The Editors

You can either have a hard marriage or an unhealthy marriage. These are your options. And Key not only made me feel normal, but he made me want to live…

Like the people I grew up among, Puddleglum speaks hope sideways, hope being too sacred to speak outright. But he speaks it anyway, sideways and hedged but there, the way…

Out-of-sight, out-of-mind is the quintessential modern American problem-solving strategy, and it sure does have a lot going for it, when it comes to dealing with our problem of stuff—that other…

Weak parties are susceptible to extreme candidates who take advantage of party weakness to run shallow, populist campaigns. These people seem fun. They appeal to our political id, mostly in…

A skeptic’s take on such a variety of experience would chalk it up as privileged gonzo larkishness or chest-beating thrill-seeking—an understandable take, one likely partly true. But there was more…

I’ve also been struck by the number of people in the book-producing-and-selling business who are uninterested in their product. On the retail end, there was the manager of a bookstore…

We live in fractured days, lacking in harmony, civility, and comity. “Comity,” an old word for courtesy and kindness, is related etymologically to the Sanskrit word for “smile.” As it…

Wendell Berry's fiction shows what relationships look like with skin on—how real relationships are enacted between people. As the characters who inhabit the fictional town Port William interact, they demonstrate…

Why does my third child, my little son whom I mention above, need me to be in physical contact with him while he reads? Because it helps him feel warm…

County Highway is not county-specific. It’s for all of America outside major cities. Well, outside of New York and Los Angeles, for sure. In the second issue, there’s a piece…

Gatsby’s character yearns for the infinite; he sparkles with something unusual in the midst of the lavish wealth and chaotic parties of Long Island’s frivolities. Gatsby has “one of those…

Paul Kingsnorth delivered the keynote address at the 2023 FPR conference in Madison, Wisconsin.  With help from a diverse band of fellow travelers including Jewish-Canadian songwriter Leonard Cohen, Anglo-Catholic social…

Paul Kingsnorth, the keynote speaker at the 2023 FPR conference in Madison, Wisconsin, begins things with a bonus talk on the power of prayer in a desecrated western world.    Highlights …

Lauck is unambiguous that he is engaged in a project of “civic retrieval,” to “remind us of our ideals and how many battles we have already won” and promote the…

The overall message is: here, readers, we have discovered a whole new mysterious island filled with these strange savages, previously unexplored. You wouldn’t believe what they’re doing out there! So…

Still, Berry maintains, the particularly Amish ways of working, rejoicing, and relaxing work together to promote the “great possessions” enumerated by Kline in his essays. “The lives of fellow creatures…

Modernity has become permanently liquid; it no longer seeks solid replacements to the pre-modern world but finds greater value in transience, not just of institutions and things, but of human…

We can never ossify the world because it is always moving and changing like the river. Yet we can open ourselves to this ever fluctuating movement. This is manifested in…

For Kaplan, when comparing two countries and asking why one has succeeded where the other has failed, what matters most is not national policies but “societal dynamics—the strength of the…

Before we totally condemn the Athenians as selfish, entertainment-addicted bad citizens—which, to be fair, they sometimes (or often?) were, just like us—it is worth considering what such shared democratic spaces…

Caitlin Smith Gilson is a philosopher, theologian, poet, and novelist. I originally contacted her to invite her to come on the podcast to discuss the story and movie “Babette’s Feast.”…

"Keep doing what you can to build strong towns": that's the motto of Strong Towns, a citizen-driven, localism-minded urbanist group now over 1,000 members nationwide and beyond.  But a recent…

We need to love smaller, more energy-efficient houses and cars in order to love people more. We need to give up much of our casual oil consumption for leisure. We…

children are inchoately aware of the sadness of the world; it’s another of the human mysteries that they already have access to. Lobel’s genius is in choosing for his subject…