Paul Pastor describes his beloved home state as the end of the West. | Continue reading
Our increasingly obvious failure to make anything like “progress” is part and parcel of our failure to conserve the order from which all progress comes. | Continue reading
The agrarian voice reveals Nolan’s most significant and disappointing departure from Homer’s epic. | Continue reading
In American society, computers are never required to prove their worth. | Continue reading
Artificial intelligence gets the best of me most days. It demands too much. It takes a profession that I love and turns it into a soul-crushing curse. | Continue reading
I’m back from my vacation and ready to play songs about perseverance. Hot funk, cool punk–we’ve got it all. Send your song suggestions to symposiumofsongs@gmail.com! | Continue reading
The moment, while small and perhaps unimportant, stayed with me and was a beautiful example of the great conversation with the stranger. | Continue reading
Eric Adler praises Patrick Deneen’s new book on how Homer’s Odyssey reveals the character of America’s tensions. | Continue reading
Moms and dads know the feeling when a child first goes off to school. It’s the end of the happy chaos of raising children. But grandparents know that feeling too. | Continue reading
There’s a harmony between wilderness, city, and farm that Bates captures exquisitely. Separate any one from the other, and you have a diminished America. | Continue reading
If we cannot tell the difference between ourselves and machines, it may not be that the machines are “that good.” It may be that our lives are that bad. | Continue reading
Hren addresses our cultural moment through the idiom of corrective: great literature can help restore things that Western societies are losing. | Continue reading
I know that the Greenbrier represents more than potential horror—it represents what Americans hope to preserve: our beautiful nation, one worth preserving. | Continue reading
I’m taking the month of July off from making new episodes of A Symposium of Popular Songs and taking the opportunity to replay some of my favorite episodes from last year. Here’s the one I did the most research for: an episode in honor of my wife’s [redacted] birthday, 16 March, … | Continue reading
Luke Allen describes what it’s like to live in northern Michigan, a place that’s increasingly oriented toward tourism. | Continue reading
The system recognizes the Not Qwhite man under two conditions only: It wants a scapegoat, or it wants a soldier. | Continue reading
We take beauty for granted, yet it keeps coming at us in an endless display of divine grace and power. | Continue reading
After the cold and dark of a long Russian winter, spring had arrived. | Continue reading
Sometimes the things one encounters change the person doing the choosing. | Continue reading
To me, his body of work for CBC Radio’s Ideas is the most remarkable sustained achievement in public intellectual life in the last half-century. | Continue reading
I’m taking the month of July off from making new episodes of A Symposium of Popular Songs and using the opportunity to share some older ones you might have missed. This one originally aired during Thanksgiving week, and I think that’s why it had a lower number of listeners than t … | Continue reading
Sarah Reardon cautions against the typical American narrative that frames vacations as a respite from busyness. | Continue reading
It’s a terrifying thing to graduate your children from high school, hoping they’ll be able to meet adulthood and be successful. | Continue reading
The ghosts of the Swedish colony of the Delaware still haunt placenames in the region. | Continue reading
Not only has Magnolia crossed over. She’s managed to go bounding straight into the troubling territory of heaven. | Continue reading
That there is a just price at which an economic exchange should take place is a feature of classical philosophy and Christian and Islamic thought. | Continue reading
It's rare to have the opportunity to look at another person, especially a stranger. | Continue reading
I’m taking the month of July off from doing new episodes and using the opportunity to re-air some episodes you might have missed. This one is from 27 October 2025 and features break-up songs. I wasn’t getting divorced then, and I’m not getting divorced now. Send your song recomme … | Continue reading
The differences between the Television Age and the Internet Age are just as illuminating as their similarities. | Continue reading
Affectionately known by her grandchildren as “Lulu,” I knew Katherine Walbert Walker, of Oklahoma City, only as “Aunt Kathy.” | Continue reading
Pretending we are not what we are—finite, dependent creatures—limits our freedom to act rightly in the world. | Continue reading
Plough is accepting submissions for its short fiction contest through September 1st. The winning story will be published in Plough, and the winning writer will receive a prize of $2,000. Entry costs $10, though subscribers to Plough Quarterly are invited to submit their stories f … | Continue reading
The mass hysteria of modern consumerism got hold of this product launch, and the result was mobs and fist fights. | Continue reading
While students struggle, we ensure that all of our pieces of paper align properly and our electronic signatures are where they are supposed to be. | Continue reading
In this episode of A Symposium of Popular Songs, which originally aired 22 September 2025, we listened to songs about solidarity, one-half of the foundation of Catholic social teaching. Send me your song recommendations at symposiumofsongs@gmail.com! I’ll be back with a year of n … | Continue reading
The Declaration begins with a riddle for today’s readers. | Continue reading
As writers, our job is to remind us of our truest selves. | Continue reading
In the spring, I was jolted into change. Because that was when I embarked upon the discovery of time. | Continue reading
Pushkin offers us the sovereignty of the personality through work on oneself. | Continue reading
The poet, the teacher, and the student together form a chain of transmission in which what is handed down is a way of being in the world. | Continue reading
Be gentle—we’re listening to songs about arguments this week, and trying to figure out the strange pleasure of them. Send your song suggestions to symposiumofsongs@gmail.com! Programming note: Francophile that I am, I will be taking the month of July off, but I’ll be using the op … | Continue reading
As the work wore on, my hands, feet, and knees blistered. | Continue reading
Before the deportation, Chechnya belonged, in a significant sense, to the old world. | Continue reading
The surveillance state is meant to be like God: all seeing, all knowing. An essential third attribute—all loving—seems to have never been considered. | Continue reading
Most current iterations and applications of AI in the form of LLMs actually turn humans into reverse centaurs. | Continue reading
There is always more at stake in our everyday lives than might at first meet the eye. | Continue reading
This week we’re listening to songs about dreams—not in the sense of goals or ambition but in the sense of images that flash across your subconscious as you sleep. Send your song recommendations to symposiumofsongs@gmail.com! | Continue reading
Consumerism's troubling impacts on American society are a concern of both Right and Left. But limiting our material appetites doesn't have to be a sacrifice. | Continue reading