Spring training is over, and I find myself at loose ends. Since moving to Phoenix a few years back, this has become the saddest time of the year for me. Over the last five weeks I’ve been going to as…
March 2011
Those Front Porchers in the Indianapolis-Fort Wayne area might want to attend the ISI Conference, “Whose Capitalism? Which Free Market?: Exploring the Moral Dimensions of the Market Economy,” Saturday, April 9th, at Taylor University. I’ll be speaking there, and there…
The shovel, the book, and the nuclear power plant have this much in common …
They say that funerals are for the living, which of course they are. The deceased, now lifeless, causes us to reflect upon their life as well as our own which remains for the moment, steadfastly ticking. This relentless winter is…
The always-interesting Tony Esolen has an article over at First Things called “Restoring the Village” which I highly recommend to those concerned about place, liberty and limits. One recalls that in Greek an idiotes was a person who withdrew from…
Conservatives are awfully fond of referring to America as a “city upon a hill;” it would be a wonderful thing if they actually made some attempt to understand what that image is supposed to signify. When it is used by…
The regime changes in Egypt and Tunisia have been hailed as victories for democracy, as proof of the liberalizing power of social networking media, as testimony to the power of nonviolent political action. All of that they may indeed be;…
Enterprising students at the University of Chicago have managed to combine two of the central interests of the contemporary student: casual sex and facebook. They’ve launched a new UChicago Hookups website for those who are too busy to be bothered…
Reason magazine’s Jesse Walker notes an outbreak of nullification, dairy-style, in Maine: http://reason.com/blog/2011/03/22/food-nullification…
The place for dismemberment is called a university.
Many FPR readers will enjoy Thaddeus Kozinski’s fine article, “The Good, the Right, and Theology.” This elucidates a theological-traditionalist account of ethics, and it offers an alternative resolution to contemporary debate (e.g., between Hadley Arkes and Matthew O’Brien) about competing…
You cannot slit your wrists. It says so, right here in your employment contract. And besides, we’ve installed suicide netting on all of our buildings. So if you manage to kill yourself, it is not our fault. So tell your…
Frank Beckwith has an interesting little article over at “The Catholic Thing” on How Political Correctness Makes Us Dumb. Staying in the academy, if you’ve read Mary Vander Goot’s piece on manners, you might find this exchange between an NYU…
Grand Rapids, MI. …Strange things happen in the checkout lane. The elderly man at the head of the line was pausing to look at something in his hand. No, not his cell phone. I suspect it was his shopping list.
I recently received a song from Front Porch Republic reader Michael Johnathon. Michael is a Kentucky based folksinger, songwriter and host of the national syndicated broadcast of the WoodSongs Old-Time Radio Hour. He is also a playwrite and his theatrical…
The problem is a result of the underlying specialization—not of people but of places—for what could be more specialized than designing a town according to discrete zones designated by use?
