Little Diamond, an island bounded by the crisp waters of Casco Bay, is a rare sanctuary from the madness and modern life. Gregory Reynolds takes readers on a journey through the stages of its beauty. | Continue reading
“Back for Good: The Fine Art of Repairing Broken Things.” Katie Treggiden profiles British artists and producers who are working to make mending beautiful in a culture that valorizes the new. These “artists and designers are leading the way in exploring what mending really means. … | Continue reading
As our society considers higher education in the twenty-first century, the best way to decide what universities should be is not to gaze into the future, but to study the past for what universities have been and what they have been able to do. Marsden’s thoughtful and thorough hi … | Continue reading
In her 2010 book, The Red Corner: The Rise and Fall of Communism in Northeastern Montana, Verlaine Stoner McDonald resurrects the surprising but largely forgotten episode of agrarian radicalism in Sheridan County, Montana. Over ten years after its publication, McDonald’s stellar … | Continue reading
Though the idea of a legislature banishing undesirable corporations from state boundaries may be a mirage for now, it is certainly a dazzling mirage. If you look carefully enough, it seems more in line with how things should be than the actual desert that is currently beneath. | Continue reading
“The Edgerton Essays.” The American Compass and the Ethics and Public Policy Center have been collaborating on the Edgerton Essays. Editor Patrick Brown describes the project: “First, find working-class Americans, typically without a four-year college degree, who felt distant fro … | Continue reading
I bought myself an iPad in August 2016, and to say that it changed my life would be only a slight overstatement. For several years I had been experiencing increasingly severe hand pain that limited my ability to write by hand for any length of time. Even signing my own name had b … | Continue reading
Simard concludes that all of the natural world is interconnected and her conclusion is particularly poignant as she points out that the hard-won insight of her decades of research is nothing more than a “scientific” stamp of approval on the wisdom of both ancient indigenous pract … | Continue reading
My guest is former Ambassador Alberto Miguel Fernandez. Alberto served as US Ambassador to Equatorial Guinea, and also served in various diplomatic roles around the world including in Afghanistan, Syria, and Sudan. He currently serves as vice president of the Middle East Media Re … | Continue reading
The 2021 FPR conference theme is “After Virtual: The Art of Recovering Lost Goods.” We’ll gather on October 16 at Middle Tennessee State University. The keynote speaker will be Andrew Bacevich, who recently wrote The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory a … | Continue reading
The Green Knight is a subversive film that recommends the culturally decaying virtues of generosity, courtesy, fellowship, chastity, and piety. It is a true myth worth telling. | Continue reading
“America’s Hidden Crisis of Power and Place.” In a long and important essay, David Fontana delves into “one of the most disconcerting, least-discussed aspects of our national political life: America is experiencing a political crisis rooted partly in the concept of place. Our pol … | Continue reading
Here emerges the stoop as neither an architectural adornment nor a fleeting trend, but as a central social locus for the people of New York. It is here where our neighbors’ joy and laughter and special moments come to light, brightening up the city street and making the neighborh … | Continue reading
Community Land Trusts, at their best, are less about development and more about stewardship, creating just places for the long-term. CLTs are thus the ultimate preservationists, the developer/landowner who never abandons the property. | Continue reading
“Berry Center Journal.” The summer issue of the Berry Center Journal includes several fine pieces. For instance, Jason Peters has an essay on security and locality, and Kate Dalton interviews Wendell Berry about COVID, co-ops, and where to begin doing good work. “Writing in the S … | Continue reading
Bugbee’s thought suggests a defiant confidence that the things themselves can and do reveal themselves to us in their independence, if only we would have the patience to let them. | Continue reading
James Rebanks and Grace Olmstead discuss his book, Wendell Berry, his vision for future farming methodologies, and the conversations surrounding agricultural reform in both the United States and the United Kingdom. | Continue reading
Esther Lightcap Meek on Wendell Berry, Michael Polanyi, and covenant epistemology. | Continue reading
The left is collectivizing, the right falling apart. Can a pragmatic, humanist center hold? | Continue reading
Mark Clavier describes coming to terms with the fact that he is a white Southerner descended from enslaved Africans who subsequently became slave-owners. Reflecting on an ancestry containing triumph and shame, he discovers how closely the commendable and corrupt can be intertwine … | Continue reading
We justify our choices as the price of innovation, of progress, of efficiency. We tell ourselves we can’t afford to do anything else. We even tell ourselves it’s for the children. And so we bankrupt our posterity so we can eat, drink, and be merry. It’s a nice life for those who … | Continue reading
My guest is Father Michael Ward of Blackfriars Hall, Oxford and also of Houston Baptist University. Fr Ward has an enviable trifecta in his academic pedigree—degrees from Oxford, Cambridge, and St. Andrews. Fr. Ward is perhaps best known for his book Planet Narnia, which explains … | Continue reading
Porchers might be interested in this two-day gathering that Rory and Becca Groves are hosting at their Minnesota farm. If you were intrigued by Rory’s book Durable Trades and want to learn more, this would be a good opportunity. FPR author C.R. Wiley will be speaking as well, and … | Continue reading
