Turmoil is present throughout Dick’s world, and this is clearly reflected in each of the three characters discussed here. Tagomi, Wegner, and Childan’s lives are greatly influenced by events precipitated by others, and each responds in a different manner. | Continue reading
Raised in Eastern Oklahoma with roots older than living memory in the Natural State, we look forward to supporting new authors while connecting readers with the long thread of our region’s creative culture. Our mission is to celebrate the literary culture of the American Mid-Sout … | Continue reading
Have you registered for our fall conference taking place in two weeks at Grove City College? Registration closes on the 17th, so don’t delay! We haven’t held a conference since 2019, and it will be great to see many of you in person for a day of lively discussion. “Property, Prop … | Continue reading
His books are not a diminishment of historic and intellectual Christianity. They are a translation of Aquinas, Barth, Calvin, and the rest into the language we all speak innately but are all too often deaf to: the language of our quotidian lives, in which the undifferentiated mas … | Continue reading
Venus’s love for her sister, and Serena’s recognition of it, has also shown us the transcendent power of family, the possibility of forgetting the accolades and the worldly recognition and the desire for advantage and finding instead deeper connections and possibilities of love. | Continue reading
Do I know by pruning the tree, picking the apples, and eating them? Perhaps, Pickstock proposes, truth is what we find when we act in the world. Our true condition is that we are beings who pick apples and prune trees. | Continue reading
We can increase the aesthetic appeal of our neighborhood by smashing the suburban quasi-monocultures of landscaping plants purchased from big box stores and restoring the rightful biodiversity of our ecosystems...Behind the natural beauty there thrums a glory ancient and ever-new … | Continue reading
“Can Love Take Sides?” The new issue of Plough is full of worthwhile essays, but Porchers will want to start with this essay by Wendell Berry. It’s an excerpt from his forthcoming book, The Need to be Whole: “love comes into our civilization – the Gospels being the source best kn … | Continue reading
All education programs enculturate students. There is no neutrality here. The question is not whether education will form our students, but how they will be formed. Proverbs (22:6) says, “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” A … | Continue reading
Baxter articulates two central features of the Medieval Model: the ordered and iconic nature of reality. Reality is not a chaos waiting for us to impose structure on it or make it what we want; it is rather a cosmos with a nature independent of our wishes, demanding us to conform … | Continue reading
Perhaps it’s the nudge you need to reconsider your little actions and the grand narrative which guides and orients them. And, perhaps, you’ll go out to confront the real in all its strange mystery and strain to hear the music and the summons that invite you to re-embed yourself i … | Continue reading
“The Good Death in Psalm 73.” Timothy Kleiser draws out the wisdom regarding mortality and human finitude in Margaret Edson’s moving play Wit with the help of Psalm 73. “Can We Resurrect Expertise?” In this excerpt from her forthcoming book, Bonnie Kristian wrestles with the need … | Continue reading
Are those who question transhumanist progress or Metaverse predictions just knee-jerk Luddites whose visceral reactions are worthy of only a patronizing pat on the head for not seeing their own privilege? As might be expected of a Porcher, I don’t think so. Instead, those who are … | Continue reading
I am not faulting Wirzba for failing to include these examples of more conservative Christians who practice agrarianism. But I would ask whether his theology of agrarianism, written in an academic context, can speak to and challenge the church at large. | Continue reading
Matthew Stewart, author of The Most Beautiful Place on Earth: Wallace Stegner in California, sits down (literally) with host John Murdock to discuss Stegner’s complicated relationship with the American West. A mobile youth left Stegner yearning for deeper roots. In the 1940s, … | Continue reading
As we approach the new academic year, we, like Sisyphus, are condemned to roll the rock up the hill only for it to roll back down. However, this does not have to be a meaningless task – we can escape the absurdity of our condition. We give ourselves meaning by following either th … | Continue reading
