“Adonai has compassion,” sang the psalmist, “for he understands how we are made, he remembers that we are dust.” Perhaps in our dust of grief, we see clearly for the first time. | Continue reading
“Angry Farmers Are Reshaping Europe.” While this New York Times article predictably frames European farmers’ frustrations through the lens of the “far right” and its rising political power, Roger Cohen provides a view of life on French farms: “if this farmer seemed passionate abo … | Continue reading
This addiction may involve us in all sorts of ironies, but we need to untangle these and distinguish between irresponsible or absurd ironies and tragic or inescapable ones. | Continue reading
Haidt’s book is a tour de force. I can give it no higher praise than to say I wish we could put this book in the hands of every parent, teacher, school administrator, schoolboard member, and legislator in the country. Haidt convincingly shows that mobile technology—mostly but not … | Continue reading
“Heeding lessons from farmers who persist in place, we can embrace these virtues. Rather than give up or get out, we can dig in. Rather than go big, we can go home." | Continue reading
I do not know where the future will take us. I’m not going to try and escape the risks in modern society, but I’m also not going to ignore them. I’m going to be right here, in the thick of it, and that’s where I want to be. | Continue reading
“In ‘Barons,’ Austin Frerick Takes on the Most Powerful Families in the Food System.” Twilight Greenaway interviews Frerick on the depressing stories of corporate power and government capitulation that his recent book chronicles: “What I call the “Wall Street Farm Bill” . . . is … | Continue reading
If an invisible world is a reality, then a creator is probable, as the deists suggest, and perhaps even plausible. God may well be really real, just as I had supposed in my childhood years. I believe so. | Continue reading
Man must face the reality of his own existence and his ultimate fate. To stare into the abyss of eternity, to examine and grasp the meaning of life, is a necessity. | Continue reading
“By their fruits you will recognize them,” Jesus tells his disciples. If what appears is bad or worthless, you’ll have been made aware of what was there all along, incipient. You can tear up the weed and try again. But when something good appears, something truly good, you’ll be … | Continue reading
Timothy Carney, an AEI senior fellow and the author of Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be, talks about the village it takes to raise a child and the metaphorical (and sometimes literal) rise of “No Children Allowed” signs. Highlig … | Continue reading
To fight a culture war justly is to be confident that your arguments have a reasonable chance of success; but this means that to fight justly is not only about carefully crafting arguments but also about sensitively observing the context in which you will deploy them. | Continue reading
“What New York Times Columnist Paul Krugman Gets Wrong About Rural America.” Wendell Berry responds to Krugman’s column about a new book on “white rural rage”: “A person who has no idea of goodness can have no good ideas. If one cannot imagine dealing with rural rage except by fi … | Continue reading
If we fail to recognize friendship for what it is, and for the role it plays in the maturation process of children and young adults, we lose out on a world that is diverse in the relationships it values | Continue reading
Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower found solace in their dead son’s favorite color | Continue reading
The past is not completely lost to us, and the fascination with fantastic beasts remains. | Continue reading
The film Patton contains many quotable quotes, some of which cannot be repeated on a family friendly website such as Front Porch (for example, what it might have been like to spend the great World War Two in Louisiana). Among the less spicy quotes are “We’re gonna attack all nigh … | Continue reading
“The Stackpole Legend.” Wendell Berry has a new short story out in Threepenny Review, and it’s a good one: “Once in time, as Art Rowanberry would put it, a boy, the only child of a couple advanced in years, entered the world in the neighborhood of Port William, to be distinguishe … | Continue reading
After fifteen largely joyful years of existence, it seems appropriate to ask whether we have retained our relevance. The struggle to catch and hold the public’s attention proves even more difficult now than it was in 2009. Events have transpired at such dizzying speed that vertig … | Continue reading
So to all my friends in this haven, this meeting place, this village green—you lovers of federalism, distributism, neighbors, neighborhoods, regional accents, little platoons, and forty acres and a mule—happy anniversary. | Continue reading
Walk boldly. Whistle not, but do keep walking. Keep walking right on by it and let the dead bury the dead. | Continue reading
The Empire did not fall the day Front Porch Republic rose. But in 15 years FPR has done much more than simply add weight to the human scale. It has revivified the most humane and practical traditions in American social, cultural, economic, and political life and thought. | Continue reading
Friendship is, in fact, a vital key to any flourishing political order, for friendship is rooted in affection and a commitment to the good of the friend, which translates in the aggregate to a commitment to the common good. And friendship is necessarily local. | Continue reading
