“Eric Gill and the Integrity of Work.” In a new preface to an edition of Gill’s writings, Wendell Berry identifies the endemic flaw of industrialized technology: “Under the rule of specialization, people trained to do one thing or one kind of thing produce a technological solutio … | Continue reading
Atlanta, GA. It’s been a rough few years for celebrity evangelicals. In the summer of 2019, Joshua Harris—the Calvinist pastor who became a national sensation in the late ‘90s with the publication of his book I Kissed Dating Goodbye—announced that he was splitting up both with hi … | Continue reading
Jackson, MI. Last week we hosted FPR’s first webinar, and today we’re releasing the recording of that conversation. This recording also serves as the inaugural episode of the Brass Spittoon, a new podcast from the Front Porch Republic. We’ll chew on issues timeless and timely, wi … | Continue reading
As the late historian John Lukacs would insist, all stories as we know them and retell them are remembered. This means they are, inherently, personal. John Berryman and Robert Giroux: A Publishing Friendship is no exception. | Continue reading
What about Lasch’s analysis of limits? I have in mind two contemporary cultural developments, the rise of technocracy and our extreme aversion to risk, that seem to challenge certain aspects of Lasch’s thinking. | Continue reading
“America’s Biggest Owner Of Farmland Is Now Bill Gates.” Ariel Shapiro writes about the massive consolidation of land ownership. Gates is focusing on farmland, but other billionaires own even more US land. “Everything Is Broken.” Alana Newhouse offers a sweeping diagnosis of a de … | Continue reading
This prayer, which enumerates what Warren calls “a taxonomy of vulnerability,” epitomizes how, far from being irrelevant or obscure, the mysteries of God fill the hardest parts of life. | Continue reading
J. Mark Bertrand is the author of the Roland March mystery trilogy and the purveyor of the aforementioned Bible Design Blog. But Mark has seemingly been lying low the past few years, and in this podcast you’ll find out why. We explore what Mark has been up to, whether we’ll see a … | Continue reading
The Lincoln that Schaff puts forth cultivated liberal democracy by placing limits and crafting public consensus. In order to see Lincoln in a new light, Schaff applies Aristotle’s ideas of moderation and prudence as his lens. It is not simply that Lincoln knew the good, but, as a … | Continue reading
In a letter he wrote to his grandchildren, Udall challenged them to "Support all endeavors that promise a better life for the inhabitants of our planet. Cherish sunsets, wild creations and wild places. Have a love affair with the wonder and beauty of the earth.” | Continue reading
“Why I Choose Rural.” Benya Kraus explains why she chose to move to rural Minnesota after graduating from college: “Though I spent my childhood summers and winters here on the family farm, my narrative about rural life was colored by the images that dominate our media channels: a … | Continue reading
Colin Phelps is not the first to discover a graced thing in college: it’s the unchosen self-knowledge that is most liberating. | Continue reading
Scotsdale, AZ. With a vaccine on the horizon, it is time to think hard about how our country should look when the pandemic ends. The state of America under the coronavirus has been a window into liberal democracy left to its natural inclinations. While all countries have faced ch … | Continue reading
The FPR leadership has decided to make a foray into a new medium (for us). And given this transitional moment in American politics, this seems like a good time. We will be hosting an on-line discussion that, hopefully, provides an interesting and unique take on current events. Fo … | Continue reading
I have spent considerable time in ravines, drawn to them by an appetite for domestic exploration: though they worry me, I have also been drawn to them; I traverse the ravines to find the spirit of my place. | Continue reading
“Failures of Leadership in a Populist Age.” In an essay that rings even more true after the events of Wednesday, Yuval Levin warns would-be populist leaders to shun the temptations of fantasy and root their words and actions in reality: It is the task of leaders in populist eras … | Continue reading
Robinson presents us with an encounter: a participatory, embodied experience; a blessed and broken reality; the sacraments. And from this encounter, we receive courageous eyes to see the precious things that have been placed in our hands and to honor them accordingly. | Continue reading
Too many children grow up learning no lessons, organising no peers, and exploring no territory, unless it be shifting electrons around a screen, and the screen becomes their world. | Continue reading
In these days of Twitter democracy, when platforms for political expression are so accessible, it sometimes seems, paradoxically, that citizens have little actual say in decision making about our country’s future. | Continue reading
“If Mr. Kristof Is Taking Names, Apple Should Be Next.” Anthony Barr points out the profit-generated blind spot that permits Apple, Disney, and other American companies from profiting off of slave labor in Xinjiang. “Barry Lopez, Acclaimed Author And Traveler Beyond Many Horizons … | Continue reading
The enduring value of adding Jane Austen to my disciplines was not beholden to my expectation of enjoyment from a happy wedding nor was it dependent on my recognition that vice and virtue are at war in me and in the world. She won me by shaping a vision of joy built on virtue and … | Continue reading
Men are fallen creatures who think they’re perfectible when in fact they’re hardly improvable. | Continue reading
