In a sequel to last week’s episode on friendship, we’re listening to songs about loneliness this week. Note: I make a fairly big error by saying that I’m playing nothing but artists I haven’t played before, then immediately playing Frank Sinatra, whom I played on the Christmas ep … | Continue reading
In a world where most everything is permissible, civil disobedience can only be achieved through an action that is socially deplorable yet morally acceptable. | Continue reading
Kristin M. Collier contemplates the practice of medicine predicated on a creaturely view of persons. | Continue reading
As we moved around, I might have said that home is a feeling. Or rather, you know you’re at home because of a feeling. I think I’d argue with myself now after finally having been settled in one place for over a decade. | Continue reading
It isn’t in the script, nor is it even in the cinematography. It is as if in a whisper which speaks to your heart. | Continue reading
By 1926, Lewis had read enough of Eliot’s poetry to conclude it a great waste and devised a prank against Eliot that involved submitting mock-modernist poetry to "The Criterion." | Continue reading
Earlier in 2025 the U.S. Mint began reducing penny production, with the last of the coins struck on November 12th ... The reason the mint ceased production was because the cost to make and ship a penny had been well over one cent for years, costing the government millions of doll … | Continue reading
We’re starting the new year by talking about friendship, that most human of institutions. Send your song recommendations to symposiumofsongs@gmail.com! | Continue reading
A city of gray concrete invokes the same belonging and responsibility as if there were a home decorated with nothing but concrete. | Continue reading
Myers considers four particular questions or misconceptions that many prospective students have regarding the liberal arts. | Continue reading
I walked into the makeshift classroom, saw quotations from McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers all around the walls, and assumed I was entering a traditionally conservative environment. But after a day of presentations and discussions with students of all ages conversations which had ran … | Continue reading
The title poem, “Home Song,” is deceptively simple in its sing-song iambic trimeter and mostly monosyllabic words. Yet the reader is pulled quickly into a dream of home, hearth, children, hospitality, music, dancing, and feasting—a dream inspired by the sad sight of an empty room … | Continue reading
The promise of liberation from drudgery quickly becomes liberation from purpose. | Continue reading
I present to you my twenty favorite songs of the year! What did I miss? Email it to me at symposiumofsongs@gmail.com. | Continue reading
Because those dancing it have worked and stretched and warmed up for three months prior to performance, breaking in shoes and bandaging toes, the dream is anchored by reality. | Continue reading
The stuff of ordinary creation can shine and shimmer with a supernatural radiance | Continue reading
They may all, in their imperfect ways, bespeak our yearning | Continue reading
The classic era of film noir, the 1940s and 1950s, is a great reservoir of sin. We sometimes forget that all of the Biblical traumas and warnings can be found in this genre, under the cover of coats and hats. | Continue reading
On keeping yourself. | Continue reading
In conjunction with my recent FPR article “What Does Christmas Feel Like?” A Symposium of Popular Songs is listening to songs that recall my halcyon Christmases—let’s say 1987-1994, though few of these songs actually come from that period. Send your song suggestions to me at symp … | Continue reading
Something of those Christmas Eve services arises in me every time I watch a sacristan light a candle. | Continue reading
Antón Barba-Kay articulates the appeal of Curtis Yarvin and diagnoses the very-online irony that marks his rhetoric. | Continue reading
Offering a way forward. | Continue reading
"You’ve Got Mail" is a love letter from Kingsnorth’s Machine | Continue reading
There are things that we actually cannot bear—and things that cannot be borne will break us. . . . What then is to be made of unbearable suffering? | Continue reading
FPR aims to gather and encourage those who aspire to a creaturely life even in a machine age. | Continue reading
This week, we’re listening to songs about young adults (let’s say 18-35) on A Symposium of Popular Songs. Think of it as a companion piece to our very first episode, on middle age! Send your song recommendations to symposiumofsongs@gmail.com! | Continue reading
Leave a comment to thank Mark. Add your good wishes to mine. He deserves them. | Continue reading
Ezra Klein wrestles with the limitations of liberalism in the face of big tech efforts to capture users’ attention. | Continue reading
Wading in a river and lumberjacking in the woods are at once work and play, play and work, and in this they resemble anything we might do for instrumental ends and yet, at the same time, take a great deal of pleasure in. | Continue reading
This stranger, rain or shine, snow or hail, more religiously than I prayed as a child, lifted the flap and dropped letters into my family’s home. | Continue reading
The negative effects of digital poison can, as documented by Haidt, cause a sort of phantom anxiety and depression for an entire generation. | Continue reading
No filmmaker is as concerned with engaging Americans in our own stories and in our own democracy. | Continue reading
We’re spending some (virtual) time in Los Angeles, this week, as the weather starts to get cold most everywhere else. | Continue reading
While I’m past the point of burning my records and musical books, and I’m no longer having to evacuate coffee shops because “Sympathy for the Devil” is playing, I still struggle with… | Continue reading
Eric Miller pens a beautiful review of Wendell Berry’s new novel and reflects on the stories and structures that hold sustaining cultures in place. | Continue reading
The term "citizen humanities" argues for the complementary nature of work by academics and non-academics. | Continue reading
A whole-hog way of seeing. | Continue reading
Williams gives readers who may be either loosely familiar with or even quite ignorant of the authors she treats a brief introduction to their importance and what beauty can be found in each of them. | Continue reading
Tradeoffs we should not be willing to tolerate. | Continue reading
Just as the light becomes a little more precious and scarce this year, we’re going to listen to songs about it. Send me your song recommendations at symposiumofsongs@gmail.com! | Continue reading
In trying to systematize relationships between words and humans, both medieval scholasticism and today’s automated dialogue sterilize the sources of human vitality. | Continue reading
Christian Wiman’s latest masterpiece is a must-read. | Continue reading
Practices that began as bounded places we visited have thinned into atmospheres we inhabit. | Continue reading
There is nothing greater in which to delight and nothing vaster in terms of the scope of His Being or understanding than God. | Continue reading
The former editor in chief of Christianity Today stops by to talk about his love of Port William and the AI infused world to come. | Continue reading
Hicks's voice is that of a mature seeker, a seeker of hidden beauties and of home in a variety of places. | Continue reading
The endurance of the building itself reinforces implicit messages that foster good character. | Continue reading