Adam Smith

I believe in personal responsibility; insurance companies believe in impersonal responsibility.

You don’t have to be normal. You don’t have to be weird. You just have to be a person – which is a moral ideal, not a fact of nature…

That’s the great cultural task now: to relearn this old language, to keep it from dying out, to nurture it and refine and expand it, to develop new idioms and…

To fight a culture war justly is to be confident that your arguments have a reasonable chance of success; but this means that to fight justly is not only about…

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.

For brokenists, the new regime is not just a matter of garden-variety regulatory capture, and “the rules” are just as often a symptom of the problem as a solution to…

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…

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…

What is more radical, and more conservative, than to cast the ring into the fire? That would be a real “regime change,” would it not?

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.

Consider that here at FPR we are at least as concerned with cultural issues as with political ones. If we are being honest, many of us are probably more concerned…

What keeps me on one side rather than the other is my belief that if we had been living more fully in that real world, a lot of what we…

I came away from Steubenville, as I came away later from Grove City, with the startling idea that things are possible. Small things; local things; putting two things together, not…

The same things that happened to the family farms, and to farmers like my father, are now happening to the colleges, and to faculty like me.

Those who do know her work might be a bit surprised if I suggest that Le Guin has a real porcher sensibility.

The romantic impulse toward wholeness, or the longing for when things were better—take a few bad turns in that mood, and you find yourself chanting hymns to blood-and-soil. People can…