Jeffrey Bilbro is an Associate Professor of English at Grove City College. He grew up in the mountainous state of Washington and earned his B.A. in Writing and Literature from George Fox University in Oregon and his Ph.D. in English from Baylor University. His books include Words for Conviviality: Media Technologies and Practices of Hope, Reading the Times: A Literary and Theological Inquiry into the News, Loving God’s Wildness: The Christian Roots of Ecological Ethics in American Literature, Wendell Berry and Higher Education: Cultivating Virtues of Place (written with Jack Baker), and Virtues of Renewal: Wendell Berry’s Sustainable Forms.
Jeffrey Bilbro
Articles by Jeffrey Bilbro
Monsanto, Walking, and Hardware Stores
“Monsanto Ordered to Pay $289m as Jury Rules Weedkiller Cause of Man’s Cancer.” Sam Levin reports on the remarkable finding of a San Francisco jury against Monsanto. Obviously this verdict…
Educating Humans to Subvert Technocracy
Alan Jacobs’s new book, The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis, traces a fascinating intellectual debate that arose on the Western home front during…
The Humanities, Baseball, and Hunting
“Simone Weil’s Deeper Grace.” Scott Beauchamp explains why Simone Weil is such a necessary thinker for us to listen to. Keep an eye out for my review, coming Monday, of…
Localism, Trade Wars, and Teaching
“Restoring Localism.” Joel Kotkin claims that if there’s one thing both conservatives and progressives should be able to agree on, it is the need to devolve power to local governments:…
A Localist Revolution, Aldo Leopold’s Conservatism, and Public Intellectuals
“The Localist Revolution.” David Brooks writes in defense of localism: “We’ve tried liberalism and conservatism and now we’re trying populism. Maybe the next era of public life will be defined…
Baseball, Debt, and Postman
“Birds, Bricklayers, and Baseball.” Sam Edgin reviews Stanley Hauerwas’s new book, The Character of Virtue: Letters to a Godson, which is comprised of 16 letters, each written on subsequent anniversaries…
Register for our Fall Conference
Registration for our fall conference, 1968 Fifty Years Later: A Re-Evaluation, is now open. We hope you can join us. For more information on the location and lodging, go to…
The Contemplative Life, Southern Writers, and a Tech Backlash
“Review: A Trappist monk tells of a life worth living.” Gregory Hillis reviews a new book by Brother Paul Quenon, a monk who began his life at the Abbey of…
Agroecology, Eric Miller, and Manual Labor
“Bringing Farming Back to Nature.” Daniel Moss and Mark Bittman report on the encouraging growth of agroecology. (Recommended by Tom Bilbro.) “The Oak Tree Almanac.” This is a new podcast…
Gone Fishing (2)
Sometimes the deluge of content that pours from our 24/7 media threatens to drown us under its cacophony of disinformation. Periodically, then, it is necessary to turn off the spigot…
Anthony Bourdain, the Galloping Gourmet, and Reading Together
“Flourishing in a Digital World.” John Fea records a live episode of The Way of Improvement Leads Home podcast. Near the end, the conversation turns to FPR’s recent localist social…
Restoring Trust in the Aftermath of Anti-Social Media
We should all be grateful to Siva Vaidhyanathan. He has endured great pain and suffering to explore a dangerous new landscape, and he now offers to be our guide to…
R. S. Thomas, Paul Kingsnorth, and Monsanto’s “Demise”
“Poetic Orthodoxy.” Peter Leithart writes about the faith and the conflicted attachment to Wales that animate R. S. Thomas’s poems. “Why ‘Monsanto’ is No More.” Don’t get your hopes up.…
Habermas on the Public Square, Polarization, and Kernza
“Carmen.” Stromae has a music video that’s relevant to our recent conversation about localist social media. Here’s what I want to know: What might happen if the Big Blue Bird…
Disenchantment, Facebookistan, and John Ruskin
“Disenchantment, Actually.” Doug Sikkema reviews The Myth of Dis enchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences by Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm. He’s not entirely convinced: “Yes, religion and…
Marginalia
I was a bit surprised that Matt directed his critique at Twitter rather than at other forms of social media. At least Twitter isn’t as corrupt as Facebook and its…
Deneen and Kauffman, Walker Percy, and Manufactured Rituals
“Wendell Berry’s Works are a Multi-Plattered Feast.” Nick Offerman praises Wendell Berry’s writing: Here in these stories, you will find a great entertainment. Laced throughout, however, will also be a…
Talking about Wendell Berry on Twitter
Matt Stewart hasn't convinced everyone, and we'll be running further responses to his piece over the next couple of weeks--including essays from those who agree with him and those who,…
A Wendell Berry Weekend, Stanley Hauerwas, and Russell Kirk’s Correspondence
“Huppert Dairy among Hundreds Selling Out.” Boyd Huppert mourns a loss that is both personal and cultural: “The upper Midwest has been losing dairy farms at a rate once unimaginable.…
J. Drew Lanham’s Clear-Eyed Vision of the Land
“I think of land and hope that others are thinking about it, too.” Those of us who try to think about land have much to learn from J. Drew Lanham’s…
Rural Kansas, Moby-Dick, and Online “Community”
“The Tweeting of the Lambs: A Day in the Life of a Modern Shepherd.” Sam Knight profiles James Rebanks, a shepherd in England’s Lake District and the author of The…
Nick Offerman, Alan Jacobs, and Robert Farrar Capon
“Five Questions with Nick Offerman about Wendell Berry.” Nick Offerman talks about Look & See, which aired on PBS this week. “Remembering the ‘Spooky Wisdom’ of Our Agrarian Past.” Gracy…
Dirt, Manners, and Patrick McManus
“Can Dirt Save the Earth?” Moises Velasquez-Manoff’s long essay is worth reading. A taste: “If you focus on the health of the soil and not on yield, eventually you come…
Learning How to Think with Alan Jacobs
Last fall Alan Jacobs published a slim book with a bold title: How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds. Jacobs is a professor of English literature,…