This is the story of a bruised soul touched by grace but still frustrated by the passivity that others continue to show in response to the unspeakable. | Continue reading
Joel Miller of Miller’s Book Review Substack reads and reviews a prodigious number of books for this regular Substack. Joel formerly served as vice president of acquisitions for Thomas Nelson Publishers. Joel and I discuss how to find time to read, how to choose what to read, and … | Continue reading
Human liberty is indeed a good. But liberty is the freedom to choose well, not just freedom from restraints. | Continue reading
After a pandemic took his son, the Bard would never be the same | Continue reading
All of this only touches the surface of Escaping the Housing Trap’s arguments and only begins the many productive discussions that should—and hopefully will!—follow in its wake. Buy and read the book, and join with your neighbors in talking about how Strong Towns can help make yo … | Continue reading
“‘This Will Finish Us.’” I finished reading Wendell Berry’s Unsettling of America this week with a group of students, so this heartbreaking essay by Stephanie McCrummen about how the Tanzanian government, oil money from the Gulf states, and “conservationists” are evicting Maasai … | Continue reading
Pruning is difficult because we are forced to make a conscious decision to remove something that has been part of a growing plant. But these cuts are necessary and even life-giving. | Continue reading
I must say that I did not want to write this review. I walked into the theatre with high hopes for Mr. Garland’s Civil War. I was hoping it would sober people to the actual horrors that a modern a civil war would entail. | Continue reading
As such, these papers provide the means for understanding how imperial concerns shaped the way Entente soldiers perceived themselves and the war. But even more importantly to my mind, the papers provide a window into the human soul and how humor springs eternal in the human breas … | Continue reading
No home but the Garden was there originally for man, once upon a very long time ago. No garage either was part of life before expulsion from Eden. | Continue reading
“The Liberalism of Refuge.” I think that Bryan Garsten’s notion of “refuge” isn’t robust enough to do all the work he’s asking it to do in this account, but he poses important and nuanced challenges to some forms of localism in this essay: “Liberal societies, I want to suggest, a … | Continue reading
The book is at its best when it embraces a more generous spirit. If one wishes to learn about traveling grain harvesters and to follow a literary description of the landscape, one will find it here. | Continue reading
In Lost Cause debates, President Biden should be wary of casting the first stone: his own history demonstrates the complicated relationship the country has with its deadliest war and the men who led it. | Continue reading
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Wendell Berry’s sprawling, uneven, brilliant, and sometimes frustrating The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice will likely not, I think, be widely remembered after he leaves us as his greatest, most important work. But it is … | Continue reading
In a funk no more, I was prepared to meet the smile of my daughters with a genuine smile of my own as they came out of practice. The graffiti was gadfly, but also gift. | Continue reading
“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