Articles Archive
Bill Kauffman in Conversation
Bill Kauffman, author of multiple books including Poetry Night at the Ballpark and long the closing speaker at FPR conferences, talks about the origins of Front Porch Republic and his…
Luddites, Reading, and Selfies
I'll be out of town the second half of next week for a book launch event in NYC. Since I'll be on the road, I probably won't have a chance…
Home Alone
This trend is peaking in a small rectangle, the smartphone. As Marc Barnes observes, the smartphone has replaced the TV. The smartphone is portable and personal and has enticed us…
An Empty Room of One’s Own
There are things that a full room can do for us. It can reassure us. It can offer comfort. It can offer luxury and pleasant distractions. A full room can…
Responding to Your Email: Better Late Than Never
It is, I realized, handy to have a proper template handy, ready to use, should my fears come true, and I discover that I really did forget to answer an…
Taste and See: A Review of Christian Poetry in America Since 1940
While many recognize the limits of human language and the ways it has sometimes been used to harm, they see language as capable of naming (or, at least, gesturing toward)…
Hermits, Homesickness, and Barbarians
“Inis Cealtra.” Paul Kingsnorth explains—sort of—what he’ll be writing about for the foreseeable future. What makes it challenging to explain is that he’s after something beyond words: “The silence of…
Voices From The Past: The Humanistic Letters of Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More
Babbitt and More advocated the study of the humanities as a tool for the shaping of human souls toward virtue, helping confront what Babbitt characterized as the “civil war of…
Batter My Heart Three-Person’d God–Break, Blow, Burn, and Make New: Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer Re-Members the Poetic as an Opportunity to Consider Redemption
Oppenheimer replies to him “Why I chose the name is not clear, but I know what thoughts were in my mind. There is a poem of John Donne, written just…
Perseverance and Grace: Or, Why I Don’t Deserve a Damn Bit of Credit for my Life
I’ve found that in perplexing or challenging circumstances, “why?” is a boring question. We like why. The leadership guru Simon Sinek asks us to start with why. It’s a popular…
Camping and Homemaking
You can’t actually get to utopia; it only seems like you can because it looms so large. I think it’s better to start wherever you are, and ask what it…
Digital Community, Dramatic History, and Suburban Sprawl
“The Community Community.” Nathan Beacom parses the effects that digital technologies have had on the way we imagine and experience community: “something important has changed about the way we think…
Why Pursue an Education?
The course I am teaching is part of the university’s core curriculum. Core comes from the Latin word for “heart,” I told my students. The same Latin root, cor, gives…
A Saintly Character Seen Through a Glass Darkly: A Review of Walking with Father Vincent
Mr. McNabb recognizes the central passion of Fr. Vincent: his deep love for Christ, expressed through a severe asceticism, a total devotion to traditional Catholic doctrine and social teaching, a…
Homeschooling and Red Herrings
Repeatedly, some of the best students I have taught have been homeschooled. What set them apart was precisely the spirit of bold curiosity that I see in my own kids:…
Hope for a Humane Agricultural Future: A Review of Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future
The ecomodernist approach of Regenesis relies on a mechanistic understanding of humanity. The presumption is that humans are merely fleshy machines that can adapt to flourish in any environment as…
Friday Night Lights, an AI Boom, and Buggy Lanes
“The Kind of People We Need at the End of the World.” Elizabeth Oldfield shares her family’s journey into communal living and relates how the humble, daily acts of prayer…
The Year We Went Inorganic
When my wife and I started our rural homestead, we were suburbanites with a lot of ideas. For one, we’d do everything organically. No question. Second, we’d endeavor to only…
Pears, Asparagus, and Contemporary Psychotherapy
Even in our modern age, then, it seems that Trueman’s “modern self” as narcissistic echo chamber, unconstrained by relationships with family and community, has not entirely triumphed after all.
Rooted in Reality
We were all, adults and children alike, doing things that really mattered to the whole free world, and we’d better get on with doing them, every day, all the time.…
A Conversation with Katy Carl on Place, Fiction, and Contemplation
Conjuring makes me think of force and manipulation, which as writers we have to forswear. Readers will either notice they're being manipulated and throw our books aside—or maybe worse, they…
Bees, Local Music, and David Jones
“The Death of Conservatism Is Greatly Exaggerated.” In her critical response to Jon Askonas’s essay on how technologies erode traditions, Christine Rosen takes issue with his argument that conservatism has…
Little League, Then and Now
But that love for baseball didn’t mean that we organized our lives around the sport, or that any parent with a Little Leaguer had baseball scholarships in mind. It didn’t…
Laird Mackintosh: The Last Phantom
Laird Mackintosh is a longtime Broadway actor who had the opportunity and privilege to play the Phantom himself in the final performances of the Phantom of the Opera. The Phantom…
