son again. | Continue reading
Williams reminds us of a lesson that we should have already learned good and hard, namely that rejection of Christianity does not result in blissful liberation and self-expression. | Continue reading
So whatever value motherhood gets assigned on earth, it’s pretty clear what position it holds on high. You may feel invisible here, but you certainly aren’t in Heaven. | Continue reading
“Dinner with Dinosaurs.” In a wide-ranging and probing essay, Lauren Spohn considers what kind of narrative we need to motivate human action and guide our technological and cultural project: “It’s partly thanks to the success of Bacon’s program that we are here: paying attention … | Continue reading
Perhaps one day moral clarity on this issue will be found or the values of the American people will align more neatly. Until that day arrives, if ever it does, let the people themselves reach across the proverbial aisle so that they may reach one another. | Continue reading
But our culture’s celebration of Halloween suggests that we know yet more. We sense not only that we are dust and will return to it; we also sense that life exists beyond death. | Continue reading
A democracy is not kept by filling in a ballot bubble once every four years. It’s kept by responsibly and virtuously exercising our freedoms in our homes, communities, and institutions day by day. | Continue reading
One of the novel’s achievements is the way that it unfolds this centuries-long story with both clarity and subtlety, establishing a clear feel for right and wrong while casting no irreproachable heroes and very few villains. | Continue reading
When Christ died on the cross, the disciples did not know he was going to rise again. But for Christians today, we see the full picture, and these are not meaningless tragedies. | Continue reading
“Love Letter to America.” A.M. Hickman takes a hard look at America’s many dysfunctions: “Then the realization sinks in like news of a dear old friend’s death: There beneath the giant plastic rodent breasts of Betty Beaver’s, you stand not only in the richest country in the world … | Continue reading
Zoning laws, housing codes, and a culture marked by suspicion and antisociality make it difficult to revive the boarding house, a living arrangement that once applied to nearly half of the population. | Continue reading
Perhaps that’s the lesson at the heart of both The Master and His Emissary and Moby-Dick: when we adopt a utilitarian posture of domination over the world, we misapprehend it. | Continue reading
I had to understand life and nature not as something to be mastered, but as gifts afforded to me to steward by a God abundant in goodness. | Continue reading
Life knocks us down. It is the price of this world, however much we may kid ourselves otherwise. Our falls become part of us. | Continue reading
The editor-in-chief of the FPR website discusses the recent conference in Grand Rapids and his latest book, Words for Conviviality. Highlights 1:00 Pacific Northwesterner in western PA 8:00 Prospects for localism and trad wives now 11:00 Bilbro’s obsessive bibliography 17:00 Prin … | Continue reading
If there ever comes a true accounting of the costs we’re racking up for making, using, and discarding our mobile (de)vices, we will be obliged to admit that there has been no net gain. The withdrawals from the account exceed the deposits in both number and in sum. | Continue reading
“The Place of Tides by James Rebanks Review—Ducking Out of a Midlife Crisis.” Helen Davies praises Rebanks’s “quietly profound book. It is a story about a still-essential way of living in the modern world and finding a way to keep going. It is also a deft travelogue to one of the … | Continue reading
We’re announcing a student essay contest! If you’re a student, consider submitting an essay, and if you know any students, encourage them to apply. Students are invited to respond either to Berry’s (in)famous essay “Why I’m Not Going to Buy a Computer” or to his essay “In Defense … | Continue reading
We might at least keep in mind the importance of proximity and presence and real encounters of flesh and blood. For the messy business of politics let us have Chesterton’s quip: “It is hard to make government representative when it is also remote.” | Continue reading
Organized community events bring people together and are an integral part of forging strong communal bonds in a place. Like the law, they serve a purpose in a community’s ecosystem of relationships. | Continue reading
You don’t have to be normal. You don’t have to be weird. You just have to be a person – which is a moral ideal, not a fact of nature – and let the chips fall. | Continue reading
To love and learn from each other in our communities is what good gossiping accomplishes. | Continue reading
“Against Killing Children.” In a new essay, Wendell Berry speaks against the violence on which our machine age runs and invites us to imagine an alternative way of relating to one another: “From the beginning, Jews and Christians are given a definition of ourselves—made in the im … | Continue reading
If we choose to befriend our many obligations—to connect with other people, to love, to serve, to create, to borrow, to lend, to repair, to celebrate, to support—instead of buying a product or a service—then we are cultivating fertile ground for a healthy form of gendered coopera … | Continue reading
Maybe, in the end, a home library does what a long-inhabited home does: charts a middle ground between the chaos of the world and the hyper-rationality of modernity. | Continue reading
As we make plans for next year’s conference, we’re inviting input from Porchers regarding what you might value in upcoming gatherings. Whether you’re a regular FPR conference attendee or haven’t yet come to one, please fill out this brief form. Thanks! | Continue reading
It is a reality not frequently enough acknowledged: like so many other things in life, the love of reading is caught, not taught. | Continue reading
Thanks to all who joined us for a wonderful gathering in Grand Rapids last weekend. On Friday evening, Jeff Polet and Ross Douthat conversed about populism, Lasch, and American presidential politics. The discussion may have been a bit more national in scope than is typical for an … | Continue reading
So the core of We Have Never Been Woke is persuasive, and it's hard not to see his thesis in operation in all kinds of fields, once you look at the world his way. | Continue reading
My guest once again is His Imperial and Royal Highness, His Excellency Eduard Habsburg, Archduke of Austria and Ambassador of Hungary to The Holy See and the Sovereign Order of Malta. He is the author of the new book Building a Wholesome Family in a Broken World: Habsburg Lessons … | Continue reading
Joshua Hren’s new novel, Blue Walls Falling Down, releases today. We’re happy to share the following excerpt with FPR readers. | Continue reading
I heard it then, followed by a man’s agonizing cry. I hear it now in every Franco-Norman word we unknowingly pronounce: that arrow piercing King Harold’s eye. | Continue reading
The future of our built environment is in our hands. We can reject the alienation of modernism and instead foster spaces that cultivate connection, celebrate history, and create a sense of belonging. | Continue reading