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
On the Use of a Grim Joke and a National Elegy
Until then you’ll welcome into your homes the talking heads who, loving an abstraction, spread a pestilential hatred.
Against Vacation
The vacation, far from being a treatment for a serious illness, is instead a symptom of it.
The One World On Offer
Perhaps the tension will be useful when it comes time to make something of what is. Just be sure you make it in a place called home.
Of Dullards, Whales, Frustrations, and Shirts Like Fetters
What of those who have never once thought it their duty to amuse their readers?
Magpie Education for Small-Mouth Bass
We’re like small-mouth bass, and we’ve swallowed the technological treble hook.
Kingsley Amis (!) On the Priesthood
Then it’s a bit up to you to be jolly crusty and jolly full of hell-fire and sin and damnation.
Handing Higher Ed to the Cripples: On John Williams’s “Stoner”
If there’s one thing we have in higher education today it’s a superfluity of bluster.
Print Culture and the Fate of the Literary Quarterly
The general continued to pay for the upkeep of the LSU tiger in an airconditioned cage. The amount of money involved was almost precisely the same as the subsidy for…
Bar Jester Chronicles 12(A): “The Way to Bliss” (A Work of Fiction–Sort of)
Nor was it his great and almost constant tumescence, which his grey polyester pants could never quite sufficiently hide.
Meditation on the Cold
Lovers of snow and cold are qualitatively different from the lovers of sun and surf; they are different moral beings altogether.
The Bar Jester’s Unpremeditated Verse
But as a profound poet trying to make a comfortable living I can’t really trouble myself about that fit audience though few. . . . Were I to start thinking…
The Vast White Landscape: E.B. White’s “Great Snows” Revisited
Rock Island, IL A century ago in New England, the approach to snow was quite different. When snow began to fly, people switched to runners. Roads were not plowed out,…
The Final Word On Cell Phones
Rock Island, IL In the early days of FPR, and then again more recently, I was impertinent enough to write disparaging remarks about cell phones, which as everyone knows are…
The Bar Jester Chronicles 7: Morning Cyanide
Rock Island, IL “Morning Cyanide” is a fun game for the whole family. The best thing about it is this: not everyone has to be awake at the same time…
Reach Out and Text Someone
ROCK ISLAND Now that all public space is the exclusive property of cell-phone users and the deaf people they talk to, a jeremiad is in order, though I'm going to try…
Time-Travel Economics with Jonathan Swift
Rock Island, Illlinois. It’s a little-known fact that many of our finest writers owned time machines and paid frequent visits to the future. Furious John Ruskin (1819-1900), for example, that…