Front Porch Republic
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…
“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.
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”
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…
News, Notes, & Podcasts
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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…
Fairs, Atherosclerosis, and Toothaches
Tara Couture writes about the mysterious relation between simple joys and hard work.
No Kings and No Landlords: Songs About Freedom
We’re talking about freedom this week on A Symposium of Popular Songs, and I demonstrate my freedom by going all the way from “guy with guitar” folk to overcranked contemporary…
Family Doctors, Designer Babies, and Bug Farms
The details of the dissolution of the Honors College at Tulsa continue to be quite discouraging.
More Articles
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?
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.
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.
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.
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)--
Knausgaard’s Literary Response to the Tyranny of Technique
The right kind of literature has the power to make the immediate visible to us once again.
America’s Most Influential Christian Voice Is a Joke
Insofar as "The Bee" now occupies something near the center of American Christian discourse, what’s crowded out, I think, is an articulated (not just implied-by-negation) path toward holiness . . .
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…
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.
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.
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…
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…