What I’ve just attempted to describe are the joys of the edge. Freedom, I believe, has a limited half-life when it’s in the heart of civilization. Anarcho-pastoralism means that there’s the most freedom near the edges, but freedom-lovers are ever in a struggle to move outward.

What’s stopping you from blessing your yard, neighbors, and neighborhood, your watershed, the land you drive over everyday? Bless the world, literally, and with your being. Offer it up to the one who has created it and cares for us all.

We use the experience of the JPII farm not only to learn and improve over time but to inform our audience of the realities and pitfalls of attempting this way of life. We have learned the hard way that small steps and incremental improvements have to be treated like great victories and that to rely on Christian hope is the essence of wisdom.

Front Royal, VA. How do you catch a cheater? This is the question that is plaguing the minds of college and high school faculty...

After excluding less plausible interpretations like Roosevelt’s, I think the Old Testamentish version of the Founding is the most defensible: the Founders left us some good principles which later were often disregarded, but which brave men and women in later eras fought for, often with success.

These benefits and this healing can only begin to happen when beauty is allowed once again on the farm. One cannot truly have a good farm without it.

Even Rosa the respectable sociologist entertains the possibility that if we relearned how to listen, the mountains might speak. Perhaps they too have their spirits, mute but waiting.

Let’s just say you’d better have great discipline and a very rich interior life if you expect to be happy amid great affluence. If this is true of individuals, that money doesn’t buy happiness, why can’t it be true of a whole society?

I’ve been talking to elderly friends here in the Irish countryside about what they used to do when the sun shone. The answer, of course, was that they made hay.

One learning outcome I had in mind for this academic year was to teach all students to close the bathroom door when using the facilities. Alas, we seem to have failed at this. But our Greek curriculum has gone swimmingly.