“Complicity and Hope in Wendell Berry’s Membership.” Next February, we’ll be hosting a conference here at Grove City College to reflect on the writings of Wendell Berry. Andrew Peterson will give a keynote address and a concert, and it should be a rich weekend of sharing ideas an … | Continue reading
Our modernist mindset too easily leads us to the comfortable notion that ‘they’–the government, the scientists, whoever–are going to save us with the latest whizz-bang techno-fix. They’re not. Nobody is coming to save us. | Continue reading
In these movements, we are but a speck of dust in the great desert. But here, where are our feet are, we hold a power forgotten. | Continue reading
The difference a pen pal can make | Continue reading
A quarter of a century ago, Wendell Berry wrote, “the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.” That division has come, and all must choose on which side of the divide to stand. | Continue reading
It is another year and that must mean another appearance by my guest Holly Ordway. Holly and I discuss her most recent book, Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography from Word on Fire. Holly and I discuss the impact of St. John Henry Newman’s Oratory on J.R.R. Tolkien, his struggle … | Continue reading
A Cain and Abel Story for Modern Man | Continue reading
“Thinking as a Human Being.” David Weinberger reviews James D. Madden’s Thinking about Thinking: Mind and Meaning in the Era of Techno-Nihilism, which probes underlying questions about the nature of human thought: “What are the necessary conditions for having a mind in the first … | Continue reading
A chief virtue of sheep is, indeed, that they are content with remarkably little, and—this is key—they are rooted and aware citizens of their locale. | Continue reading
Here, in this shed’s unremarkable pool of silence, I am reminded of other places where silence stretched like an ocean. I happened upon one of those waning shores the previous year when I resided in the mountains of the high desert. | Continue reading
Rushing to enslave themselves like animals in a cage, the animal rights and climate activists who think they are on the “right side of history” are unwittingly reinforcing their dependence on the corporations that have long damaged ecosystem and human health. | Continue reading
If I am therefore departing one field in which I hoped to do some good work in place, I hope to deepen my practice as an English professor who lives and reads in place, bringing my reading and my other work in the world closer together in the most literal, physical sense. For enc … | Continue reading
“Taking the High Road.” Nadya Williams issues a stirring call to root liberal education in a transcendent vision of what it means to be human: “what if the future of the humanities lies in Christian colleges—and colleges I would term Christian-adjacent in their mission, like St. … | Continue reading
In a world in which there are so many problems to solve, solitude plays an important role in helping us remember that life consists of more than finding and righting wrongs. Time spent resting and recharging has moral value too. | Continue reading
Theodore Roosevelt never recovered from the loss of his son in WWI | Continue reading
Do we treat the created order as if it belongs to God or exclusively to ourselves? Is dominion the same as domination? Is stewardship the same as subjugation? Such notions need to be worked through. Such notions have a profound impact on how we see and treat the world around us. … | Continue reading
Why is it that we can all say that this building works, that this room is just right, that this town is good and pleasing? Why is it that we can all imagine some beautiful and perfect home, complete with all its habits and accouterments, but we can’t say exactly what it is about … | Continue reading
“Against Human Flourishing.” Paul Griffiths gently suggests that the paradigm of “flourishing” may be inadequate to ascribe meaning to our lives and efforts: “Damage, flourishing’s apparent opposite, may have contributions of its own to make to what it appears on its face to cont … | Continue reading
If we imagine that the fate of our times hangs upon our efforts, we’ll deceive ourselves and miss out on the goods and pleasures that are at hand waiting to be enjoyed, even now. | Continue reading
As Americans, we must remember that place matters, and our founding principles are best understood when we look at how they were made real in the city of brotherly love. | Continue reading
Surviving the holiday without our loved ones | Continue reading
Matt Stewart discusses the promise and peril of current forms of localism with Trevor Latimer. | Continue reading
“Growing, Fermenting, Canning, and Why?” The Maurin Academy is hosting a slate of discussions on home food production to get you ready for the growing season: “It’s time to plan a garden, whether it’s on your patio, in your yard, or someone else’s yard! Ryan Dostal will be runnin … | Continue reading
Yet our little sister does not play the victim. She presses on, a sufferer who labors as best she can while shadows and thorns press in against her. And she prays to God like the woman persistent in her case when contending with an unjust judge; and since God is just, since He is … | Continue reading
Our duty is to live lives that conform to what is good, true, and beautiful. Natural rights in general, and the rights enshrined in the Constitution in particular, are means for citizens to fulfill their duties, live good lives, and build up their families and communities. | Continue reading