New from FPR Books
Clearing Ground
The romantic impulse toward wholeness, or the longing for when things were better—take a few bad turns in that mood, and you find yourself chanting hymns to blood-and-soil. People can start out defending Berry’s proper prejudices and end up celebrating prejudice itself.
Thinking about the Post-Pandemic (and, Maybe, the Post-Suburban) Neighborhood
Chuck Marohn's work, whatever disagreements one may have with it, gives us some good counsel on where to start changing suburban-addicted minds and fiscal incentives.
A Resurrection Story
On May 20, 1945, days after the end of World War II, my mother’s Aunt Anne was shot in both legs by a Communist gunman in Yugoslavia and left for dead.
Thomas Aquinas: Front Porch Cosmologist
Thomas’ cosmological theology was thoroughly enchanted and magical, and it is his enchanted and magical view of the cosmos that we so critically need today.
Weird Christianity’s Aesthetic and the Tyranny of Values
So long as old Christianity is treated as an aesthetic or an alternative lifestyle or a set of values contending against alienated modernity, it will never be anything more than a therapeutic commodity. But if we allow it to reckon with us, we may find ourselves snared in the grasp of “something real.”
What He Saw in America: G.K. Chesterton’s View of the United States
Front Royal, VA. “Who is the American, this new man?” Crevecoeur famously asked. Since the discovery and settlement of the continent across...
Imagining Divine Participation
No matter how fallen or distant from God the world around us may seem, the distance is never absolute.
Failing in a Pandemic
The whole mode of online education screams that now I must be the source of attraction. But I’m not entertaining. In fact, I’m pretty unentertaining. If you ask most of my students, they may even say I’m boring.
Feeling Claustrophobic in the Big Wide Open
I worry about our ever-expanding cult of safety and nod in agreement with so much of sociologist Frank Furedi’s description of the “Paradox of our Safety Addiction.” He argues that “the zero risk mentality breeds a culture of anxiety and a hunger for authority.”
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From the Archives
Patriotic Subversives: Distributism as a Political Problem
We are presented with a complex and even contradictory task. In the name of subsidiarity, we must work to undermine liberal capitalism and create alternative spaces for production and exchange, art and leisure, community and independence. But in the name of solidarity, we must work to ameliorate the system and socialize such common goods as health care, unemployment insurance, education, etc.
The Leased of These
Earlier this year, headlines indicated that an unprecedented number of Americans are more than 90 days behind on their car loan payments. Nearly...
Puritans and The Pope: The Conflicted Christian History of American Ecological Ethics
The responses from American Christians to Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’ have fallen into two predictable categories: Economic conservatives push back against Francis’ critique...