Fidelity to place needn’t (and shouldn’t) result in stuckness, a condemnation of ever moving at all. But we must beware falling into that second trap: rejecting roots altogether. | Continue reading
“How Can We Encourage Doctors to Come Home and Serve Well?” Nicholas Brennecke draws on Wendell Berry to consider how the medical profession might encourage young doctors to serve their communities. “Putting Down Roots.” Patrick T. Brown praises Gracy Olmstead’s new book, but he … | Continue reading
Populism can in fact be seen as being precisely a reassertion of democracy against the anti-democratic tendencies of managerial, technocratic elites. | Continue reading
The purpose of politics is to accrue power. Chavez knew this reality, and perhaps his funeral was his last, best opportunity to control the stage and direct the players. | Continue reading
Add the past year on to this already disturbing trend, and such destructive realities have only been further exacerbated. The need for human sociality is not a deficiency, nor is it something that we can just put on hold for an indefinite amount of time. | Continue reading
My guest this episode is Grace Olmstead. Grace has done excellent work for several years on issues of localism, just the sort of thing we like to talk about on Cultural Debris. Like your humble host, she is a devotee of Wendell Berry’s works, and her new book Uprooted is a chroni … | Continue reading
Despite differences that are exacerbated at the national level, we often share significantly more in common with our “enemy” when we interact with them at human scales. | Continue reading
“A Common Good Conservatism for the Common Man.” Anthony Hennen reviews a new edition of The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge and praises Coolidge as “a standard-bearer for a certain strand of American conservatism: A belief in the importance of institutions, the value of free ma … | Continue reading
The Innovation Delusion goes a long way toward demystifying and destigmatizing the ordinary yet essential work of maintenance. | Continue reading
Our society may sometimes be divided on how to define right and wrong, but that has not dampened enthusiasm for identifying wrongdoing. | Continue reading
This is the humbling gift our children offer. If we seek to shape their character, at some point in the journey we’ll find ourselves backed into a corner, faced with our own hypocrisy. | Continue reading
Summary Filmmaker John de Graaf pulls up a chair to discuss his 1997 documentary Affluenza; a forthcoming project on Arizona politician and JFK/LBJ’s Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall; the politics of beauty; and a whether John Muir should be cancelled. Singer/songwriter W … | Continue reading
I go forth strangely heartened and even hopeful that I might succeed in my attempt to describe and perhaps even explain the hill country presently looming off our port bow. | Continue reading
“Small-Town Natives Are Moving Back Home.” Gracy Olmstead writes about several college-educated young people choosing to move back to their hometowns, and she points to the work of organizations like Lead for America that are encouraging individuals to do so. “Using Commercial B … | Continue reading
Corrymeela is a dreamscape, a landscape that I marvel at every time I go out there. If conservation consists of loving something—a tract of land, a garden, a wood—then my hope is to love this land even more intensely into its full God-created glory. | Continue reading
Unfortunately, much of what is currently driving the discussion is not reason nor compassion but anger. | Continue reading
Uprooted is partly a memoir of her extended family, partly a paean to a way of life that is both dying and which she never really understood while she grew up in the midst of it (and thus feels the loss of all the more deeply now), and partly a study of the causes of that dying, … | Continue reading
That advocates of year-round DST persist says something about the evolution of American agriculture and how out of touch we collectively have become with the intractable pulse of nature. | Continue reading
“How Local History Can Save America: The Crucifixion and Resurrection of Frederick Douglass.” John W. Miller recommends an essay about the place where Frederick Douglass fought Edward Covey to a standstill. He points to it as an example of the kind of local history that can be pa … | Continue reading
At the heart of Gracy Olmstead's book is the conviction that roots do not just serve the individual person or plant—they also are vital to the health of one’s soil, place, and neighbors. | Continue reading
Even if ‘land’ is less important than actual vote share, this map does point to a very real issue at the heart of American politics: namely that majorities, specifically local majorities, matter very much in our democracy. | Continue reading
Reading the Lutheran Letters today, I cannot help but think about woke capitalism. The fundamental economic and cultural and human issues are obscured by clashes regarding discourse and slight gestures. | Continue reading
It’s time to walk out of our artificially-lit caves and get as close as we possibly can to real presence and real powerlessness, wherever and however these things come into view. | Continue reading
“Arguing with Success.” Rory Groves writes about how his dissatisfaction with the business model of the tech industry led him on a quest for more meaningful work: “Weary (and wary) of the technology industry’s addiction to obsolescence, I began to research more durable ways to wo … | Continue reading
