Freeing ourselves from the corrosive Consumer identity isn’t an individual task, but a call for system change rings hollow if we are afraid of personal change. How can we imagine a world beyond the Consumer if we can’t talk about our experiences of consuming and acknowledge that … | Continue reading
Mark Mitchell, author of Plutocratic Socialism: The Future of Private Property and the Fate of the Middle Class and President of Front Porch Republic, joins the podcast. Mitchell and Murdock discuss the origins of FPR and the importance of widely-held productive private propert … | Continue reading
Wendell Berry has written endlessly about the goodness of local work; if, for Berry, the goodness of such work is connected to agrarian virtue, while for Jackson it is connected to ecological necessity, does that make much practical difference? | Continue reading
What is the goal of life? Cultural messaging has tricked many of us into thinking it is wealth and status, or career advancement. For us, it is the project of our marriage, our family, friends, and the good we can do in the world. | Continue reading
“Will Lab-Grown Meat Save Us?” Elizabeth Wainwright reads environmentalist George Monbiot’s latest book and considers its arguments in the context of two local communities she knows well, one in Devon and one in southern Zambia. Along the way, she models the kind of sympathetic, … | Continue reading
Scruton, from that day in France until the end, could never situate himself in the fugitive and cloistered comfort of the academic and intellectual orthodoxy. | Continue reading
Annette Kirk was kind enough to sit down with me to talk on a recent visit to Piety Hill in Mecosta, Michigan in the brick Italianate home that she and Russell Kirk built a half century ago. Annette talks about growing up on Long Island, her activist mother, being present in the … | Continue reading
In Untrustworthy, Kristian sets an objective for Christians to be faithful, factual, and fair. In some cases, this must be practiced in a somewhat extreme environment. What do we do when we encounter something like QAnon, which is not factual and often fractures relationships? | Continue reading
If beer and football are just the modern bread and circuses of a declining empire, then these are spectacles best avoided. However, if such gridiron microcosms of the human experience can unite us with our neighbors and point us to the bigger and more real story, then football, f … | Continue reading
To acknowledge the harm that has been inflicted on uncountable human lives is to invite doubt about the underpinnings of our technologically sophisticated world. That is an uncomfortable and lonely place to be. Yet it’s necessary if humans have any hope of reclaiming their birthr … | Continue reading
“American Barn.” In a marvelous essay, Joshua Mabie reflects on the iconic meaning of barns in America: “Attention to barns’ actual history as well as to their cultural value can help us reckon with the complexity of the nation’s agricultural past — and, perhaps, find a better wa … | Continue reading
Not only is this a literary accomplishment, it’s an example that both Rowling and her critics – and, by extension, all of us who wish to live in compassionate community with one another – would do well to pay closer attention to. | Continue reading
We sense that there’s more at stake in a restaurant visit than simply gustatorial or financial gain. Eating out, as Plato might have observed, is a chance to reinforce or undermine the rule of the rational over the appetitive soul. | Continue reading
They know their neighbors; they know their village; they know their land. They have their own vernacular that everyone who lives there understands because their father and mother taught them, just like they were taught by their fathers and mothers. The book is a survey of one man … | Continue reading
To walk a place is to open the door to the possibility that you will grow to love it. With time, you could get to know it in an intimate way. Streets or roads or wild forest paths that we walk for the first time can be the object of wonder, even if sometimes also mingled with fea … | Continue reading
If you weren’t able to join us two weeks ago for our conference, you may want to set aside some time to watch the video recordings of the talks. We’ll also be releasing audio versions via the Brass Spittoon podcast. These recordings don’t convey the delights of in-person conversa … | Continue reading
Berry, with an insistence that defies despair, is still carrying out his calling. He notes the discouraging odds his kind has faced not just now but in the past. Imperial presence in whatever its forms has long imperiled the agrarian ideal. | Continue reading
Berry connects these major themes from The Hidden Wound to other themes from his many works—work, agrarianism, industrialization, citizenship, affection, and place. In so doing, he offers his readers a fuller-orbed view of his thinking than maybe he has ever done previously. In t … | Continue reading
Luke Sheahan of Duquesne University and the newly appointed editor of The University Bookman, a book review journal founded by Russell Kirk and edited by him until his death. Dr. Sheahan steps into the role left vacant by the passing of the great Gerald Russello, someone we all g … | Continue reading
These are not compassionate times—not in the public square, and not in all too much of our increasingly chaotic private life, though I think many people are trying. Mr. Berry knows this very well. And so about halfway through the book, he takes a few pages to acknowledge he was t … | Continue reading
If I attempt to follow Berry’s underwater route too closely, I’m afraid I will drown. Rather than try to summarize it, then, I will instead distill from it a set of guidelines for improving the quality of our language. The shouters who dominate our public discourse are unlikely t … | Continue reading
No one can be whole alone; no one can be free alone. Rather, Berry holds that “[t]o be whole and free is…to be at home in a place and in a community where one knows and is known,” and where its boundaries include soils, waters, plants, and animals. | Continue reading
The FPR conference this weekend was a great delight. The only problem is that I wanted to have long conversations with everyone who came. I was mollified, however, by seeing many lively conversations happening during breaks throughout the day and over drinks in the evening. Among … | Continue reading
Lying on a bed at 2:00 AM idly flipping through a book while texting a friend isn’t likely to be a transformative experience. Treating education as a hoop to jump through to secure a job, make money, and consume leads to practices serving that end. The authors in this book will c … | Continue reading