“No More ‘Normal.’ How to Live after the COVID Apocalypse.” I reflect on the themes of our upcoming conference and Chris Arnade’s book in an opinion piece for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Do make plans to join us next month in Grove City. We’re looking forward to a great day of l … | Continue reading
More to the purpose of this essay, organized youth sports should challenge students to be dissatisfied with amusement or entertainment in their pursuit of excellence. Our culture is soaked in entertainment, the preponderance being of a low quality. While it can be entertaining, s … | Continue reading
In their newest incarnation, American racial preferences are advertised to the public as compensating for prior pro-white discrimination and promoting racial diversity. Problems of definition persist under the new order of things, however. There is still no central race bureau, b … | Continue reading
What if our expectations of politicians whom we mock or despise are simply unrealistic and guided by the standards of this world? The faith of some regular Americans in their ability to achieve social reform already amazed de Tocqueville in the 1830s. But this mindset, flowing so … | Continue reading
“David McCullough, Master Chronicler of American History, Dies at 89.” Glenn Rifkin remembers a remarkable storyteller who made forgotten aspects of American history come to life: “Working for much of his career in a tiny windowed shed behind his farmhouse in West Tisbury, Mass, … | Continue reading
If we can foster a freedom to flourish rather than our modern freedom of choice, and if we can recognize versions of a common good appropriate to different real entities of social order from the family to the town to the nation, integrated with the rest of nature at scales from t … | Continue reading
Back of all this you might hear a rabble-rousing Palestinian Jew from a couple of millennia ago promising that the truth, once known, will set you free - but that poor soul on a collision course with Golgotha was assuming that truth could be disentangled from all the elegant tech … | Continue reading
Michael Possanner is a bespoke tailor in Vienna, Austria. Michael and I discuss the value of bespoke tailoring, his non-traditional journey to learning the ancient trade, his love of American football, and his passion of mixology and collecting vintage cocktail books. Christian A … | Continue reading
Livy asserts that shamelessness led to decadence which, in turn, led to greed and eventually devolved into demagoguery and tyranny. His assertion that Roman liberty and equality were destroyed by the decadence of the civil wars and buried with the emergence of the Augustan regime … | Continue reading
“Hoping for Doomsday.” I’ve been savoring the summer issue of Plough. Peter Mommsen’s opening editorial is, as usual, excellent: “In the interim of the ages, as the universe’s great Sabbath approaches, humankind has work to do. Plant the sapling; tend the earthworms; welcome the … | Continue reading
An imagination like his, fictions like his – born from affection – may not provide us with data or answers but may help us feel “somehow more substantial and less troubled, characters more permanent.” And they may show us how we can help the land we find underfoot become a belove … | Continue reading
Is there a direct causal connection between America’s embrace of succulents and semi-succulents as houseplants-of-choice and the conspicuous mass movement of Americans to states with the least amount of rainfall? Maybe not, but the correlation gives us strong cause to consider. | Continue reading
But the dark events of that afternoon have remained with me and have prompted a question that I have often wrestled with, fruitfully, I think, but never to a clear decision: Lacking a proper foundation in kickball, what sort of culture, if any at all, could flourish in a Newton, … | Continue reading
There is something new in Doestoevsky's insights into the psychology of “the Human Being,” beyond the Church Fathers, or at least that's the case made. If this is true, especially in the light of the complete mental breakdown happening all around us, shouldn't we be redirecting o … | Continue reading
“The Corruption of the Best: On Ivan Illich.” Geoff Shullenberger takes the occasion of David Cayley’s intellectual biography of Ivan Illich to offer a reassessment of Illich’s thought. In particular, Shullenberger explains Illich’s work on gender, which earned him opprobrium in … | Continue reading
There will be a temptation for many to say: “Good. Roe is gone. Now the rest is none of my business.” It would be wise to remember this disinterest in our communities is what enabled a technocratic judiciary to impose Roe. To perfect our nation and its communities, we must balanc … | Continue reading
