The liberal arts aren’t for some utilitarian purpose; they’re to free young people to love rightly. | Continue reading
There needs to be a concentration of the real: skills training, middle class and upwardly mobile working class jobs. Replace symbolism with real improvements. | Continue reading
“On Integration.” Jesse McCarthy and Jon Baskin critique the kind of anti-racism made popular by Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility. Instead, they follow Harold Cruse in advocating for actions that would strengthen the social fabric of smaller communities: While intellectuals may i … | Continue reading
The same things that happened to the family farms, and to farmers like my father, are now happening to the colleges, and to faculty like me. | Continue reading
Gracy Olmstead is organizing a reading group for people who want to read and discuss Marilynne Robinson’s new novel Jack. Tiffany Kriner, who wrote a review of the novel for FPR, Charlie Clark, and Sarah Clarkson will join Gracy to talk about the novel. You can find more informat … | Continue reading
Dreher, as prophet, gives a dire warning that, if true, means that many Christian dissidents will suffer loss of job, loss of reputation, and loss of social status. Will we listen? Will we heed the warning and prepare to endure such suffering well? Will we commit ourselves to str … | Continue reading
In television and movies, heroes often push away the ones they love, because relationships can be obstacles or endangering for one or both parties. But what if love is not a liability, but a force greater than gravity? | Continue reading
The rancor of this political season provides a diversion from the hard and serious work that must be done to reverse the great unraveling that America is experiencing. | Continue reading
“The Irony of the Google Antitrust Suit.” Franklin Foer writes that the government’s suit against Google is long overdue and marks the end of Big Tech’s unchallenged accumulation of power. “Patrick Deneen: A Primer.” Henry George summarizes Deneen’s books and the trajectory of hi … | Continue reading
The act of hunting makes hunters guilty—and so it makes them moral. | Continue reading
A freezer and pantry full of meat, a season without having to buy any beef: for this a deer died. | Continue reading
Supporting a third party is one way of advocating for long-term, structural change. | Continue reading
In a nutshell, Degrowthers make a bold case that a future worth living is not about doing more with less, it’s about doing “less with less,” and it’s not at all hard to sense an idea whose time has come. | Continue reading
“What if Local and Diverse Is Better Than Networked and Global?” Damien Cave profiles Helena Norberg-Hodge and her work with Local Futures for the New York Times. “Our Fractured Communities: Piecing together American Society in the Wake of Covid–19.” Emma Green writes about how h … | Continue reading
If human beings flourish from their inner core rather than in the realm of impact and results, then the inner work of learning is fundamental to human happiness, as far from pointless wheel spinning as are the forms of tenderness we owe our children or grandchildren. | Continue reading
Continuing to base economic and government models around a reductive view of homo economicus will trap us within the inhumane “reality we have made.” | Continue reading
The world is God’s farm, his flourishing garden. We find ourselves as his workers in his fields, called to cultivate the land and the souls, minds, and bodies of ourselves and our neighbors—in this way all can be “fruitful and multiply.” | Continue reading
“Our Humanity Depends on the Things We Don’t Sell.” In a profound essay, Mary Harrington links such apparently disparate topics as strip-mining, prostitution, and enclosure to defend the ordinary work of caring for our fraying relationships: To see the world in terms of standing- … | Continue reading
Mill Valley, CA. As our country struggles to come to terms with its racist past—and present—a controversy surrounding a 1934 mural at the University of Kentucky mirrors the racial tensions of today. Ann Rice O’Hanlon’s New Deal-era fresco, a jewel-like composition alive with hist … | Continue reading
Human driving requires unending mutual predictions and constant accommodations for each other. It is in such experiences that we end up with something meaningful for life in the physical world and life in community. | Continue reading
“The Forgotten Front Porch Is Making a Comeback.” Spike Carlsen notes a promising development: “Thanks to the pandemic, the front porch is enjoying a new golden age. Like their near cousins, stoops, steps, even fire escapes, porches offer a semipublic setting where we can meet fr … | Continue reading
James Howard Kunstler follows the first commandment handed down to all of us at birth: “Thou shalt not be dull.” | Continue reading
With California burning, Antarctica melting, and a death-toll spiraling, we’re left with a looming question: Can a people walking in darkness yet be made to see? | Continue reading
Much of the novel reads like this sentence—the internal struggle of someone who wants—not forgiveness, nor salvation, really, but rather to not need to be forgiven, to not require salvation nor redemption, to maintain what dignity is possible, given irremediable forsakenness. | Continue reading
“The Market Made Me Do It: The Scandal of the Evangelical College.” Eric Miller draws on the example of the institution I’ve taught at—Spring Arbor University—to highlight the failure of Evangelical colleges to stand against the apparent dictates of “the market”: “The market mind … | Continue reading
I encourage readers to give Dreher a fair hearing and consider the evidence he offers in support of his arguments. The phenomena he cites are real and disquieting, and he should not be dismissed out-of-hand simply because he forecasts a world far darker than many of us believe co … | Continue reading
We need to reject the myth of Progress that discourages us from ever being settled and content. | Continue reading
At their best, local papers “help provide a common reality and touchstone, a sense of community and of place.” | Continue reading
“Notre Dame Press Virtual Book Exhibit.” Steve Wrinn and the University of Notre Dame Press are regulars at FPR conferences. Since we had to cancel this year’s main conference, the press put to | Continue reading
What would be helpful is a book that acknowledge both sets of trends and moves beyond name-calling to begin the hard work of engaging in the tensions and trade-offs between them. Beneficial too would be a clear-eyed encounter with the fact that measures of human happiness and ful … | Continue reading
There are second chances for some of us, but even second chances bring new losses. For me, it is the grace and hope of these stories and others like them in the work of Berry and Berger that has earned them pride of place on my shelves and in my life. | Continue reading
The sins of the movers may be visited upon their children, but it’s possible for the children to suffer well the consequences of their parents’ and grandparents’ decisions. | Continue reading
We should “follow the science.” But we need to have the intellectual humility—and moral fortitude—to acknowledge the provisional, incremental nature of scientific understanding. | Continue reading
“Jason Peters Writes to Entertain his Friends and Exasperate his Enemies.” Bill Kauffman is the perfect reviewer for Jason’s new book. Read the review, then read the book: “Peters, the belove | Continue reading
One need not be a Nietzschean to recognize that something is rotten in the states of America and in the West more broadly. It was Nietzsche’s view that the civilization could not be saved, even if pieces of it could be salvaged. | Continue reading
Training for a triathlon roots you to the environment, economics, and people of a particular place. | Continue reading
Alan Jacobs is right that if we would receive a blessing from the dead, we will have to wrestle with them. | Continue reading
The lens through which Eric O. Jacobsen views the three pieces of glass that serve as the basis of his book—the windshield, TVs, and phones—is in need of a good polishing. | Continue reading
Examining conservative dissenters such as Viereck can enrich our portrait of the conservative movement and shed light on its most recent Trumpian variant. | Continue reading
Over and against manifest follies that characterize American life in the first quarter of the twenty-first century there stands the wide-ranging work, keen and voluminous, of the historian and social critic Christopher Lasch. | Continue reading
Students may return to universities that post a philosophy statement but have no philosophy department. Yet as we look at our country, divided over history and by economics, home to scientific innovation and scientific ignorance, education is both more needed and more endangered … | Continue reading