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If a human timescale—privileging our experience and our hopes—is insufficient to understand the forest, then maybe we will be provoked to reconsider both the human and forestal timescale.

Cultivate. Give order. Name. Attend. Reveal. Craft a parable. Homestead. Welcome. In Placemaking and the Arts: Cultivating the Christian Life (IVP Academic, 2018), Jennifer Allen Craft offers these paradigms and…

In his 2017 book The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics, British commentator David Goodhart seeks to understand the recent populist moments that have shaped the…

Review of “The Power of Place: KU Alumni Artists” at the Spencer Museum of Art in Lawrence, KS. The exhibit runs through June 30, 2019. There is a line in…

I remember being held. I remember, though it was the desert, being cold. I remember the feathers of a headdress, coming up like the sun from behind red boulder. My…

Some months ago I stood in a basement bookstore in suburban Maryland and pondered a relic of the 1960s, an artifact of dubious worth to the casual observer which had…

John Gatta is the William B. Kenan Jr. Professor of English at Sewanee: The University of the South. He’s the author of several excellent books, including Making Nature Sacred: Literature, Religion,…

One of my heroes of the faith is dead. Eugene Peterson experienced death, but certainly not its sting, as he uttered his final words, “Let’s go,” on Monday, October 22.…

What you miss out on by not making the climb is too great a loss on such a morning as this.

The first time you read the novels of Thomas Hardy–especially if you read them as a young adult–you’re likely to get a pretty forceful impression. With the story-telling powers of…

When I moved to Poland it was the first time I had left Britain. I have lived in the same town for four years and a month. Tarnowskie Góry is…

I’m honored and excited to be joining the Front Porch Republic in a more official capacity and taking over the editorial duties for this site. When I stumbled across FPR…

“Bawk-bawk be-gehk!” she cries, and I know just where she’s coming from.

Heaven favored me with three successive clement weekends.

Earlier this year, after the Charlie Hebdo shootings, I reflected on the conversations that may or may not ensue from the changing of a facebook profile picture.  As my facebook…

He wrote sixty-five books and had a hand in another hundred and thirty-five.

In the thirty years since writer-professor Eric Zencey first published his essay “The Rootless Professors” in the Chronicle of Higher Education, much has changed, and much hasn’t, regarding academe’s reputedly rootless…

Low flames and smoke and visions of the eschaton.

Or, "Shaken and Stirred: The Cosmopolitan, the City, and the Regime of God" Queens, NY The following essay was presented at FPR's annual conference in Louisville on September 27. What…

Situate the preference where it is, not where it isn’t.

[This post is adapted with permission from “Making Places: The Cosmopolitan Temptation,” an essay in the anthology Why Place Matters: Geography, Identity, and Civic Life in Modern America, edited by…

[This post is adapted with permission from “GPS and the End of the Road,” an essay in the anthology Why Place Matters: Geography, Identity, and Civic Life in Modern America,…

Hidden Springs Lane. What’s the deal with Smart Phones? Go to any public gathering and most of the young people (and some of the not-so-young) are clearly more interested in…

Dramatic paths to glory are viewed with skepticism in our modern democratic age. As Tocqueville suggests, “amongst democratic nations ambition is ardent and continual, but its aim is not habitually…