I worked alongside Dad many times. I have also worked alongside other men and women with a disposition towards work like my father’s. They do their labor with skill, creativity, and energy. They rightly earn trust as one to call upon for help with physical jobs. | Continue reading
What is being outlined here is fundamentally a Wendell Berry conservatism: our solutions are not global in nature. They might not even be national in nature. It asks individuals to get involved at the lowest possible scale, in church and on school boards, to be productive in the … | Continue reading
The summer, its heat and its flowers, has finally been put to death. But the dust remains. George Wilson is covered in it, alive and dead, and as Nick told us at the beginning of the novel, the empty space around Gatsby’s dream is made up of that same dust, those same ashes. | Continue reading
“Labor, Land, and Racism.” Brian Volck reviews Berry’s new book, which comes out next month: “For Berry, there are no autonomous people and no isolated social problems. Thus, while acknowledging that ‘it is obvious that race prejudice or white supremacy is the original and fundam … | Continue reading
Beyond writing about craftmanship and antique furniture, M&T explores ideas about human work in a technological age, work in the context of community, and the relationship between craft and tradition. Regardless of your interest in the nuances of woodworking, many Porchers would … | Continue reading
Jason M. Baxter is a professor at the University of Notre Dame and has a new book from InterVarsity Press titled The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis. Dr. Baxter and I discuss the C.S. Lewis few ever talk about, the dangers of presentism, and how the medievals aren’t at all like the c … | Continue reading
Though his recent bestselling books trace the roots of several deeply entrenched beliefs about human nature and our world that have led us into bewildering territory, Trueman concludes both books with a look back into the ancient church and a call to faithful Christian work in lo … | Continue reading
We are the blind, each calling out that which we are so sure we see. No longer aware that the sight we now marvel at is little more than one conceived and praised in our internal darkness... And what becomes of a world under such stewards like me? | Continue reading
“The Work of Mourning.” Roger Scruton probes the necessity and value of mourning with his characteristic range and insight: “Until the work of mourning has been accomplished, Freud argued, new life, new loves, new engagement with the world are all difficult if not impossible.” Re … | Continue reading
“Choose you this day whom you will serve,” the Old Testament leader, Joshua, charged his fellow Jews. And that choice, while crucial, while fundamental, must also be borne out during a lifetime of choices. | Continue reading
Turmoil is present throughout Dick’s world, and this is clearly reflected in each of the three characters discussed here. Tagomi, Wegner, and Childan’s lives are greatly influenced by events precipitated by others, and each responds in a different manner. | Continue reading
Raised in Eastern Oklahoma with roots older than living memory in the Natural State, we look forward to supporting new authors while connecting readers with the long thread of our region’s creative culture. Our mission is to celebrate the literary culture of the American Mid-Sout … | Continue reading
Have you registered for our fall conference taking place in two weeks at Grove City College? Registration closes on the 17th, so don’t delay! We haven’t held a conference since 2019, and it will be great to see many of you in person for a day of lively discussion. “Property, Prop … | Continue reading
His books are not a diminishment of historic and intellectual Christianity. They are a translation of Aquinas, Barth, Calvin, and the rest into the language we all speak innately but are all too often deaf to: the language of our quotidian lives, in which the undifferentiated mas … | Continue reading
Venus’s love for her sister, and Serena’s recognition of it, has also shown us the transcendent power of family, the possibility of forgetting the accolades and the worldly recognition and the desire for advantage and finding instead deeper connections and possibilities of love. | Continue reading
Do I know by pruning the tree, picking the apples, and eating them? Perhaps, Pickstock proposes, truth is what we find when we act in the world. Our true condition is that we are beings who pick apples and prune trees. | Continue reading
We can increase the aesthetic appeal of our neighborhood by smashing the suburban quasi-monocultures of landscaping plants purchased from big box stores and restoring the rightful biodiversity of our ecosystems...Behind the natural beauty there thrums a glory ancient and ever-new … | Continue reading
“Can Love Take Sides?” The new issue of Plough is full of worthwhile essays, but Porchers will want to start with this essay by Wendell Berry. It’s an excerpt from his forthcoming book, The Need to be Whole: “love comes into our civilization – the Gospels being the source best kn … | Continue reading
All education programs enculturate students. There is no neutrality here. The question is not whether education will form our students, but how they will be formed. Proverbs (22:6) says, “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” A … | Continue reading
Baxter articulates two central features of the Medieval Model: the ordered and iconic nature of reality. Reality is not a chaos waiting for us to impose structure on it or make it what we want; it is rather a cosmos with a nature independent of our wishes, demanding us to conform … | Continue reading
Perhaps it’s the nudge you need to reconsider your little actions and the grand narrative which guides and orients them. And, perhaps, you’ll go out to confront the real in all its strange mystery and strain to hear the music and the summons that invite you to re-embed yourself i … | Continue reading
“The Good Death in Psalm 73.” Timothy Kleiser draws out the wisdom regarding mortality and human finitude in Margaret Edson’s moving play Wit with the help of Psalm 73. “Can We Resurrect Expertise?” In this excerpt from her forthcoming book, Bonnie Kristian wrestles with the need … | Continue reading
Are those who question transhumanist progress or Metaverse predictions just knee-jerk Luddites whose visceral reactions are worthy of only a patronizing pat on the head for not seeing their own privilege? As might be expected of a Porcher, I don’t think so. Instead, those who are … | Continue reading
I am not faulting Wirzba for failing to include these examples of more conservative Christians who practice agrarianism. But I would ask whether his theology of agrarianism, written in an academic context, can speak to and challenge the church at large. | Continue reading