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Front Porch Republic

The Last Lesson of Charlie Kirk

Kirk started as a kind of ultra-MAGA influencer. Over time, however, he was becoming a serious man—one with a popular following, especially among the young.
September 15, 2025

The Word and the Machine: On Paul Kingsnorth

I wanted living color, an axe to break the frozen sea.
September 12, 2025

When the Internet Was a Place

Not too long ago, the internet was a place you visited. The family desktop sat in its designated closet or back office. In schools, there were rooms filled with computers…
September 10, 2025

“Two Liberals Walk Out of a Pandemic…”

I have been hoping for a reckoning about covid for years now, and this book is a major step in that direction.
September 9, 2025

News, Notes, & Podcasts

Jeffrey Bilbro
Newsletter Editor:
Jeffrey Bilbro
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Burning Warm and Bright: Songs About Fire

We’re talking about fire in all its forms this week on A Symposium of Popular Songs, and I managed to get all the way through the episode without referencing Beavis…
September 15, 2025
A Farmer Reading His Paper. Photographed by George W. Ackerman, Coryell County, Texas, September 1931.

Marce Catlett, Farm Policy, and AI Friends

Antonio Spadaro responds to plans to build a bridge across the Strait of Messina.
September 13, 2025

Can We Dance on the Tables Again?: Songs About Parties

It’s party time at A Symposium of Popular Songs, though we’re going to oscillate wildly between the kind of party you go home from in an ambulance and the kind…
September 8, 2025
A Farmer Reading His Paper. Photographed by George W. Ackerman, Coryell County, Texas, September 1931.

Fairs, Atherosclerosis, and Toothaches

Tara Couture writes about the mysterious relation between simple joys and hard work.
September 6, 2025
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More Articles

The Wars of Alex Garland

With "Civil War" and now "Warfare," the writer-director has made two consecutive movies about the “what” of armed conflicts rather than the “why”
September 8, 2025

Writing Like a Man

I found that Wink has not simply played haphazardly with an abundance of tropes but collected them together, arranged them in a pile—so he could then throw them aside and press deeper into the thicket of questions of manliness.
September 5, 2025

Decoding Toddlerese and Theology

It is such a joy to finally figure out something my son has been trying to say. Just so, it is a joy when a particular passage of Scripture finally breaks open.

When Humans Prefer a Machine: Warnings from a 1960s Chatbot Creator

Chatbots aren’t new. Joseph Weizenbaum created one in 1966. And what happened next led him to become a vocal critic of his own creation. What did he see that we need to see now?
September 3, 2025

The Vestigial Front Porch

Still it waves. Still it sings.
September 2, 2025

Only Connect

In 2024, I held my first Margarita Mile. I’ve done more since then. It’s simple. I invite a group of friends. Using sidewalk chalk, I mark a start line and some arrows on the sidewalk in front of my house.
September 1, 2025

The Way from St. Martin’s: On the Virtue of Paths

When the wood deepened, the clean wearing of the earth itself wore away into indistinguishable concord.

Love and Loathing in Lawn Tractor Land

In the ultimate form of mimesis, the well-seasoned mower who comes to know every inch of the property he maintains, also comes, in the end, to know the contours and corners of his own mind, given sufficient time.

My Encounters with Dr. Dobson: His Unremarked Upon Strengths and Fatal Weakness

Dobson knew his influence was on one side of the political divide and kept his focus and advocacy there. Political loyalties came first.
August 27, 2025

A Flight of Leisure and Distraction

How we use our free time might be the difference between a professionally successful but ultimately mediocre life and the life of a saint.
August 26, 2025

Reading Rilke with the Catherine Project

We've made it all the way from the overstepping of Orpheus, the land, and poetry into something our own lives can do (spill over as though water from a fountain--or, perhaps, light from inside the petals of a flower)--

American Spirit

On Politics, Spirituality, Walt Whitman, and the Healing of the United States
August 22, 2025

From the Archive

Spiritual Secession: A Conversation with Paul Kingsnorth

" None of your readers need me to tell them that the useful work is practical, particular, small and careful: to get away from screens as much as we can, get…
November 12, 2021

The Road Taken

Sometimes an important change becomes evident only in retrospect - not while it’s happening across quiet broken days alone in a house while autumn succumbs to shadow and cold.
November 5, 2021

Where Is Our Freedom to Exercise Sympathy?

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.
October 30, 2020

The Art of Living an Examined Life

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…
October 16, 2020

Cultivating the Skills that Freedom Requires in Matthew Crawford’s Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road

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…
October 7, 2020