Articles Archive
Dante’s Virgil as a Guide for College Professors: Insights from Inferno
Students sometimes come to us in crisis, but always they come from a world filled with challenges and are with us only for a season. We could do far worse…
Nothing to F***ing Cheer About: Preserving Moral Authority in Public Education
Preserving moral authority in schools would truly be something to cheer about.
Living Outside the Machine
Ashley Colby, founder of the Rizoma Field School, digs up inspiring true stories of resistance and restoration (with references to donkeys, elephants, and our 49th state). Bill Kauffman, author and…
Housekeeping: The Unhinged Edition
I guess it’s time to sweep. Again. And then again. But we can embrace the gentler side of housekeeping. Besides, if you leave be those spiders in the corners, they…
Taylor Swift, Foreign Policy, and Flannery O’Connor
“Swift Going.” It’s hard to describe this essay by Peter Bast. But you should definitely read it: “I’m still amazed that my folks allowed me to see the Grateful Dead…
Confession
“I don’t roll on nobody,” I said, abysmal grammar and all, but a jail cell is no place for linguistic niceties. My voice was rough, as much scared as aggressive.…
Localism Not Integralism: A Review of All the Kingdoms of the World
Self-government by local communities, including some tiny confessional states, would be more consistent with ideals of diverse, self-governing communities.
Localism without Nostalgia
Let’s have a localism without nostalgia, a practical but also a faithful localism. As localists let’s be committed to an accurate accounting of the checkered past that grounds our hope.
Brian Miller on Kayaking with Lambs
Brian Miller visits the porch to talk about his new book chronicling life on a Tennessee farm. Highlights 1:30 Bayou Bengal Volunteer farmer 5:45 A monastic text 11:15 Man…
Southern Hospitality in the New Machine Age
It’s not perhaps that the world doesn’t need change, but that as anti-Machine author Paul Kingsnorth put it in these pages, “the first work is changing yourself.” We have to…
AI, Bureaucratization, and NIMBYs
“Keep Your Money Close.” Jane Clark Scharl draws on the localist principle of subsidiarity to diagnose how online shopping leads to a scarcity of human interaction and to suggest some…
AI, Misinformation, and Manual Arts Training
It’s said that seeing is believing. And even sleight-of-hand may be caught in the act if you watch closely enough. But things began to change with the use of computers…
Boys in the Boarding School
If boarding school stories are exceptionally good at communicating certain universal themes despite the privileged setting, the lasting appeal of the setting offers some lessons, as well. The older we…
Humane Politics
Adam Smith, a philosopher at the University of Dubuque, counterattacks the disenchanted War on Suffering. FPR President Mark Mitchell goes biblical to bring down a heightened politics of insanity. Brass…
Two Leftists Walk Into a Pandemic . . .
Not only did the worst consequences of lockdowns occur in the Global South, but lockdowns were pushed on the South from the North, through well-known strongarm tactics of neocolonialism that…
Academic Joy
After years of research, I have developed a three-stage teaching method that breaks new ground in pedagogical theory: Stage 1: Pay attention. Stage 2: Be astonished. Stage 3: Tell about…
Alaska, Smartphones, and Realignment
“The Resurrection of the Bawdy.” J.C. Scharl ponders the strange, grotesque wisdom of Francois Rabelais: “there must be a reciprocal relationship between our high culture and our low. High culture…
First Hack: A Techno Myth
Unaware, we can stand in a museum, in a temple of modernity that extracts life from all other temples. We can gaze into the vengeful gift of a god while…
Federalism Frees Us to Flourish
Although it may seem counterintuitive, freedom is actually enhanced, not curtailed, when states have the right to experiment, subject to important federal constitutional limitations, with social and economic polices till…
The Art of Activism: Conflict and Conversation in Mitali Perkins’ Hope in the Valley
Activism needs to begin by fearlessly staring down our own prejudices, by rooting out the injustices we allow. Once that is accomplished, we can turn to the outer world
Human Responses to Technology
Jeff Bilbro, FPR’s super-beaver EIC and Grove City College professor, looks to ancient mythology to assess modern technology and fiction of the future. Cassandra Nelson of the University of Virginia’s…
Petroleum and Me
I wish environmentalists would better understand that there are no mustache-twirling billionaires drilling and digging and burning oil just for the hell and the money of it. Like money, petroleum…
Imagining Life Beyond the Machine: Eric Miller and Jason Peters
Eric Miller, biographer of Christopher Lasch and a professor at Geneva College, plus longtime porcher Jason Peters of Hillsdale College address the role of imagination in shaping our shared reality. …
Small Plastic Gods: On the Tabletop Renaissance
Tabletop games put something in our twitchy, swipe-hungry fingers other than a digital device—a hand of cards, a pair of dice, a plastic Zeus. And since others have put down…