BURNED-OVER DISTRICT, NY—Our daughter will be spending the snowy months rehearsing her role as Marian the Librarian in her high school’s production of Meredith Willson’s “The Music Man,” that tuneful Iowa-placed warhorse—no, parade horse—of community theater. (The flaw in community…
Porch readers will be interested in the new online symposium on distributism that is now on ANAMNESIS, A Journal for the Study of Tradition, Place, and ‘Things Divine.’ This includes essays by John Medaille, Thomas Storck, and Thomas Woods.…
In this essay, former Wall Street Investment Banker, Michael Thomas, expresses his frustration and disillusion with our current economic system. His credibility comes from three decades on Wall Street. In 1961 he landed a job with Lehman Brothers
to begin…
Santa? Are you still there?
Has it really been two years since the Bar Jester said, Forget about Christ; put the mass back in Christmas?
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res]
As Christmas and the end of 2011 approaches, I find myself thinking gratefully about what Leroy Hershberger has enabled my students and me to learn this year, and what that learning has meant to me.…
This Christmas–like last Christmas, and the one before that , and the one before that….–hundreds of thousands of our countrymen and women are far from their homes and families, fighting the endless wars and otherwise serving the anti-American Empire. (Obscenely,…
He was local when local wasn’t cool.
I’ve just finished Andrea Wulf’s beguiling book entitled “ Founding Gardeners, The Revolutionary Generation, Nature and the Shaping of the American Nation”. Published this year by Knopf, it delves into already well-known territory but does so in a manner highly…
This is what I would call patriotism: the love of a home country that’s usually much smaller than a nation.
In this season of the “holidays,” it was announced several days ago that Fairfax County schools would be permitted to install video surveillance cameras in High Schools. Fairfax County is frequently lauded as being one of the best public school…
Devon, PA.… We face only two feasible policies in America’s engagement with the world. We can seek to be a bomb-throwing hegemon until the money, and the credit, and the bodies, run out, and can identify American national interest with our sitting
We are at a turning point, according to McKibben. The era of the big and few is being replaced by a new era of the small and the many. Take but one example:
Last year the USDA reported that the…
“The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what he saw in a plain way …”
John Ruskin…
I do not know William “Beaver” Watkins, supervisor of a bucolic township where
Give me smartassery. Give me a yawning match.
I am angry with my friend; he has betrayed a secret of mine perhaps, or maybe instead he has formed an intimacy with persons he knows to be my enemies. I start to view his behavior as treacherous, his character…
My friend Paul Buhle, the great historian of the American left, has edited, with his wife Mari Jo Buhle, It Started in Wisconsin: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Labor Protest (http://www.versobooks.com/books/1076-it-started-in-wisconsin), just out from Verso. The best…
CALL FOR PAPERS: CICERONIAN SOCIETY
2012 ANNUAL MEETING AT UVA…
The Ciceronian Society will be holding its annual meeting at the University of Virginia, March 29-31, 2012. This will be an academic conference in which panelists can present on a
Well no, not exactly. But as anyone who has ACTUALLY READ ALINSKY KNOWS–in contrast to those who simply parrot his name as part of rather stretched smear of anyone they which to paint as dangerous un-American radical–Alinsky was primarily about…
This is the last audience to which I should announce such a thing but after fumbling an editing gig or two because I lacked a one-stop site containing my bio, clips, etc., I have agreed to—aw, to hell with the…
The Right may be beyond redemption, but it isn’t above parody.
More good news from the family-values, good-money-management crowd.
Once again St. Michael Orthodox Church here in Louisville will be hosting the annual Climacus Conference, with this year’s event focusing on the artistic, intellectual, and spiritual legacy of Byzantium. Scheduled speakers include University of Kentucky Philosophy Chair David Bradshaw,…
Brian (no relation to Lefty) Frizzell, Brooklyn’s archivist of Americana, sends a link to Matt Morris’s Pickin’ & Trimmin’ http://vimeo.com/31066145, a lovely documentary short film about a barbershop in Drexel, North Carolina, in which banjos and mandolins and clippers and shears make…
This piece from the Sunday Times serves as a reminder that the claims made for technology, progress, and modern conveniences are too overblown, and that human beings have fundamental longings and needs that can’t be satisfied by texting and TV.…
This is the kind of states’ rights I like:
Montana’s Supreme Court has issued a stunning rebuke to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010 that infamously decreed corporations had constitutional rights to directly spend money on ‘independent…
Here is an article describing how Kansas is leading the way toward a less centralized future.
The “revolution in a cornfield” that is happening today in Gov. Sam Brownback’s Kansas is potentially as important as what happened here in 1776.…
Porch readers will be interested in the new online symposium on distributism that is now on ANAMNESIS, A Journal for the Study of Tradition, Place, and ‘Things Divine.’ This includes essays by John Medaille, Thomas Storck, and Thomas Woods.…
In this essay, former Wall Street Investment Banker, Michael Thomas, expresses his frustration and disillusion with our current economic system. His credibility comes from three decades on Wall Street. In 1961 he landed a job with Lehman Brothers
to begin…
Has it really been two years since the Bar Jester said, Forget about Christ; put the mass back in Christmas?
This Christmas–like last Christmas, and the one before that , and the one before that….–hundreds of thousands of our countrymen and women are far from their homes and families, fighting the endless wars and otherwise serving the anti-American Empire. (Obscenely,…
This is what I would call patriotism: the love of a home country that’s usually much smaller than a nation.
In this season of the “holidays,” it was announced several days ago that Fairfax County schools would be permitted to install video surveillance cameras in High Schools. Fairfax County is frequently lauded as being one of the best public school…
We are at a turning point, according to McKibben. The era of the big and few is being replaced by a new era of the small and the many. Take but one example:
Last year the USDA reported that the…
At long last The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry is available. This volume, published by ISI Books and co-edited by Nathan Schlueter and yours truly, includes sixteen original essays on various facets of Berry’s work as well as an open…
Do we get an economy that serves the people? Or do we get the right people to serve the economy?
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Bar Jester’s Writing Seminar; or, How To Write Like the Average Undergraduate Male by 
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The Lost Children by 
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Ten Key Questions Framing the Health Care Debate by Taking Secession Seriously–At Last by 
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Why I am a Conservative by 
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Miss Coach by Abraham Lincoln and the Destruction of Place by The Red Tories and the Civic State by 
Mere Krustianity by 
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Why I am Leaving Georgetown by Saul Alinsky, Localist by 
Whoring in Shittim by 
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Democracy and Coercion by 
Tradition and Critique: On Wanting to Know by Ciceronian Society Meeting at UVA: Call for Papers by 
