Like the “good men” that Lincoln noted will give up on free government in the wake of mob rule, Hamilton warns that those who fear their rights are threatened will be prone to accept tyranny. | Continue reading
What Sanders offers might be called the imagination of hope—a means of acting to stem disaster. | Continue reading
Ken Myers of Mars Hill Audio on place, the evangelical mind, and classical music. | Continue reading
Civic muscle describes a citizen-centered democracy, where citizens themselves, viewed as agents of change and not mere voters, assume much of the responsibility for the quality of our public life. | Continue reading
Houellebecq describe those aspects of our world that swarm us now, beleaguer us, pen us in. They are the products of a world suffused with technology, and of the attendant detachability of human relations. They condition the warp and woof of our social fabric. | Continue reading
While there are so-called “flyover” states, there is also a “flyover” state of mind. A road trip can help us leave that behind. | Continue reading
Evans, GA. Christian authors have been proclaiming the death of Christendom since at least 1989, when Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon made such an announcement in Resident Aliens. Thirty yea | Continue reading
Drawing from both Baldwin and Berry allows us to see that the racist and imperial policies of the past continue to do immense social, economic, cultural, and ecological damage around the globe. Racial injustice is among other things an ecological issue. | Continue reading
Before I begin to complain about the shortened season, the lack of travel to the usual hubs, the lack of live fanhood, it might be well to remember those who loved baseball with extraordinary intensity, yet for whom no season of major league baseball ever opened up its bounty. | Continue reading
What strikes me overall about The Slumbering Host is the open-heartedness, hopefulness, and steadfastness of the editors’ approach and selection. This is a collection that is true to itself and knows its own mind and plays its own music. | Continue reading
When cut into chunks, tossed with salt and some brown sugar, and then roasted all afternoon in a very low oven, perhaps with a bit of sauce for the last bit, pork belly becomes a gateway to the real. | Continue reading
Building or re-building things taps into deep and elemental desires embedded in the human experience that in some shadowed sense mimic the Creator. | Continue reading
For readers in North America, familiar as most of us are with the history our own agrarian tradition as well as our own “seismic shift in agriculture” from the work of Berry, there emerges much from the work of Hawking as well as Bell of which we should be reminded. | Continue reading
I doubt okra tops many people’s list of garden must-haves, which is a shame since it is such a determined grower. Gardens are only guaranteed to produce one thing year in and year out: humility. | Continue reading
How might we recognize and adopt a vision for the future of agriculture inspired by the beauty and goodness of the ox-cart man? | Continue reading
Jane Kenyon was foremost a poet of place. Not of the State of New Hampshire, though she was its Poet Laureate, but of the much smaller and less abstract corner of it in and around Eagle Pond. | Continue reading
To all FPR readers living in Idaho: join Front Porch regulars John Murdock, Amanda Patchin, and Matt Stewart for light food and drinks and a friendly discussion of the last two issues of Local Cultu | Continue reading
Chris Arnade, Jared Woodard, and Sarah Hamersma on Wall Street versus Main Street. | Continue reading
As Sarah Orne Jewett knew, "everyday tasks” and the celebrations they engender are the condition upon which many other arts rest, including poetry. | Continue reading
The global middle class of Kotkin’s subtitle must unite with the working class for a new Magna Carta for the 21st Century, one that will, in Lincoln’s words, make us “independent of crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings.” | Continue reading
As I try to do each year, I’ll be taking a break from the internet for a couple of weeks. FPR will continue publishing under the able guidance of Matt Stewart while I’m offline, but these weekly | Continue reading
The contributors to Free America belonged to one another and to the vision of a humane society, one founded on distributed property. Just because this vision has been drowned out by the purveyors of the bigger-is-better and the latest-is-greatest doesn’t mean a decentralist visio … | Continue reading
Hillsdale, Michigan. Which is more surprising? To read that a Great Booksy curriculum—which you, a fairly committed Protestant who tries to keep faith under wraps, happen to teach in—turns Protes | Continue reading
If I can value the inner lives and the outer well-being of animals and plants and rocks and stars, because I can see the inherent beauty and goodness that something simply is, then I can be trusted with believing myself of higher status than animals. I do not have to make myself … | Continue reading
Recently FPR's Bar Jester sat down with the Culinary Plagiarist to discuss a new book by Jason Peters, The Culinary Plagiarist: (Mis)Adventures of a Lusty, Thieving, God-Fearing Gourmand. | Continue reading
“Verse Lines When the Streets Are on Fire.” James Matthew Wilson offers a stirring defense of poetry in a season of chaos: “Disease, disorder, and riot are reminders to us of the mortality and | Continue reading
Berry wrote in one of his letters to Merton that “you are one of the few whose awareness of what I’m doing here would be of value to me.” He is acknowledging that he and Merton lead lives of similar mission, lives shaped by work and silence. | Continue reading
Women like Tanya bring artistry and honor to everything they touch: the homes they inhabit, the land they steward, the children they raise. These photographs are testimony to the clear, sharp eye of a woman who is herself an artist—and who brings that artistic gaze to every endea … | Continue reading
Roosevelt delivered an oration he entitled “Citizenship in a Republic,” but which the world would soon come to call “The Man in the Arena.” Every fresh reading of the speech brings something new into bold relief. | Continue reading
Caleb Stegall was one of the early guiding lights of Front Porch Republic, and his influence on the project, however distant, still endures. I've enjoyed, and learned much from, my opportunities to a | Continue reading
Of course, Amash may well not win, but that really is not the point. The prodigal son had limited hopes when he said goodbye to the pigs, but he had come to himself and he was heading home regardless. | Continue reading
To all FPR readers living in Idaho: mark your calendars to join Front Porch regulars John Murdock, Amanda Patchin, and Matt Stewart for light food and drinks and a friendly discussion of the last two | Continue reading
No man is an island, and everything we do, even in the privacy of our homes, has an effect on our society as a whole, but the past three months have shown us that the same lie that animates the Chinese government has spread and infected the West as well: the State knows best. | Continue reading
“The Great Stagnation—or Decline and Fall?” Patrick Deneen reviews Ross Douthat’s latest book with the help of Henry Adams and suggests our society is not merely decadent and stagnant—it is | Continue reading
Léon Bloy delivers satires that aim to liberate souls from cages they did not even know they occupied | Continue reading
Patrick Deneen, Jeremy Beer, and Jeff Polet respond to J.D. Vance's recent American Mind essay "End the Globalization Gravy Train" and consider the prospects for postliberal conservatism. | Continue reading
Maybe O’Connor’s narrative can teach us that people—and the places they call home, the places that form them—need not be defined by their flaws. | Continue reading
A good rule of thumb is that literature about current events is terrible. I have, however, come across two recent exceptions to this general rule. The first is James Matthew Wilson’s “Quarantine | Continue reading