Articles Archive

It is an MSNBC segment with pseudo-historical gloss. Billed as a warning to American democracy, it is a simple yet pretentious work that will do nothing to solve the problems…

What this means is death. When our kids were little, parenting meant death to my independence: my time, my space, my very body, were no longer my own. Parenting meant…

Neither Wheeler Catlett nor his real-life inspiration John Marshall Berry practiced in the 21st century, but for those of us in the profession who do, their example remains powerful and…

The unspent beauty of nature that Hopkins saw has much to teach us even if we’re not always paying attention. But paying attention is always better.

The true virtue of a hobby farm is that it gives us the space to confront that tension between natural and artificial.

The frictionless existence we were promised, one that freed us from slavish obedience to place and tradition and family bonds, turns out to be one in which we amorphously float…

Was May demonstrating, knowingly or not, that even the isolated and disparaged—on the very nose of their ridicule—could be pointing the way brightly ahead through a dark and foggy future?…

On this year’s Feast of the Nativity of the Light in Our World in the Age of the Machine, my prayer is this: may our ceremonies not be one dimensional,…

Christina Rossetti's 1872 devotional poem, "A Christmas Carol," has held a special place in my heart from the moment I first heard it at a high school friend’s Christmas concert…

It is encouraging to see how some young people have embraced limits on energy consumption. But the underlying disease of rapacious desire has not been cured. No, this tradeoff only…

In this piece, I turn from the abstract idea of the marriage between the outer world of work and the inner world of the spirit to centers of education that…

David Heddendorf’s novel, The Terra Cotta Camel, is, as the subtitle accurately puts it, about “hope, new beginnings, and Des Moines.” It is about the small, the local, and the…

University presses are remarkable allies in the cause of localism. Though they publish all kinds of academic books, you’ll struggle to find a state university press that does not publish…

I’ll be taking the next couple of weeks off from putting together these Water Dippers. I plan to resume in the new year. “The Case for Left Conservatism.” Ashley Colby…

If I’m honest, I am skeptical that the localist approach I advocate will bring about a quasi-utopian future of widespread flourishing, at least within my lifetime. But at least localism…

It almost feels heretical to say that at the center of our religion, indeed our existence, is a God that can be wounded and broken, but this is precisely the…

You can either have a hard marriage or an unhealthy marriage. These are your options. And Key not only made me feel normal, but he made me want to live…

He does not conflate attendance with salvation or sanctification. But empty pews can neither be saved nor sanctified. They never serve in the nursery or children’s services. They never teach…

“A Great Historian’s Inner History.” Jeff Reimer reviews Peter Brown’s Journeys of the Mind and describes the particular genius Brown has for imagining the lives of those far separated from…

Like the people I grew up among, Puddleglum speaks hope sideways, hope being too sacred to speak outright. But he speaks it anyway, sideways and hedged but there, the way…

Out-of-sight, out-of-mind is the quintessential modern American problem-solving strategy, and it sure does have a lot going for it, when it comes to dealing with our problem of stuff—that other…

For brokenists, the new regime is not just a matter of garden-variety regulatory capture, and “the rules” are just as often a symptom of the problem as a solution to…

Weak parties are susceptible to extreme candidates who take advantage of party weakness to run shallow, populist campaigns. These people seem fun. They appeal to our political id, mostly in…

A skeptic’s take on such a variety of experience would chalk it up as privileged gonzo larkishness or chest-beating thrill-seeking—an understandable take, one likely partly true. But there was more…