Two Cheers for Two Popes

In short, we need to rely less on building rigid ideological superstructures and more on our guts, guts kept healthy by a diverse diet of conversation and friendship. We need to have more personal encounters and trust in the general “goodness” of people. In other words, we need to take the seriousness with which we treat this Left-Right stuff down a notch and lighten up!

Noticing Birds

We don’t have to escape to a new and better location with more perfect neighbors. We need to lovingly attend to the ones we have.

How Farms Differ From Factories

For farming to exist sustainably, even from an economic perspective, it must be re-imagined.

Journeys in Trump Country

More interesting than the big-name hits and misses, though, are the everyday but often extraordinary people that she meets along the way. Some are firmly in the Trump camp; some are frustrated by their friends who are; and some are somewhere in the complicated middle.

On Being Kind

If it keeps us from flying at each other’s throats, I’ll take kindness every time. But if we seek more than survival, kindness is just the beginning.

Love Is Its Own Justification: Wendell Berry and the Lure of Political Efficacy

Scialabba insists that our actions are meritorious and good if they are effective, if they transform society and lead to measurable improvements. Berry, on the other hand, upholds love as its own standard: human lives are good insofar as they participate in divine love’s redemptive work.

Adjuncts, Mechanics, The Overclass, and Class War

Something has gone seriously wrong, and no one seems to have any idea how to fix it—including, alas, Michael Lind.

When Protestants Became Libertarians

Protestants and American Conservatism reveals a capacious knowledge of American religious history. As skeptics of the liberal order slowly work out a positive vision for the republic, they now know that they have forebears from which to learn, both in their success and defeats.

In Memoriam: Roger Scruton, 1944-2020

“The real wealth of a country … does not reside in the hectic exchanges on the stock market or the rivers of commodities that flow through every household without belonging there. It resides in local communities, in the work that holds them together, and the deep investment represented by a home, a place and the endowment across generations of human love.”

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From the Archives

Reading Seed Catalogs for Pleasure and Profit

Gardeners are a modest and sober breed, not much given to the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, or...

What the Smartphone is Good For (Besides Nothing)

The invaluable works of our elder writers, I had almost said the works of Shakespeare and Milton, are driven into neglect.

Title-town

The Green Bay Packers – like America itself - are a study in ironies: the smallest city owning a franchise in the largest professional sport, a non-profit corporation in one of America’s most commercial businesses. It is fitting, then, that they should win the championship in Dallas – home to the Dallas Cowboys – that most market-driven of sports franchises.