Today I make a COVID resolution: I will learn to be more lamby-like, as Carl would say: to think like a lamb. | Continue reading
As a student of Christian history and an off-and-on conservative, I continue to be confused by the combination of Roman Catholic identity and Front Porch location. The idea of localism is not one that goes readily with the hierarchy of bishops and the universal rule of the papacy … | Continue reading
Minari is haunted by O’Connor, as Chung explores the theme of misfits and “hard to find” good men (and women) that jolt our senses toward who we truly are, including our limitations. | Continue reading
Modest and hopeful, but backed up by a lot of thought and research, Guido Preparata's work is at least a beginning. Surrounded by lies, it’s high-time we started telling another story. | Continue reading
Christian Platonism’s affirmation that we are spiritual beings who will outlive this current life, in one manner or another, lends us powerful impetus to reconsider what it means to spend life here and now in a worthwhile fashion. | Continue reading
Holly Ordway is Cardinal Francis George Fellow of Faith and Culture of the Word on Fire Institute. Her new book, the first from the new Word on Fire Academic imprint, is Tolkien’s Modern Reading: Middle-earth Beyond the Middle Ages. It’s an important work, that genuinely breaks n … | Continue reading
The Church provides a sacramental and moral framework as well as an ultimate sense of hope in The Irishman, and it is this sense of hope that is so desperately needed as we enter into the brave new world of the Biden-Harris era. | Continue reading
“Words and Flesh: Pastoring in a Post-truth World.” In this wise essay, Kurt Armstrong begins with Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, which narrates the long process by which humans learned to name and narrate cancer. This story has analogu … | Continue reading
Human fertility is not the root of our problems. It is but one symptom of a deeper, more elemental problem. | Continue reading
The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self draws on a deep reservoir of erudition rather than the shallow puddle of populism. | Continue reading
The longing created in the reader to want to know Jack is not easily articulated. It is difficult to admit that though we love happy endings, we are inexplicably drawn to misery. | Continue reading
“John Deere Promised Farmers It Would Make Tractors Easy to Repair. It Lied.” Jason Koebler and Matthew Gault investigate to see whether John Deere followed through with its promise to provide farmers diagnostic tools necessary to repair their tractors. It seems they have not don … | Continue reading
The best stories in the volume offer Cather-esque explorations of the links between place and people. The stories are remarkable for their dense layers, for their social, psychological, and emotional intricacies. | Continue reading
When Petrarch uses Augustine to call himself out for being bound and dragged down by the “chains of love and glory,” students are forced to consider what it is they are pursuing, in college and in life. | Continue reading
My guest this episode is Elisabeth Deane, a talented artist living and working in London with her husband Jethro Buck, also an artist. On a trip to India, Elisabeth was exposed to traditional Indian miniature painting, which led her to her life’s work. She pursued studies at the … | Continue reading
Who wins in a contest between Woke Soft Totalitarianism and White Christian Conspiracists? Nobody. But there will be many losers, not least among them Christians who fail to stand for the truth. | Continue reading
“Vermont’s Superpower, Revealed: The Ability to Practice Local Democracy.” Susan Clark writes about the formative role that Vermont’s annual town meetings play in training citizens to practice democracy. (Recommended by John McClaughry.) “Why the U.S. Needs the Romney Family Plan … | Continue reading
Is only the life of the busy and bustling place, the place of mergers and acquisitions, worthy of story and song and canvas? | Continue reading
In an age of knee-jerk innovation, the warnings articulated by Emerson and Dewey are more needed than ever. They advocated for applied knowledge, but they also insisted such technology must serve human ends. | Continue reading
Perhaps, just perhaps, COVID has restored some of the beauty and desirability of the front porch. | Continue reading
We’ve got a cover and table of contents for the spring issue of Local Culture. If you’re a subscriber, you can expect to get your copy in March. If you’re not a subscriber, what are you waiting for? “From Tech Critique to Ways of Living.” Alan Jacobs has an important new essay in … | Continue reading
There is much wisdom contained in English Pastoral for suffering churches. If the last fifty years have shown that innovation and modernization aren’t the solution to our ill-health, they have also made a nostalgic return to yesteryear an impossibility. | Continue reading
Ted Lasso offers a compelling model of a good parish priest: this fictional football coach exemplifies how to lead others with care. | Continue reading
When I hear some folk wisdom that I would have previously dismissed as backwards or ridiculous, I now look for the guardrails it establishes and what they might be protecting. | Continue reading