Writers & Poets

Lessons on Limits from the Cougar Prophet

Fontainebleau chateau October 11, 2012

If a spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down, I took my prescription of limits and localism with a spoon full of pretty sweet sugar indeed.   About 20 years ago I came into possession of  Stephen Vizinczey’s In…

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Life Under Compulsion

Sigrid Undset photograph October 8, 2012

In 1940, when the Nazis attacked their supposed racial kinfolk in Norway and set up a puppet government under the odious Quisling, the novelist Sigrid Undset fled to the countryside at Lillehammer, and then, with her son Hans—her elder son…

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Twice Removed

IMG_6575 September 24, 2012

Damn the lights,
unnatural, bright, coiled,
spewing white 15 watts.
 
Damn the halls,
with their smooth vinyl, soaked in bleach,
the stench of sterile rising like road kill
on a summer street.
 
Damn the cinderblock walls,
painted neutral…

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“There Was Also Much Singing”: A Review of The Hound of Distributism

beer August 27, 2012

In his estimable history of distributism and its major figures, Jobs of Our Own, Australian economist and former MP Race Matthews records an account of the distinctive atmosphere of the Distributist League meetings in the late 1920s:
“The formal business…

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The Writer as Yente

imagesCAVABR2C August 21, 2012

Friends sit shoulder to shoulder.

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A View from the Studebaker Servants’ Quarters

Mello Place August 2, 2012

I’ve breathed its dust in, taken careful note how plastic urns break in the snow; how I can merely mock at stone’s sad history; pronounce its fate, perhaps, but just in quotes.

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Bankruptcy: Or, Morality Left and Right

coleridge_3_ July 17, 2012

Competing moralities converge and dissolve.

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After Altruism (A Book Recommendation–Sort Of)

Robinson July 4, 2012

I honestly feel sorry for the guy, until I remember my sociobiology.

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A Footloose Spring Day

Tiny_Bluets June 18, 2012

On a gorgeous April Wednesday I am filling in as substitute homeschool teacher. We do arithmetic; we do a language lesson about adverbs and Emily Dickinson. Then—did I mention the day is gorgeous? That the air through the window is…

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The Flaw in Jefferson’s Idea of Ward Republics

Thomas_Jefferson_by_Mather_Brown June 14, 2012

Thomas Jefferson’s agrarianism has long been vulnerable to attack by unsympathetic critics. Given that Jefferson ultimately banks on virtue rather than folly, this is of course to be expected; but the agrarian part to his vision is also vulnerable on…

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A Lucubration Neither Lugubrious Nor Lubricious; or, A Nocturnal Upon Saint Edward Abbey

Ed-Abbey-The-Journey-Home June 12, 2012

What machine can match a pair of legs?

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You Have Thought Up the Wrong World

hospital corridor June 11, 2012

In the spring of 1994 my grandmother chose to go off dialysis. Four days later, she was dead. I still remember my parents waking me up in the middle of the night and taking me to the hospital. I don’t…

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The Mishawaka Cruisers

West McKinley May 24, 2012

They make their measured circuit along three blocks of neon fast-food chains, the darkened panes of auto dealerships, the Checks-Cashed, and the boarded Dollar Store.

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On Being a Worthy Heir of the Agrarian Contrarians

666 May 2, 2012

But, as Shakespeare wrote, we sometimes “by indirections find directions out.”

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American Enthusiasts At The Gates: A Review of D.G. Hart’s From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin

cross-flag April 30, 2012

D. G. Hart, From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin: Evangelicals and the Betrayal of American Conservatism (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2011). ISB: 978-0-8028-6628-8. 252 Pages. Cost: $25.00
Darryl Hart’s From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin: Evangelicals…

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President Obama vs. Walker Percy (and Another Jefferson Lecturer)

walker-percy April 25, 2012

Making higher education an “economic imperative” misses the point of higher education entirely.

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