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Articles Archive

On Bars in Church Basements

Might our local faith communities support such cultivation of virtue, while also restoring what might again be a hub of parish social life?

Buffalo, Kitchens, and Control

“Red Dragonflies.” Steven Knepper offers a deeply informed consideration of Byung-Chul Han’s intellectual and spiritual trajectory. Knepper argues that Han’s emphasis on contemplation has much to offer: “The Church’s contemplative…

Bewilderment My Bow: A Review of Zero at the Bone

How are all these entries against despair? Insofar as metaphor is an act that creates meaning, it’s an act of hope: even intractable realities can be changed by placing them…
Jeffrey Bilbro
February 2, 2024

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…
January 29, 2024

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.
January 23, 2024

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…
January 22, 2024

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…
January 19, 2024

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…
January 17, 2024

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…
January 15, 2024

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…
January 11, 2024

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…