In this season for making resolutions, perhaps this opportunity might help those of you who want to read more books in 2021. I’m delighted to pass along this invitation from Porchers Bernard Franceschi and Zac Blanchard. “In the long run, exchange without reciprocity destroys the … | Continue reading
2020 has certainly had real trials and tribulations, but our approach to it is also reflective of a culture in which everything disliked has long been “the worst.” | Continue reading
George offers his joyful holiday greetings to these institutions as if they were persons, bodies that saw his town through good and bad, through war and peace. | Continue reading
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] The departure of Donald Trump from the White House [crosses fingers] will assuredly not mean the departure of Trumpism from American life. The collection of grifters, paranoiacs, and devout (and, I think, devoutly misinformed) Christians who embrac … | Continue reading
Merry Christmas, Porchers! Thanks for joining us in this virtual space throughout what has certainly been an interesting year. While we missed our yearly conference, we’ve hosted a lively set of essays here on the website, published several new books, and sent out two rich issues … | Continue reading
There is nothing morally wrong with being poor, and the stigmatization that affects the poor probably only adds more to their burden. | Continue reading
When we see that beauty and imagination, rightly understood, are intellectual as well as affective, we no longer have to try to bridge some gap between imagination and reality. | Continue reading
Supportive efforts can steer this ingenious workforce toward better stewardship and environmental integrity by reclaiming that awe that life on the land should inspire. | Continue reading
The Cult of Smart is deeply entrenched in most modern systems of public education around the world, and the increasingly clear reality of cognitive and genetic differences between different human beings poses a sharp challenge to liberals whose membership in the Cult makes them w … | Continue reading
We all want students to think critically and to reflect on what they have encountered in the course of their education. In order to do that, however, they must have something to reflect upon. | Continue reading
The pandemic has provided an opportunity to recenter our lives around home and family | Continue reading
"In order to implement vital system updates, you must install the Trans-Mog-Z Facilitator, available at any Big Horizon Automotive Intervention Center. This has been your first notice.” | Continue reading
By deciding to farm, I was unwittingly leaving the progressive dominion of my college’s campus, and sidestepping that of the urban centers to which most of my peers were destined. | Continue reading
The Bruderhof do not blindly follow the status quo but have chosen to organize their life around simplicity, self-sacrifice, and peace. | Continue reading
Hillbilly Elegy is indeed political, but in a deeper sense, entangled as it is in the webs of broken promises and repeated forgiveness. | Continue reading
Jackson, MI. As a college professor and reader of Wendell Berry, I’ve long been concerned about the dominant narrative of “upward (and lateral) mobility” that draws students to higher education. These concerns led Jack Baker and me to write a book that tries to re-imagine these n … | Continue reading
Family-centered trades are not only the most durable throughout history; they are also the ideal context by which parents can pass their values, faith and culture on to the next generation. | Continue reading
Hall’s elegiac poetry and prose teach grim lessons that are worth heeding, but there is also a sort of unsentimental, necessary hope—a hope for continuity and unexpected rebirth, a hope that keeps open a sense of possibility—that shines obscurely beneath their grief. | Continue reading
Perhaps, without silence for a reference point—something out there that reminds us of our place in the big order of things—the masters of information feel free to shade, obscure, or otherwise manipulate their messages. | Continue reading
With the hope that the self-promotion involved doesn’t obviate whatever potential value the words written may convey, here is something I wrote, which I’d like to believe will be of interest to at least some of the Front Porch Republic audience, on the theme of civic friendship a … | Continue reading
I’ll be taking a break from compiling these weekly roundups during the Advent season. See you all after Christmas! “The Trappists’ Coffins.” In a moving essay, Leah Libresco Sargeant writes about the loving care with which a group of Trappist monks craft coffins, many of which ar … | Continue reading
This book at least provides a compelling diagnostic starting point, calling us back to our own networks of dependence and encouraging us to pursue friendship, particularly in the most challenging and vulnerable contexts. | Continue reading
Ordinary and unrefined, Kooser's poems suggest the steady hand of a craftsman who doesn’t need to go looking for the next big thing. | Continue reading
If Dolly Parton left the Smoky Mountains, it seems to have been on a hero’s journey that Joseph Campbell would have recognized. She came back, bearing gifts. | Continue reading
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Gillian Brockell, a talented writer and researcher for The Washington Post‘s history blog Retropolis, interviewed four esteemed historians and scholars of the Constitution, about what, if anything, the Founders had to say about the possibility of a … | Continue reading
“What are Families For?” The new issue of Plough is out, and it looks excellent. I am trying to avoid reading these essays, though, until my print copy arrives in the mail. Waiting won’t be easy. “Tending to the World’s Problems, One City and Town at a Time.” Richard Doster draws … | Continue reading