Catullus is not a saint. He is not a moral poet. But his crudity and madness still dance with the shadows of truth and echo with the cry of the human heart. | Continue reading
Alan Noble is author of the new book You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World from IVP. Dr. Noble is a professor of English at Oklahoma Baptist University and a founder of Christ and Pop Culture. Cultural Debris Patreon – Support the podcast! You Are Not Your Ow … | Continue reading
What makes Blythe a joy to read is this rare combination of literary erudition, keen observation of both men and nature, and a reserved, peaceful piety. What is immediately apparent and most appealing about his work is his obvious care for everything he writes about. | Continue reading
“We are What we Eat.” Aruna Uprety describes the deleterious effects of advertising and packaged food on the health of children in rural Nepal: “The traditional practice of growing and consuming locally grown lentils, soybean, millet and buckwheat is being replaced even in the re … | Continue reading
Sometimes an important change becomes evident only in retrospect - not while it’s happening across quiet broken days alone in a house while autumn succumbs to shadow and cold. | Continue reading
The tragedy of the hold Hoover’s rugged individualism continues to have on the American psyche in our increasingly atomized age is that his formulation risks presenting a false dichotomy between state control over an increasingly large swath of our lives on the one hand and socie … | Continue reading
Host: John Murdock Guest: Will Hoyt Will Hoyt, author of The Seven Ranges, discusses his journey along the Ohio River into the physical, historical and philosophical interior of the strip-mined region where he lives. In the book, Hoyt transforms the area’s colorful past into a … | Continue reading
Thinking as a practice places a check upon the self. It offers us a way out of our "res idiotica." If our universities are faithful to their missions, they must foster conditions where truth is free to be heard and sought. | Continue reading
“I Tried to Prove that Small Family Farms are the Future. I Couldn’t Do It.” Sarah Mock published a long, thoughtful examination of the viability of the small, family farmer (thanks to Russell Fox for drawing my attention to it). It’s a sobering essay and worth reading carefully. … | Continue reading
Valetudinarianism connects arguments about the pandemic and the climate, with, on the one side, a distrust of experts and politicians, and, on the other, the belief that science (however defined) is paramount and must dictate, not simply advise, policy. | Continue reading
Michael Knowles: “Free speech cannot be an open plain; nor can it be a jungle; it must be a delicately manicured garden." | Continue reading
My guest is Professor Todd Hartch of Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond. A specialist in the history of religion, particularly Latin American religion, Todd has written a new book A Time to Build Anew: How to Find the True, Good, and the Beautiful in America. You’ll enjoy ou … | Continue reading
“Growing things are good” isn’t a sufficiently coherent claim for a book. While the questions and problems that Andrew Peterson raises in The God of the Garden are thorny and complex, his ideas deserve greater development. | Continue reading
“Economists to Cattle Ranchers: Stop Being So Emotional About the Monopolies Devouring Your Family Businesses.” Matt Stoller argues that professional economists are stonewalling efforts to combat monopolistic price-fixing in the cattle market. “An Emersonian Guide to American Pol … | Continue reading
With the supply chain tangled, we have what may be a brief moment to consider its flaws without being blinded by the glare of its surface efficiencies. | Continue reading
The virus has given us many headaches, but it is also giving us an opportunity as we re-evaluate policies and practices and seek to care for one another and for our students. | Continue reading
Gehrz traces the life of a fascinating individual, but in the process he raises important moral questions about which story of transcendence we seek to pursue. | Continue reading
“All Mod Cons.” Bill Kauffman commends the legacy of Senator Mark Hatfield: “A radical dispersal of power may lack the bellicose appeal of strident nationalism, but those who support fortifying the nation-state at the expense of its towns and cities and neighborhoods should remem … | Continue reading
The question, of course, is not whether some Protestant individuals have under-developed aesthetic sensibilities; the question is whether Protestant principles logically or consistently contribute to an under-developed aesthetic sensibility. | Continue reading
Alex Sosler compares online and in-person education. Paradoxically, when we embrace the limits of our embodied existence and learn with and from particular classmates in a particular place from a particular teacher, affections develop. Imagination stirs. | Continue reading
My guest is author and bookman Stuart Kells of Melbourne, Australia. Stuart and I chat about various things bookish—private presses, pulp paperbacks, typefaces, and university presses. We even talk about two of his books a bit, The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders and Shakespeare’ … | Continue reading
Emily Wenneborg reviews You are Not Your Own, by Alan Noble. Noble confronts the lie of autonomy that shapes Western society and counsels radical dependence on God’s grace. | Continue reading
“Land, Limits and the Scandal of Reparations.” Allan Carlson lays out the long and tragic history that has dispossessed so many American farmers—and particularly black ones—of the land. He concludes with some promising policy suggestions. Carlson’s proposals are too sane to be en … | Continue reading
We have confirmed reports that copies of the fall issue of Local Culture are now showing up in mailboxes around the country. Depending on the vicissitudes of the USPS, yours might arrive any day. If you haven’t subscribed and want the delight of receiving the next issue, you can … | Continue reading
How might we discern the truth in a mad time? Wendell Berry and G.K. Chesterton offer some wisdom. | Continue reading
