Place. Limits. Liberty.
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Jason Peters

Articles by Jason Peters

The Middle Ground of Wit and Insult, Considered Together With Their Limits

In other words, knowledge and reason are no match for our gargantuan vices. The giants passion and pride cannot be held at bay by the ignorance that prevails in public…
Jason Peters
November 7, 2024

The Final Word was Right

If there ever comes a true accounting of the costs we’re racking up for making, using, and discarding our mobile (de)vices, we will be obliged to admit that there has…
Jason Peters
October 21, 2024

Civility and Civic Virtue

We might at least keep in mind the importance of proximity and presence and real encounters of flesh and blood. For the messy business of politics let us have Chesterton’s…
Jason Peters
October 18, 2024

From the Editor

There is something Augustinian in Lukacs’ view of the past—that in a real sense, or at least in a manner of speaking, it exists only in the present, for it…
Jason Peters
April 26, 2024

Walk Boldly, Darlin’ Clementine

Walk boldly. Whistle not, but do keep walking. Keep walking right on by it and let the dead bury the dead.
Jason Peters
March 13, 2024

From the Editor–Local Culture 5.2

Friendship may also be an art that invites our probing, if also by inviting resists it. Careful study of any great work of art gives way to knowledge, and knowledge,…
Jason Peters
October 13, 2023

Jonathan Swift’s Street Cred

Swift knocked out several tracts and sermons on the problems of the Irish economy. And in them he said, in good FPR fashion, several FPRish things—for example, that place matters.
Jason Peters
July 3, 2023

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…
Jason Peters
May 5, 2023

On Scruton and Settling: From the Editor

Scruton, from that day in France until the end, could never situate himself in the fugitive and cloistered comfort of the academic and intellectual orthodoxy.
Jason Peters
October 21, 2022

Tone-Deaf Experts in the Hour of Grift

Back of all this you might hear a rabble-rousing Palestinian Jew from a couple of millennia ago promising that the truth, once known, will set you free - but that…
Jason Peters
August 10, 2022

From the Editor–Local Culture 4.1: The Civil Dissent Issue

Think not, then, of the ubiquitous screens and hideous architecture and suburban metastasis and microwave dinners. Think rather of Eric Voegelin’s famous quip—Voegelin, who said that “no one is obliged…
Jason Peters
February 25, 2022

From the Editor–Local Culture 3.2: The Higher Ed Issue

Jason Peters contrasts the traditional telos of education, what John Newman called "a great but ordinary end" with the current emphasis on utility and constant social change.
Jason Peters
September 13, 2021

From the Editor–Local Culture 3.1: The Arts of Region and Place

Is only the life of the busy and bustling place, the place of mergers and acquisitions, worthy of story and song and canvas?
Jason Peters
February 12, 2021

Another Night Like All The Rest

Men are fallen creatures who think they’re perfectible when in fact they’re hardly improvable.
Jason Peters
December 31, 2020

Adapt or Die: Kunstler’s Guide to Living in the Long Emergency

James Howard Kunstler follows the first commandment handed down to all of us at birth: “Thou shalt not be dull.”
Jason Peters
October 2, 2020

From the Editor–Local Culture 2.2: Christopher Lasch

Over and against manifest follies that characterize American life in the first quarter of the twenty-first century there stands the wide-ranging work, keen and voluminous, of the historian and social…
Jason Peters
August 28, 2020

Culinary Plagiarist: An Interview with the “Author”

Recently FPR's Bar Jester sat down with the Culinary Plagiarist to discuss a new book by Jason Peters, The Culinary Plagiarist: (Mis)Adventures of a Lusty, Thieving, God-Fearing Gourmand.
Jason Peters
June 22, 2020

A Selfish Prayer for Basketball and Cottonelle

I’m inclined to believe that both the species and individuals, that both mankind in general and you and I in particular, benefit from the occasional reality check..

From the Editor–Local Culture 2.1

Although the basic principle of widely distributed property may be known and competently grasped—it is a tune that in America had been played in a Jeffersonian key, after all—it is…
Jason Peters
February 26, 2020

And To All A Good Night

Too soon the mistletoe will be a garland.
Jason Peters
December 25, 2019

Blessed With Triple Ds: A Dispatch from Dumb-Ass Acres

This is a description of small-town life and the help you can expect to receive from people not conditioned to give strangers the finger.
Jason Peters
December 18, 2019

Happy 60th, Bill Kauffman

". . . among the keenest minds in contemporary American letters." ---Allan Carlson
Jason Peters
November 15, 2019

Dying Properly—like a Dumb Ass (A Dispatch)

Little do I know that in a few days I will have died properly: by explosion.
Jason Peters
October 21, 2019