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
Parker’s Winters in the World is an education fit for the Humanities and lay person who wishes to expand upon what it means to exist as humans in a world full of wyrd winters. | Continue reading
People often want to ignore the complexity of that process, downplay how often interests conflict, and avoid confrontation. In this essay, I suggest we throw ourselves into the mess and hash it out—respectfully, in public, based on shared intellectual standards. | Continue reading
“Police Seize on COVID-19 Tech to Expand Global Surveillance.” A team of AP reporters—Garance Burke, Josef Federman, Huizhong Wu, Krutika Pathi and Rod McGuirk—detail how COVID surveillance technologies are being used in countries around the world to track and control citizens: “ … | Continue reading
As populations and employments shift, the South reflects transitions affecting the nation as a whole. Wherever we are, the place around us is changing. Yet it also has a history of its own. | Continue reading
J. R. R. Tolkien imagined a society characterized by people who care for one another and their natural spaces, cultivating human and ecological flourishing in their communities. | Continue reading
The reason I lament the loss of home visits is because in the doctor’s journey to see the patient as a person (which is essential to the therapeutic relationship) the home is a rich environmental shortcut to the core of the person. | Continue reading
In order to reconcile competing and hostile cultures in our current, chaotic milieu, it is necessary to forge a politics of honesty and integrity. As hinted by The Wordhord’s emphasis on daily life, the true and good political life begins with the small things of home life. | Continue reading
“Generations.” Plough’s new issue is out, and while I’m waiting to read it until my physical copy shows up, Peter Mommsen’s opening editorial, probing the yearning for roots and the ways in which we avoid or cultivate these, whets my appetite: “The “pervasive rootlessness” that [ … | Continue reading
One can have a very merry Christmas with great simplicity. And maybe, thinking of charity toward our less fortunate neighbors, modeling simplicity has its virtues. | Continue reading
The happiest boomers I know love nothing more than talking with their old friends about their new grandchildren. So, my holiday recipe for fighting loneliness is lots of face-to-face talking–with strangers, family, and everyone between. | Continue reading
Chris Arnade, the keynote speaker at the After Virtual conference, has traded global finance for skid row photography. Chris discusses his journey from Wall Street board rooms to a booth at McDonald’s and the associated rejection of careerism and self-definition. Speaker: Chri … | Continue reading
So leave if you must, but perhaps not today. Stop and consider all the ways you can stay. | Continue reading
Manchester, NH. The prospect of moving from our little cottage in New Hampshire causes me great pain. Why? Because I am a creature of place and my surroundings, the people, the landscape, the history—all play into my sense of the importance of where I live. This place and its con … | Continue reading
“I’m a Stranger Here Myself.” FPR contributor Brian Kaller has a moving essay on returning to his hometown of Ferguson, Missouri for a few weeks this summer after being away for many years. Much has changed, and he muses about some of the causes: “Living on the internet isolates … | Continue reading
It is meant to reference, to supplement, but also to circumvent. Manchester doesn’t do smog or spinning jennies anymore. It’s a friendly city. Come on in. | Continue reading
But the promise of the coming of the Messiah is that all these animals will be changed from enemies of the human race into its friends, or at least comfortable and tolerant neighbors. This promise sheds, furthermore, a different light on the present discomfort that some of us may … | Continue reading
Clapp’s ambitious study attempts a great deal within a comparatively brief compass. Unfortunately, some topics suffer as a result...How can one best understand the tension between individual moral responsibility (rooted in Protestantism) and an individual liberty which rejects ex … | Continue reading
We can agree that many technological “advances” have objectively done more harm than good, in terms of the human condition as well as the Earth, and that we face a bleak scenario of looming catastrophe. But this doesn’t mean that there is no way out. | Continue reading
“No Snowflakes are the Same. These Stunning Close-up Photos are Proof.” Amudalat Ajasa explains how Jason Persoff captures amazing images of snowflakes and showcases some of his photos. If you’re fascinated by snowflake photography, you may enjoy Snowflake Bentley, a beautiful Ca … | Continue reading