By holding up the life of Muhammad Ali, Ken Burns seems to be asking us pressing questions: can we maintain our principles and move from outspoken and oppositional to loving and virtuous? Will we use our beauty and gifts not to belittle others but to better them? | Continue reading
As Earth Without Water got me thinking about the mystery of seeds, the mystery of faith, and the mystery of Divine action in the world. The novel is not about farmers, or even about the literal planting of seeds. Instead, it is about two painters and sometimes lovers and the germ … | Continue reading
“A Case for the Porch.” Charlie Hailey writes in praise of the porch. Many of his reflections resonate with Patrick Deneen’s early essay on the name “Front Porch Republic.” “‘Biopolitics’ Are Unavoidable.” Matthew Loftus turns to Wendell Berry for a properly expansive understandi … | Continue reading
Henry George reviews A World After Liberalism, by Matthew Rose. | Continue reading
Education in the age of COVID is an opportunity for teachers and students to investigate the role of language in an intense real-world situation. Rachel Griffis considers the prevalence of analogies and the deeply troubling ways that irresponsible and unethical language is destro … | Continue reading
“On Not Knowing Esperanto.” Peter Mommsen introduces the new issue of Plough. It’s a great introduction, and while I haven’t read the full issue yet, it looks to be another good one. “What Makes Moby-Dick a Great American Novel?” On October 5th, Andrew Delbanco, Robert K. Wallace … | Continue reading
Andrew Figueiredo describes his family connection to Minderico, a language belonging to the Portuguese town of Minde. Localists must join the fight to save endangered languages, if only because they present us with a way to practice stewardship, rebel against the abstractions of … | Continue reading
Front Porch Republic editor Jeff Bilbro sits down with Joe Loconte of The King’s College for a spirited discussion of the book-turned-film A Hobbit, A Wardrobe, and a Great War. Bonded by war and steeled by friendship, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R Tolkien produced works of fantasy that … | Continue reading
In an excerpt from her book The Spacious Life, Ashley Hales redefines limits as an expression of love and a doorway into rest. | Continue reading
When I first started teaching at a community college, I had no idea of the types of non-traditional students I would meet. Their resilience and motivation made me wonder if a non-traditional route is actually better, at least for some. | Continue reading
“Ending America’s Antisocial Contract.” Ron Ivey and Tim Shirk warn that American policies which incentivize hoarding capital contribute to social and economic instability: “If our antisocial contract has led to wealth hoarding, lower productivity growth, and precarious financial … | Continue reading
What all these most profound culture-makers have in common is death-mindedness, which gives them the ability to fully pursue their art, because they don’t pay as much mind to the fleeting: the money, the fame, the critical disapproval. | Continue reading
As a new school year begins, Jon Schaff takes stock of the effects of Covid on education. Learning is relationship, and, if the point of college, as the very term “college” implies, is to come together for the enterprise of learning, that coming together has to be more than a nam … | Continue reading
Last year, when we also had to cancel our fall conference due to COVID restrictions, several Porchers hosted smaller gatherings of local readers. We know that our readers are scattered around the country, but these gatherings provide an opportunity to meet and converse with like- … | Continue reading
John Peters contrasts the traditional telos of education, what John Newman called "a great but ordinary end" with the current emphasis on utility and constant social change. | Continue reading
“Bad News.” Joseph Bernstein scrutinizes the disinformation discourse and argues that its underlying technological determinism and assumptions about human persuadability stand to benefit big tech: “tech companies and select media organizations all stand to gain from the Big Disin … | Continue reading
Elizabeth Stice remembers the impact of the events of 9/11 on college students 20 years ago. Now a college professor, she considers the disillusionment of her own students, and how the Christian meta-narrative allows for hope in a broken world. | Continue reading
Sadly, due to ongoing COVID-related restrictions, we’ve made the difficult decision to cancel the 2021 gathering. We hate to do this as we very much want to move past our enforced reliance on virtual communications and take up the necessary work of recovering lost goods. Those wh … | Continue reading
[Cross-posted to In Media Res] Wichita, KS. That Charles Marohn is a friend to localist movements across the United States and beyond is indisputable. It’s not just that he has said said so, repeatedly; both the whole operating premise of Strong Towns, the organization he has bui … | Continue reading
“If you cannot think of anything appropriate to say, you will please restrict your remarks to the weather.” So says Mrs. Dashwood to her daughter Margaret in the 1995 film version of Sense and Sensibility. Although the exact line is not found in the original novel, Jane Austen’s … | Continue reading
“He is Britain’s Famous Shepherd-Author-Influencer. He Wants to Transform Farming to Save the Planet.” William Booth visits James Rebanks’s farm and puts his recent efforts to defend and practice regenerative farming in the context of the post-Brexit agricultural economy. If you … | Continue reading
Hassler and McDonagh conclude their stories with the hope that, in the absence of the clergy, faithful everyday Christians can rebuild the lost soil of local culture through faith and forgiveness. | Continue reading
Corporate rights was not a spontaneous development but the result of a sort of corporate civil-rights movement. Through litigation (generally well-financed) over two centuries, various corporations won decisions by which corporations evolved from government-created artificial per … | Continue reading