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).
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.
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,…
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.
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…
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.
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…
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…
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.
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?
Another Night Like All The Rest
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
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
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…
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.
Love in a Time of C̶h̶o̶l̶e̶r̶a̶ ̶S̶c̶u̶r̶v̶y̶ Coronavirus: A Bar Jester Chronicle; or, A Tragi-Comedy in One Act
Says here malaria treatments work on COVID-19.
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…
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.
Happy 60th, Bill Kauffman
". . . among the keenest minds in contemporary American letters." ---Allan Carlson
Dying Properly—like a Dumb Ass (A Dispatch)
Little do I know that in a few days I will have died properly: by explosion.