Jason Peters

Jason Peters
84 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

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, when it is more fully grown, presents to us by way of return a greater mystery than we started with. Our knowing sends us back to the thing, and we find that it is now larger, deeper, more vexing, if also paradoxically to some degree better known.

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 here in this issue of Local Culture, the first and I hope not the last devoted to food and drink.

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 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

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 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 critic Christopher Lasch.