Irving, TX. …In answer to the question, “What do the poor want?” Simone Weil replied “They want you to look at them.” I take Simone’s answer to mean we must look at this poor person or that poor village, and
July 2009
Kearneysville, WV. …One of the stars in the Republican galaxy (notable today mostly for its lack of stars) pulled a surprise move last week that has plenty of people scratching their heads. Her resignation with 18 months still
Alexandria, VA …Since Caleb has posted his lecture from a legendary conference a few years ago that a number of future Front Porchers attended in Charlottesville, VA, I’ve brushed off the dusty pages of a lecture that I delivered there,
“We live on the far side of a broken connection” Wendell Berry has written. One of the greatest obstacles resulting from our current circumstance is our inability to make the necessary connections between various “problems,” seeing them as discrete and…
The following is not intended to upset our happily balanced ecumenical apple cart …
As a Scots-Presbyterian of old psalm singing austerity, I tend to enjoy observing the furor set off by any new encyclical (the thoughts of typically wise and…
Pope Benedict XVI’s eagerly awaited third encyclical was released today: ”Charity in Truth.” I’ll be reading it over the next few days, but here’s a link to a quick synopsis. The concluding paragraph of the summary points in an exciting…
The folks at First Things have been kind enough to ignore my lame punning and respond to some of my criticisms, which has resulted in some helpful progress on examining certain features of our identity starved, sanitized, homogenized, and sterile…
The conversation between Rusty Reno, Jody Bottum, and Caleb Stegall prompted me to revisit a recent post from “What I Saw In America” in response to a reader reply who had charged localism with insufficient attentiveness to justice. Since, in…
Joe Carter, managing editor of First Things, has been gracious enough to put up with my jokes at his boss’s expense, so forthwith, I offer the following as the more serious (but still less than serious serious) response (which Joe…
Wichita, KS…
In honor of Canada Day, in the fine federation (though these days, in the eyes of a majority of Canadians, less a federation than an Americanized nation, or at best a “multinational” country) to our north, here’s an
ROCK ISLAND, IL …
“Each generation exercises power over its successors,” said C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man, “and each, in so far as it modifies the environment bequeathed to it and rebels against tradition, resists and limits the power