Brown stresses the need to pay attention to “what God has said, and nature is his most primordial and exoteric word”; after all, within this word, human nature is situated too. But “[l]ess and less in our time and place do we hear the most primordial of God’s words—the song, one … | Continue reading
For all the enhanced resolution of our universe Webb brings, for all the material analysis this new device supplies to scientists’ burgeoning cosmic databases, informing the denizens of Earth just what the universe is made of, NASA is not one whit closer to explaining what the un … | Continue reading
“How Foreign Private Equity Hooked New England’s Fishing Industry.” Will Sennott has an in-depth report on the ways the local owners and fishermen in New England are increasingly squeezed out by large capital investments from overseas corporations: “Blue Harvest and other compani … | Continue reading
Life is inherently unpredictable and requires engagement without certainty of outcome. It also often requires patience. No matter how many labor-saving and time-bending devices we create, we will never exist in a completely predictable and easy environment. “Convenience” ceases t … | Continue reading
For readers exhausted by the seemingly intractable erosion of society by powerful forces, Perzanowski, has, thankfully, included many tales of heroic and insurgent successes sure to inspire readers, and his treatment of cultural history related to planned obsolescence, consumeris … | Continue reading
Siloam Springs, AR. Earlier this month Americans celebrated yet another Fourth of July, marking 246 years of independence. As we approach the country’s semiquincentennial, talk of nationalism and patriotism is all the rage – namely, whether these are virtues or vices in an increa … | Continue reading
“A Way of Life Being Lost.” Ruth Conniff visits Henry County, KY to talk with Wendell Berry and Mary Berry about rural America, the work of the Berry Center, and models for healthy farm economies. “Seed Oils and Bad Science.” Carmel Richardson narrates the history of producing, m … | Continue reading
Continetti’s rendition is distinctive in its focus on the tension and recurrent clashes between an increasingly radicalized populist grass roots and movement elites committed to a principled small government constitutionalism. Academic historians of the movement will be skeptical … | Continue reading
In our day, we cannot ourselves see the heavens; we can only see pixelated images of heaven produced by computer screens. In this respect, we already live in virtual reality. | Continue reading
The real challenge is to make the wisdom of the past live in the present. Such work is analogous to sprouting a seed, playing a song, cooking and enjoying a family recipe. | Continue reading
“Syria’s Seed Planters.” Plough’s Summer 2022 issue on “Hope in Apocalypse” has many essays on this important virtue. One of the most moving, I think, is Mindy Belz’s account of Assyrians who seek to restore homes and communities in the midst of unimaginable devastation and hards … | Continue reading
No one even tried to keep me. The dead, not an argumentative sort to begin with, never had the chance. The living, God bless them, had been so thoroughly tutored by modern life that they could, in the same breath, say how wonderful was my “great opportunity” to go and how sad the … | Continue reading
Wiley, throughout his book, handles the paradoxes and tensions of Tolkien’s text not as inconsistencies to be brushed aside, but rather as brushstrokes of a master artist at work. For such a meticulous and calculated author, an author who spent decades crafting his mythology, why … | Continue reading
Dr. Greg Hillis of Bellarmine University in Louisville. He is author of the recent book Man of Dialogue: Thomas Merton’s Catholic Vision from Liturgical Press. Dr. Hillis and I discuss Merton’s reputation, his role as novice master at the Abbey of Gethsemani, his interaction with … | Continue reading
With simple elements of bread and wine, the church, then and now, celebrates the memory of Christ’s death by partaking of the sacrament of his body and blood. Ignatius wants to share in the suffering and thereby the glory of his Lord. He knows there are worse things than death - … | Continue reading
Today the man described as “Issaquah’s Thoreau” is largely forgotten. His books have been out of print for years and the anniversary of what would have been his 100th birthday in 2020 passed without a single mention in any local newspapers. An unfitting end for a man who poured s … | Continue reading