The rivalry we’re experiencing goes deeper than symptoms, political principles, and even the need for responsive, wise leaders. Indeed, it may bypass principles and wisdom altogether. But to explain it, I need the help of anthropologist and literary critic René Girard. | Continue reading
It is a trouble that visits us all: our fate is to die and be forgotten. Tying ourselves to one another and to life can diminish that trouble’s force, but kingdoms and cultures and homes rise and fall. Being willingly bound in devotion to the Creator redeems that trouble forever. | Continue reading
Math is certainly not the best language for every situation, but it is essential for many situations. And once we understand this, and not merely acknowledge it but shift our paradigms to understand it as a very special method of communication, we can use math without fear. | Continue reading
Are dreams only dreams? Or are they God’s gifts of the unconscious which we still fail to know? McCarthy lets these questions remain, and no argument or worldview can answer them. So, we are left waiting for God to say something, anything, as His answer. | Continue reading
“Daughter of Forgottonia.” Liz Schleicher describes a family rooted in a plot of land near where the Illinois River joins the Mississippi. Guided by a matriarch, they have lived well there: “it is extraordinary that a simple farm wife, uneducated, poor, and without power, could b … | Continue reading
Creative fidelity is attuned to, and draws out, the richness in people and things. It calls for awareness and attentive seeing. In the end, Paterson is a film about such creative fidelity to a place and its people. | Continue reading
Hillsborough, NC. The term “care” is used in our times to signify tasks like feeding, changing diapers, bathing, and otherwise maintaining the well-being of those too young, old, or infirmed to do so for themselves. Those services are performed as part of elder care, childcare, a … | Continue reading
Today, many in our society seem to want change for its own sake. I hope a different spirit continues among those neighbors and the street remains a neighborhood as it was while my family lived there. | Continue reading
The second episode from the FPR conference After Virtual: The Art of Recovering Lost Goods looks at education. Jeff Polet discusses walking away from Hope. Angel Adams Parham talks about the elementary power of a rapping Homer. Jason Peters goes back to the future of the educ … | Continue reading
As we enter this season of Advent, we would do well to share the skepticism of Mary and her misfit Son about the powers of this age to establish an unshakeable kingdom. | Continue reading
“Who’s Preserving Harlan Hubbard’s Beloved Payne Hollow?” Bob Hill writes a lovely account of the Hubbards’ remarkable life and explains the hopes of the recently formed nonprofit organization Payne Hollow on the Ohio: “The goal is to honor the Hubbards’ place in American history … | Continue reading
Society’s long move from the country to the city may have desacralized their meaning, but for so long has man’s festive calendar been defined by our ecological needs and vulnerabilities that it is hard to imagine us ever dropping our seasonal traditions. Some are embedded remnant … | Continue reading
Brecon, Wales. Stories are a necessary part of healing and wholeness. I don’t just mean a story we may like or we tell ourselves (though they include that), nor do I mean that story we weave from our experiences and think of as our life or our autobiography (though they include t … | Continue reading
“Will the Real Dorothy Day Please Stand Up?” In this review of D.L. Mayfield’s new biography of Dorothy Day, Myles Werntz offers a masterclass in how we ought to befriend the dead. They are irredeemably strange, and rather than appropriate those aspects of a person’s character th … | Continue reading
The various parts—historical and autobiographical, theological and literary—all contribute to the central thread: that we seek wholeness, and that wholeness depends on better understanding ourselves and our damaged, but not lost, chances for community. | Continue reading
It is a terrifying responsibility every single day, for a preschooler’s capacity to find ever creative ways to put herself in danger does not always match up with the parent’s ability to foresee said dangers. And yet, without the wonder of exploration, how could anyone ever truly … | Continue reading
Alan Jacobs is not, to my knowledge, a Porcher, though he ought to be; his insightful reflections upon Christianity, literature, society, and the state are hugely relevant to all sorts of different ways of pondering the struggles facing those who wish to attend to, preserve, or e … | Continue reading
The young pagans band around the picnic table and scrawl inky runes into their hands with cheap pens. Around them, the world falls, and wonders if they will learn to rebuild it. —Betsy K. Brown, “II. Dark Ages” At the still point of the turning world…. Neither from nor towards; a … | Continue reading