Articles Archive
The Language of Numbers
Math is certainly not the best language for every situation, but it is essential for many situations. And once we understand this, and not merely acknowledge it but shift our…
Cormac McCarthy’s Sorrow of Creatures
Are dreams only dreams? Or are they God’s gifts of the unconscious which we still fail to know? McCarthy lets these questions remain, and no argument or worldview can answer…
Chickens, AI, and the Legal Conversation
“Daughter of Forgottonia.” Liz Schleicher describes a family rooted in a plot of land near where the Illinois River joins the Mississippi. Guided by a matriarch, they have lived well…
Paterson and Poetic Fidelity
Creative fidelity is attuned to, and draws out, the richness in people and things. It calls for awareness and attentive seeing. In the end, Paterson is a film about such…
Reclaiming our Private Economies
Hillsborough, NC. The term “care” is used in our times to signify tasks like feeding, changing diapers, bathing, and otherwise maintaining the well-being of those too young, old, or infirmed…
Selling 3301
Today, many in our society seem to want change for its own sake. I hope a different spirit continues among those neighbors and the street remains a neighborhood as it…
After Virtual: Education
The second episode from the FPR conference After Virtual: The Art of Recovering Lost Goods looks at education. Jeff Polet discusses walking away from Hope. Angel Adams Parham talks about…
Losing Elections and Telling Better Stories
As we enter this season of Advent, we would do well to share the skepticism of Mary and her misfit Son about the powers of this age to establish an…
Payne Hollow, Camels, and Distributism
“Who's Preserving Harlan Hubbard's Beloved Payne Hollow?” Bob Hill writes a lovely account of the Hubbards’ remarkable life and explains the hopes of the recently formed nonprofit organization Payne Hollow…
Sloe the Winter’s March
Society’s long move from the country to the city may have desacralized their meaning, but for so long has man’s festive calendar been defined by our ecological needs and vulnerabilities…
The Joyful Christian Nationalist: How Stephen Leacock Loved His Home by Resisting the World
Undergirding Leacock's work was not a desire to restore a previous version of Canada, but to preserve the gifts God had given: the best traditions of the past, the communities…
Stories of Healing and Wholeness: An Appreciative Engagement with Wendell Berry’s The Need to be Whole
Brecon, Wales. Stories are a necessary part of healing and wholeness. I don’t just mean a story we may like or we tell ourselves (though they include that), nor do…
Dorothy Day, Humility, and Ed McClanahan
“Will the Real Dorothy Day Please Stand Up?” In this review of D.L. Mayfield’s new biography of Dorothy Day, Myles Werntz offers a masterclass in how we ought to befriend…
An American Augustine
The various parts—historical and autobiographical, theological and literary—all contribute to the central thread: that we seek wholeness, and that wholeness depends on better understanding ourselves and our damaged, but not…
The Only Way is Up
It is a terrifying responsibility every single day, for a preschooler’s capacity to find ever creative ways to put herself in danger does not always match up with the parent’s…
Alan Jacobs on Ursula Le Guin and Anarchism
Alan Jacobs is not, to my knowledge, a Porcher, though he ought to be; his insightful reflections upon Christianity, literature, society, and the state are hugely relevant to all sorts…
Joining the Dance: Setting Aside Screens to Build the City
The young pagans band around the picnic table and scrawl inky runes into their hands with cheap pens. Around them, the world falls, and wonders if they will learn to…
After Virtual: The Church
For the first of our episodes from September’s FPR conference After Virtual: The Art of Recovering Lost Goods, we go to church. Carl Trueman, Gregory Hogg, and Charlie Cotherman share…
The Burden Of Youth
Why are so many of Uncle Sam’s children so miserable? What is going on? The reasons are one part mystery and one part well-known. It is worth reflecting on them.
Wendell Berry, Ronald Blythe, and Oat Milk
“One of Our Most Beloved Environmental Writers Has Taken a Surprising Turn.” I don’t think Berry’s new book is “seething with resentment,” but Daegan Miller’s thoughtful review of Need to…
Planning and The Politics of Beauty: Reflections on Stewart Udall
If you’ve ever visited Canyonlands National Park, or hiked the Appalachian Trail, or spent time at over a hundred other similar locations across America’s beautiful and diverse ecosystems and geography,…
On Lug Wrenches and Chopsticks
Semiotic tools are inevitable in an American economy that is increasingly segregated between those whose work is dependent on process and those who focus on outcome.
More of the Familiar in Wendell Berry’s How It Went
He has never chased the new or tried to be avant-garde. Even in the physical act of writing, he has famously resisted the “advantages” of a personal computer and has…
How to Be a Liberal-Socialist-Conservative
The mark by which we recognize a rightly ordered way of thinking about politics, it seems to me, is that such a way of thinking should recall us to the…
