Like the sonnet, the five-paragraph essay traps investment in truth felt in the heart and forged in the mind by means of its life-respecting limitations. | Continue reading
Christianity is not merely a doctrine to believe but a life to live and embody. East understands this and invites Future Saints into a different imagination and way of life. | Continue reading
When we toast we celebrate our fight against the forces of darkness and evil. | Continue reading
“News from the Berry Center.” The Berry Center fall newsletter provides updates on their ongoing work, and Mary Berry’s opening letter serves as a good reminder of their vision for good farming, good land, and good communities: “Our dominant economy over the last century has made … | Continue reading
If we don’t experience full, unqualified “concrete, historical community,” then we won’t experience full, unqualified “genuine deliberation.” | Continue reading
To find these deeper wells of silence, however, we must seek them out, whether in the woods or the deserts of our own shut doors. | Continue reading
These questions would cause little debate or consternation without the importance of place tethering them. And, despite the erasure of communitarian mindsets and regional identity, place still matters. | Continue reading
Look at what has sometimes happened to Christian architecture in America, for example; tragic declines in quality are matched by the inability of people to even notice how bad it all is. | Continue reading
While it is impossible to be sure what the ultimate cultural importance of this movie will be, I do think Walsh has hit a nerve. | Continue reading
“In Defiance of All Powers.” Peter Mommsen introduces Plough’s new issue on Freedom. It looks quite promising, but my physical copy hasn’t arrived yet, so I’m exercising restraint: “as my teenage son is now tired of hearing because he just wants to go fishing, freedom to play the … | Continue reading
What the Amish understand perhaps more than we do is the necessity of maintaining and protecting domains of embodied human agency in our lives. | Continue reading
Brian Miller (author of Kayaking with Lambs) is hosting a BBQ at his farm outside Philadelphia, TN with some Doomer Optimism friends. They’ll be gathering Sept. 28 from 6-10. Guests are asked to bring a side dish. If you’re interested in joining, RSVP to Brian Miller, and he’ll s … | Continue reading
Contemplating this turn of events in our politics reminds me that we human beings have a strong desire for tidy coherence. Sometimes this desire can be a kind of sickness. | Continue reading
Pastoral ministry in prison can change lives, but it doesn’t magically erase the pain of incarceration. | Continue reading
The AEI scholar and author of American Covenant joins John to talk about a document that he believes could unify we the people, again. Highlights 1:30 Second home 8:15 The national “we” 13:45 A dignified basis for unity 21:00 Changing culture by changing institutions 25:00 Make C … | Continue reading
For the task of understanding the past demands honesty, humility, and respect for all aspects of human nature, from the material to the intellectual and volitional and—above all—the spiritual. | Continue reading
Language is primarily a relational (rather than a representational) technology. Words articulate our relationships to God, other humans, our environment, and even ourselves. | Continue reading
“How a Vermont Cheesemaker Helps Local Farms Thrive.” The essay up on FPR’s front page right now by Lenny Wells describes some possibilities for small farmers to find a “seam” in the global farm market where they can thrive. Jake Price profiles how Jasper Hill Farm has created a … | Continue reading
There are much easier ways to make money than farming. The primary goal of a good farmer is to find success in caring for one’s land, community, and family. | Continue reading
Society needs its most talented individuals to not just dive into the fray of politics and policy but to build the institutions that shape culture. | Continue reading
Nevertheless, if someone of a conservative disposition wishes to produce excellent art that, in a certain sense, supports conservatism, the best thing they can do is to focus simply on producing excellent art. | Continue reading
Chris Arnade writes the Substack ‘Chris Arnade Walks the World,’ which chronicle his wanderings as he literally walks and walks and walks all over the world. He is the author and photographer for the book Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America. Chris and I discuss the value … | Continue reading
Hence this book is something special: a new set of Christian fables on natural law that do more than teach simple morals or seek to modify children’s behavior. | Continue reading
A machine can read books out loud to the baby. A machine can rock the baby to sleep. Smart devices and apps can do these and many other things. But they can do none of them in love. | Continue reading
“Twelve Months to Fall Back in Love with America.” Anarchist, hobo, Coast Guardsman, Catholic, Front Porch Republic conference-goer, and now newlywed A.M. Hickman is traveling America with his wife Keturah and looking for signs of communal vitality: “Everywhere, a rattling juxtap … | Continue reading