Benjamin Myers reviews Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town by Jason Stacy. Stacey explores the changing and contested myth of the midwestern small town, particularly in relation to Masters’s famous Spoon River Anthology. In Spoon River a … | Continue reading
By the end of season one of Clarkson's Farm, Clarkson is still not an expert on anything farming related, but he is learning all the time, including about the area where he lives and how to love it well. | Continue reading
Hawley’s book goes some way towards providing a framework for using the threat of a legislative boot to stomp Big Tech back down to size. Whether the Right will listen is another thing altogether. | Continue reading
Ethan Jones explores the harmful ways our culture relates to food, and concludes that food’s purpose is not beautification of the body. Rather, food itself is beauty. Inside and outside the walls of church buildings, itd raws us to God and one another. | Continue reading
Canadian radio broadcaster David Cayley pulls up a chair to discuss Ivan Illich, a renegade priest and professor who argued against schools, missionaries, and modern medicine. Cayley, author of Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey, walks listeners through Illich’s thought and its … | Continue reading
Feeney’s book is a helpful antidote to the “go to college at any cost” mindset. But more importantly, it examines how this mindset can corrupt the forms of association that allow our communities to thrive and the humans within those communities to flourish. | Continue reading
While every people has a right to cultural solidarity and (peaceful and just) defense of their traditions and heritage, every moral person (especially every Christian) is also called to a deep sense of humility, forgiveness, and ultimately love of neighbor—even when that other ra … | Continue reading
Long-time friend of Front Porch Republic, Solidarity Hall‘s Elias Crim, is opening up the final session of their weekly small-group Zoom discussion of the Nathan Schneider’s history of the cooperative economy, Everything for Everyone (discussed in some detail on FPR here), to all … | Continue reading
In the book Steak Barbare, Gilles Luneau unravels the industry that depends on promoting a vegan diet and post-animal agriculture. His book sheds light not only on how labs grow protein, but also on the ways investors market a technological ideology. | Continue reading
Doug Sikkema fills in for Jeffrey Bilbro on this week's Water Dipper. | Continue reading
Milton Friesen reviews My Vertical Neighbourhood, Linda’s McGibbon’s xperience as a newcomer to a high-rise condo in Toronto. She actively explores what it means to be a neighbour in the third dimension, and challenges us to acknowledge that mutuality matters. | Continue reading
Jeffrey Bilbro is editor of the The Front Porch Republic. Jeff is a fellow devotee of Wendell Berry, and has written a new book from IVP called Reading the Times: A Literary and Theological Inquiry Into the News. We discuss setting priorities in a Twitter world with a bit of talk … | Continue reading
Elizabeth Stice reviews Sebastian Junger's new book, Freedom. The new book is a product of a roughly 400-mile hike Junger took with other men processing their war experiences. Junger's approach to freedom is based in reality and, as a result, speaks to real life. | Continue reading
Daniel Ritchie explores how the #MeToo movement affects our reading of Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock. In turn, this comedy with a sad ending offers us a sense of balance for today's sexual politics. | Continue reading
Rebekah Curtis reviews Rory Groves' book Durable Trades through the lens of the novel Growth of the Soil. While sometimes difficult to apply to modern-day life, the trades are not only occupations, but reasons and ways to come back home. | Continue reading
Ed Hagenstein reflects on Makoto Fujimura's metaphor for cultural engagement and suggests that cultural renewal starts with the essential resources all around us. | Continue reading
Learning from Wallace Stegner, Doug Sikkema considers the timeless blessings of his childhood in a letter to his mother. | Continue reading
Popular discourse in the United States today—as well as in many places around the world—hasn’t been so open to alternatives to the liberal capitalist mainstream for close to a century. | Continue reading
This will be my last Water Dipper for a couple of months; I’ll be quite busy with moving and all the accompanying obligations. Doug Sikkema is planning to keep this feature running over the summer on a more or less weekly basis. Matt Stewart will be taking the lead on editing sub … | Continue reading
Robert Sapunarich shares what he learned during pre-dawn workouts with F3: true masculinity is about countering instincts of anxiety, despair, and resentment with courage, hope, and grace. | Continue reading
Paul Krause examines the politics of Latin literature and discovers a desire for peace and joy, a peace and joy found in an intimate environment of beauty which the poets, even theologians, described as a garden. But the race to Arcadia runs through strife, war, and murder. | Continue reading
Casey Spinks muses on zombie shows, Pixar movies, Scorsese films, metaphysical realism, and the philosophical fate of modern culture in her review of Age of Anxiety: Meaning, Identity, and Politics in 21st-Century Film and Literature, by Anthony Wachs and Jon Schaff. | Continue reading
In the context of the calendars for holidays, feasts, and Sabbath observance in Leviticus, LeFebvre argues that we need to attend to the creation account in Genesis as a calendar for shaping the sacred rhythm of labor and worship. | Continue reading
“Is Self-Help Advice Doomed to Be Conservative?” Rebecca Onion interviews Pete Davis about his new book, and Pete articulates the goods that come with being rooted. “Plough Quarterly No. 28: Creatures: The Nature Issue.” Plough’s new issue is out, and it looks to be a rich one. M … | Continue reading
Rural Rebellion by Ross Benes, examines the changing politics of rural Nebraska from the perspective of a native son living in Brooklyn. Nebraska is a cycle of poems by Kwame Dawes, a Ghanaian-born poet teaching at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Both address the identity cri … | Continue reading