Jason Peters

78 POSTS168 COMMENTS

Jason Peters tends a small acreage in Ingham County, Michigan, and teaches English at Hillsdale College. A founding member of FPR, he is the editor of both Local Culture: A Journal of the Front Porch Republic and Front Porch Republic Books. His books include The Culinary Plagiarist: (Mis)Adventures of a Lusty, Thieving, God-Fearing Gourmand (FPR Books 2020), Wendell Berry: Life and Work (University Press of Kentucky 2007), Land! The Case for an Agrarian Economy, by John Crowe Ransom (University Press of Notre Dame, 2017), and Localism in the Mass Age: A Front Porch Republic Manifesto (co-edited with Mark T. Mitchell for FPR Books, 2018).

Recent Essays

On Scruton and Settling: From the Editor

Jason Peters - October 21, 2022

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.

Tone-Deaf Experts in the Hour of Grift

Jason Peters - August 10, 2022

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 poor soul on a collision course with Golgotha was assuming that truth could be disentangled from all the elegant technocratic lies it’s wound up in.

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

Jason Peters - February 25, 2022

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 to take part in the spiritual crisis of a society; on the contrary, everyone is obliged to avoid this folly and live his life in order.”

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

Jason Peters - September 13, 2021

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.

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

Jason Peters - February 12, 2021

Is only the life of the busy and bustling place, the place of mergers and acquisitions, worthy of story and song and canvas?

Another Night Like All The Rest

Jason Peters - December 31, 2020

Men are fallen creatures who think they’re perfectible when in fact they’re hardly improvable.

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

Jason Peters - October 2, 2020

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

From the Editor–Local Culture 2.2: Christopher Lasch

Jason Peters - August 28, 2020

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 critic Christopher Lasch.

Culinary Plagiarist: An Interview with the “Author”

Jason Peters - June 22, 2020

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.

Love in a Time of C̶h̶o̶l̶e̶r̶a̶ ̶S̶c̶u̶r̶v̶y̶ Coronavirus: A Bar Jester Chronicle; or, A Tragi-Comedy in One Act

Jason Peters - April 20, 2020

Says here malaria treatments work on COVID-19.

A Selfish Prayer for Basketball and Cottonelle

Jason Peters - March 18, 2020

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

Jason Peters - February 26, 2020

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 perhaps less firmly grasped that, on Belloc’s account, what capitalism had killed among men was in fact a Distributist society.