Articles Archive
A Local Look at the Meanings of the Founding: A Review of The Nation that Never Was
After excluding less plausible interpretations like Roosevelt’s, I think the Old Testamentish version of the Founding is the most defensible: the Founders left us some good principles which later were…
A Beautiful Farm?
These benefits and this healing can only begin to happen when beauty is allowed once again on the farm. One cannot truly have a good farm without it.
Payne Hollow, Ice Cream, and National Parks
“Thriving on the Fringe of Society.” Carrie Blackmore Smith describes the life that Harlan and Anna Hubbard made at Payne Hollow and the work now being done to restore and…
Observing Limits to Re-enchant a Mute World: A Review of The Uncontrollability of the World
Even Rosa the respectable sociologist entertains the possibility that if we relearned how to listen, the mountains might speak. Perhaps they too have their spirits, mute but waiting.
Are Americans Better Off?
Let’s just say you’d better have great discipline and a very rich interior life if you expect to be happy amid great affluence. If this is true of individuals, that…
Silage and the Silence of the Corncrake
I’ve been talking to elderly friends here in the Irish countryside about what they used to do when the sun shone. The answer, of course, was that they made hay.
One Homeschool Year: A Local Story in Four Seasons
One learning outcome I had in mind for this academic year was to teach all students to close the bathroom door when using the facilities. Alas, we seem to have…
David Foster Wallace, Brian Doyle, and Francis Fukuyama
“Fresh Cliché.” In a wise essay that puts David Foster Wallace in conversation with Wallace Stegner, Matt Stewart gives two cheers for clichés: “Surely there are phrases that are lazy…
Composition as the Art of Loading Brush
Instead, we have the opportunity to spur students to true and healing composition through the exercise of creativity, precision, care, and nuance. The best analytical writing assignments in the future…
John Herreid & Contemporary Catholic Art
John Herreid is editor of a new art compilation from Ignatius Press titled The Catholic Home Gallery: Eighteen Works of Art by Contemporary Catholic Artists. We discuss the dying world…
The New House, The New Life
I fear that neither liberals nor most self-styled conservatives want to reexamine the habits, both economic and sexual, that have impoverished the working class, set the middle class on the…
Antonin Scalia: A Man for All Seasons
Antonin Scalia’s judicial legacy was ratified on June 24, 2022 as the Supreme Court effectively overturned Roe v. Wade with the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision.
Get Off the Bench: Host a Cocktail Party
As someone who squirms every time I see a couple or family all quietly tapping their cell phones, a room of twenty people talking is a beautiful sight. It is…
Hospitality, Exile, and Mushrooms
“Hospitality from the Front Porch.” Bethany Hebbard describes how a front porch lifestyle promotes genuine hospitality: “If you actually have a front porch or balcony, then I what I am…
From the Editor — Local Culture 5.1
here are many such images, as many images as there are places where good folk deep in this life perform the communal rites of place. Several of them are collected…
Good Conversation and the Talking Cure: A Review
One cannot really have a book about conversation alone. Conversation is so much a fruit of individual persons and their relationship to one another, that a book about that fruit…
A Journey to Right Worship: A Review of Learning to Love
I was encouraged by Sosler and all the many ways he connected love and knowledge to the journey that a rightly ordered education invites students to take. The infilling of…
Prophetic History: A Review of A History of the Island
Contemporary sensibilities tend to prefer the nihilist abyss to such salvation, even as we pathetically pursue the latest "cure" for that emptiness—be that radical politics, surgical revisions to our anatomy,…
AGI, Hiddenness, and Grace
“We Must Slow Down the Race to God-like AI.” Ian Hogarth gives a sobering assessment of the unpredictable ramifications of AGI: “I thought about my four-year-old who would wake up…
An Extraordinary School for Girls: Learning the Things You Wish Grandma Taught You
It is daunting to envision running a pleasant, blessed household. This is why we're not meant to do it alone. Women are meant to flock together, with their words and…
Cyber-Sophistry, or How ChatGPT Unmasks the Emptiness of AI
AI is the culmination of an ideological fantasy of elite control, woven into the very infrastructure of commonplace media technologies. When it gets used to talking to us, we may…
On Milosz, Exile, and Humane Art
Was it his commitment to truth in art that ultimately preserved his faith? Perhaps—God may have worked in that mysterious way. He seemed, late in life, to come to an…
The Power of Place: Payphones
The value in seeing payphones is the way it develops a practice of seeing. So often we are driving or walking down streets, unaware of what serves us no purpose…
Cruises, Liberty, and Plastic
“Nature is Healing.” The Lamp recently put this essay online, and it’s a doozy. Stay all the way to the end of Sam Kriss’s haunting meditation in living in a…