Obama is suffering because whether or not it is true, he seems not to understand what is going on around the country. Whether or not it is true, he seems uninterested in making his proposals understood. As a result, he seems distant – the k...
“Come in and look,” Quintín urged me, as he disappeared with a shuffle through the low doorway in his adobe house. I got up from the wooden bench on which I had been sitting on his small patio, and followed him inside. It was quite dark c...
Claremont, CA. A student has confronted me about Front Porch Republic. So now I’m writing the post that I’ve known I would have to write someday. “It just doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that you would do,”...
April was “Media Awareness Month” at our sons’ school. I took a couple weeks off from the Porch, and I also published a first draft of this piece in the school’s weekly newsletter. When my wife and I met as graduate ...
Claremont, CA – The first thing you see, when you enter the Memphis Rock N Soul Museum, is a front porch. This front porch is a dilapidated thing, decorated with a few old barrels. Nearby lie the accoutrements of tenant farming: mule ...
JEFFERSON COUNTY, KANSAS. Everyone here seems to pretty much agree that we are in a pickle. The symptoms are there for anyone to see. The root causes are perhaps more difficult to ferret out, and may be multiple and varied. One of these...
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS. Via Derbyshire, this Terry Teachout column makes an important observation that relates back to Derbyshire’s criticism of the influence of talk radio and my post on community: The information age offers something for...
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS. E.D. Kain had a fine quote from Wendell Berry that provides a good definition of community to start any discussion of place and limits: A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared...
