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Articles Archive

We Were a Peculiar People Once

What comes out is a story of a small group of Reformed Canadian Baptists who are rural, hardworking, self-educated (largely by reading the Bible), and persistent in becoming holy, but…
August 23, 2023

Planting Our Flag in the Real World: Parents Take the Postman Pledge

Do real things together. Celebrate. Take delight in the world—together. Don’t feel compelled to broadcast your views about the dangers of technology. Let your life speak, but be prepared to…
August 21, 2023

Time, Secrets, and Water

“What is Time For?” In this excerpt from The Liberating Arts: Why We Need Liberal Arts Education, Zena Hitz queries the way in which we spend our time. As she…

Back to the New Jeffersonianism: A Review of Tyranny, Inc.

By now, no one should be shocked when a conservative says something unkind about the free market. Still, those unfamiliar with any right-wing tradition predating Reagan react to someone like…

Private Tyrants, Public Remedies: A Review of Sohrab Ahmari’s Tyranny, Inc.

The “freedom to walk away” from at-will employment seems, in many cases, to be the “freedom” to launch yourself into the unsteady winds of “joblessness and financial misery,” particularly if…

Taste and See: A Review of The Liberating Arts

Perhaps people defended the liberal arts to me, and I was too dense to hear, but I truly cannot remember anyone ever setting out a vision for the liberal arts
August 14, 2023

David James Duncan, Peter Viereck, and Charlotte Mason

“The Liberating Arts Book Launch.” If you’ll be in NYC this September 28th, join us for a panel discussion and book launch event for a book I co-edited on the…

Liberalism, Postliberalism, and Localism: A Review of Justice By Means of Democracy

Allen notes that in ancient political thought, “the people” or demos referred not to the whole but to one part of the whole political community, namely the poor. The question…
August 11, 2023

In Praise of the Humble Slow Cooker

One easy solution is the crockpot. Why? You can throw in some basic ingredients in the morning before work or school, and then when you get home in the evening,…

Toward Philosophy of Birth? A Review of Natality

For Banks, the glory of natality is not that it is a passage into the world for something or someone else, but that birth is a tool for our own…

The Country Mouse in 2023

Vermont dumps almost all of its own garbage into Mount Casella, though it exports some to New Hampshire and New York. Its own consumption of goods–often including unhealthy processed foods,…
August 7, 2023

Facts, Bears, and Democracy

“Rage against the Baseball Machine.” Bill Kauffman wasn’t keen on watching a baseball game where balls and strikes were determined by a machine: “We are told by ABS advocates that…

Shiny, Happy Propaganda

It is profoundly strange to suggest (as Shiny Happy People implicitly does) that there is something strange and nefarious about people who believe in their principles wanting to see them…

Why We Camp… And Why We Don’t

As evening arrives, you put on warmer clothes and make a campfire, arguing over which is the best design method, the teepee or the log cabin. Once it gets going,…
August 2, 2023

In Defense of Playdates

In a perfect world, our children would romp out the door after completing their chores and their schoolwork (we homeschool) and knock politely at their best friend’s door, who lived…

Living To Die Well

We are not meant to die alone in nursing homes and hospitals, with gray faces, morphine drips, and flickering television screens. We are meant to live, die, and live eternally…
July 31, 2023

Does Food Policy Matter? A Review of Small Farm Republic

Folks reading this site might, and there is a minority of the public that spends the time and money to grow produce or seek out good, local farms. But most…

The Mandalorian Makes a Surprising Defense of Tradition

Turns out, there are other Mandalorians, and our hero is a traditionalist. After this encounter, some speculated that Mando would go “the way of the creedless Unitarianians, steadily shedding his…
July 27, 2023

Rectifying the Names: Is Conservation Liberal?

To appeal to personal rights seems to be an appeal to the highest value, and it is no wonder that people are feeling spiritually and socially starved. No one in…

The Liberty to Value Common Goods: A Review of The Political Economy of Distributism

While some of Salter’s discussion here is “inside baseball” for economists, what he is trying to achieve is laudable, namely getting distributists to recognize some shortcomings in their theory while…
July 25, 2023

Dale Ahlquist on G.K. Chesterton

My guest is Dale Ahlquist who has made the study and promotion of the works and ideas of G.K. Chesterton his life’s work. We preview the upcoming Chesterton Society Conference,…

Apocalypse Now: ChatGTP and the End of Education

The intrusion of AI-generated content into the university sphere is a strange kind of judgement, even an old-style apocalypse, whose real gift is neither its productive power nor the opportunity…

Ambiguity and Belonging in Oklahoma

It is hard to say who this land belongs to, but I know without a doubt that I belonged to it from my earliest youth. I was raised just south…

Christopher Nolan: Anglo-American Apologist

Pattinson captured the appeal of Christopher Nolan’s movies: “You can either really, really dig into it, find so many different threads to pull, or you can appreciate it as a…