Front Porch Republic

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

The right kind of literature has the power to make the immediate visible to us once again.

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 . . .

One of the most curious things about raising two boys seventeen years apart is the divide I feel in their digital generations.

Scott was a scholar of reciprocity, collaboration, and a kind of stubborn agrarianism that is the opposite of romantic and a requisite of real, existing democracy. Let him rest in peace.

A weary, hungry child is walking through the forest, the emerald-green hues of the dense foliage gleaming shyly in the rays of a young summer day. From far above, the sun’s brightness struggles to reach past the lush greenery of…

Encouraged, not only by the burgeoning online-use of Oldenburg’s term "third place," but by a young person’s desire to engage with it, I decided to reach out to Madison.

Building community doesn’t map well into the high value we place on choice at the individual level.

Some good things can only exist at the person-to-person level. To institutionalize them drains them of their moral power.

Rather than focusing on an abundance of produced goods, focus on an abundance of productive land; rather than building an orientation around increasing supply, build an orientation around the collective use of that which has already been supplied—which for cities…

We knew last year’s streak was something special, and now we know it may have been the start of something.

How school uniforms foster a common life in an age of fragmentation.