Rudyard Kipling’s 1902 Just So Stories are a delightful anomaly—they feel like folk tales but were largely invented by Kipling himself as bedtime stories for his eldest daughter, Josephine. | Continue reading
America is known for its English-Protestant roots, for the pilgrims who settled the Eastern seaboard and the Anglos who descended from them. But America has a French-Catholic history, too, and Northern Michigan is a central location in that history. | Continue reading
As she engages ultimate questions about human life, Little models the pursuit of virtue and the concomitant wrestling with vice involved in this pursuit. | Continue reading
Despite Trump’s own divisive rhetoric, he makes rural Americans feel heard in ways neither majority party has in decades. Any politician or scholar who actually wants to address the root causes of polarization needs to reckon seriously with this reality. | Continue reading
Cash may as well be situated in an Anglo-Saxon mead hall, a broken ring-giver, a pagan, who for all his good intentions, cannot heal that which infects his people and himself. | Continue reading
We’ve now posted the FPR conference schedule. It’s shaping up to be a great weekend of conversation, and a time to make new acquaintances and renew old friendships. Do consider joining us. “Why I Changed my Mind about Volunteering.” When confronted with large issues like homeless … | Continue reading
If the sky clears above is, we won’t suddenly find ourselves saints. But at least, perhaps, we’ll be able to see the stars. | Continue reading
Russell Kirk, perhaps more than any self-described conservative thinker of the past century, celebrated the virtues of place, limits, and liberty. His ancestral estate in Mecosta, MI has long been a center not only for the downtrodden and oppressed, but for the fomenting of local … | Continue reading
Without God, a spiraling fertility rate seems certain. But on spiritual grounds, there’s always room for hope and renewal. When the seed is sown on the good soil, it bears thirty, sixty, and a hundredfold. | Continue reading
To gaze upon creation through a sacramental lens is to admit that God is God and we are not; it is an antidote to the poison of Genesis 3. | Continue reading
Civil society relies on common spaces where people of all backgrounds can meet, but states and cities have been pursuing semi-privatization of public spaces. | Continue reading
In expressing his love through epistolary lament, it may be that Freud discovered the precise meaning he felt he had lost. | Continue reading
“Captive Users.” Alexander Stern pens a thoughtful review essay that puts Cory Doctorow’s The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation in conversation with Antón Barba-Kay’s A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation to try to identify better ways of buil … | Continue reading
Culture is the ever-evolving play that takes place on that stage, as new props come and old props are replaced, even as the theater remains the same. Of course, the play is influenced by the stage and interacts with it. | Continue reading
Jobs in construction, health care, and manufacturing technology need not lead to dead ends... | Continue reading
It’s ironic that this whole Impossible Question — whether to have children in this age of climate change — springs from the same mentality underpinning the forces tearing the world apart, the idea that humans are in charge. | Continue reading
Perhaps in the coming decades we shall have, so to speak, not a straightforward demographic slope downward, but more of a dip and a levelling off in the next century. | Continue reading
“Robert Nisbet for the Present Age.” Kirstin Birkhaug describes the experience of teaching Robert Nisbet’s The Present Age and watching her students respond to his analysis of America’s twinned statism and individualism: “My students do not want to feel rootless. They do not want … | Continue reading
But I wonder: as it strains to get over Christ, will the West survive without noticing all the other beaten horses of the world? Or will it one day break its supposed sanity and collapse back into a foregone pity? | Continue reading
It would be easy to dismiss my argument as a simple platitude: “Trust God.” But it is trust in the infinite that allows us to trust finite beings. | Continue reading
The execution of Marie Antoinette and the treatment of her family is nothing for France to be proud of. Her punishment is the first evidence of a revolution run amok. | Continue reading
But even a novice like me—hobbled by an ignorance of veterinarian science and perennially pulled toward too many projects—found the book interesting and useful. | Continue reading
“‘Your Friend, Wendell’: A 90th Birthday Tribute to Wendell Berry.” To mark Wendell Berry’s 90th birthday, The Library of America published a set of reflections by several of the people he’s influenced over the years. Here’s a taste of Andrew Peterson’s: “the Wendell Berry I’ve e … | Continue reading