Articles Archive
Still’s “River of Earth”
Given domination of the Commonwealth’s institutions by progressivist ideology, it’s unsurprising how few Kentucky students and teachers are familiar with poet-novelist James Still and River of Earth (1940). After all,…
Can Health Care Be Local?
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Wichita, KS Over the past couple of weeks, I've written a few things on the current debate over health care reform. A couple of smart…
Who is Phillip Blond?
Here is an interview from The Guardian. Blond has the ear of David Cameron, calls himself a Red Tory, and is launching a new think tank in the fall. Do…
Advice For Up-And-Comers
Claremont, CA. I spoke last week at the New Jersey Governor’s School for Public Issues, a (mostly) state-funded summer program for civic-minded students about to enter their senior year in…
The Eccentricity of the Saints
Devon, PA. Earlier this week, some devout and worthy reader on the Porch proposed G.K. Chesterton as the patron saint of the Front Porch Republic. Aside from heartily endorsing the…
Hospitality and the Hopi: Fragmentation and Hope
“Pray for the foothills,/goatherds and windmills/and satellite dishes” – Mark Heard Cincinnati, OH. A comment on my recent post on Hopi hospitality referred to “…satellite dishes on the stone and…
How We Solve Problems in Small Town America
I'm still on my summer blogging hiatus, but this artifact was too good to pass up. Seen at local post office this afternoon.
An “Industrial” Farmer Challenges Michael Pollan
Michael Pollan doesn't know what he's talking about and neither do the millions of his soft-handed readers. So says a farmer here. One wonders, though, what Wendell Berry and Joel…
Cocktails at the Dump
My father in-law, Ron, tells me a story of what life was like when he moved his young family (my wife not yet born) to the bucolic Southern California college…
Class Project
Recently, a friend who is conservative asked me: "What should be the next great project for conservatism?" I mulled this for a bit, and then the conversation quickly passed…
Convolutions in Veritate
Devon, PA. In the near future, I hope to offer a few essays on Catholic Social Doctrine, and, of course, on Caritas in Veritate in particular. I have not yet…
Characteristics of the Modest Republic
Erie, PA. Readers of the Front Porch Republic are likely looking for new ways to conceive of American politics and culture. They are in search of alternative categories to the…
Benedict on Business: What’s Love Got to Do With It?
Irving, Texas. Since its beginnings with Aristotle and Plato, the study of economics has always been regarded as a branch of philosophy, a colony of politics and ethics. But all…
B.S. Degree
College graduates are certainly learning something - all that resume padding isn't worth a bucket of spit when all the imaginary jobs that kept people busy moving around notional financial…
“On the Grid”: When Electricity (and Other Things) Came to the Countryside
“Come in and look,” Quintín urged me, as he disappeared with a shuffle through the low doorway in his adobe house. I got up from the wooden bench on which…
The Strange Lament of a Bohemian Conservative
“Half-knowledge is more victorious than whole knowledge: it understands things as being more simple than they are and this renders its opinions more easily intelligible and more convincing.” --Nietzsche Several…
Lookin’ Out My Back Door; Or Sounds From Boo Radley’s Porch
BURNED-OVER DISTRICT, NY---Caleb has proposed this beautiful rendition of “Our Town” by Iris DeMent as the Front Porch theme song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FikZwgj89HI (Anyone not moved by it is either dead or,…
When Lawyers Catch the French Disease
Devon, PA. No observer of American culture grasped its implicit contents better than did Alexis de Tocqueville, and no one since has better grasped its potencies as they have actually…
Jesse Walker, No Depressor
Jesse Walker, managing editor of Reason, is one of my favorite writers on matters cultural and political. His fugitive essays for No Depression, the magazine of American music, have just been collected…
What’s in a Name?
Holland, MI. I live in the only part of the country where the “V” section is the largest part of the phone book. When your landscape contains burgs with names…
Foreign Beer at the White House?!
Devon, PA. The Wall Street Journal reports one angle on what I just knew would become a controversy. If it were the New York Times reporting, one could safely expect…
The Red Tories and the Civic State
Phillip Blond Irving, TX. It has been sometime since I have called myself a “conservative.” It is not that any of my opinions have changed, but rather that conservatism forgot…
Family Matters
Kearneysville, WV. The debate, such as it is, between liberals and conservatives frequently centers on issues pertaining to that oldest of institutions, the family. On the one hand, there are…
Buddhist Economics: The Eight-Fold Path
Cold Spring, N.Y. In order to get people thinking rightly about economists, Fritz Schumacher used to tell the story of an architect, a priest, and an economist talking about which…