The Editors
Articles by The Editors
The Power of Place: The Daytripper with Chet Gardner
Daytripper reminds people that you don’t have to go far to see something new. Even small towns have a special local food or watering hole. Every place has history. And…
Kayaking with Lambs
The newest book from FPR Books is Brian Miller's Kayaking with Lambs. Enjoy this excerpt, and then pick up a copy of the book. This life is not what was…
Happiness Fit for Humans: A Review of A Web of Our Own Making
Barba-Kay argues that we tend to resolve our cognitive dissonance by outsourcing all the choices that do matter and consoling ourselves with a plethora of choices that don't.
The College Diploma Shakedown
The aim is to get young people, of all backgrounds and races, on their feet with as little fuss and expense as we can, regardless of whether their families can…
Bill Kauffman in Conversation
Bill Kauffman, author of multiple books including Poetry Night at the Ballpark and long the closing speaker at FPR conferences, talks about the origins of Front Porch Republic and his…
An Empty Room of One’s Own
There are things that a full room can do for us. It can reassure us. It can offer comfort. It can offer luxury and pleasant distractions. A full room can…
Responding to Your Email: Better Late Than Never
It is, I realized, handy to have a proper template handy, ready to use, should my fears come true, and I discover that I really did forget to answer an…
Taste and See: A Review of Christian Poetry in America Since 1940
While many recognize the limits of human language and the ways it has sometimes been used to harm, they see language as capable of naming (or, at least, gesturing toward)…
Voices From The Past: The Humanistic Letters of Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More
Babbitt and More advocated the study of the humanities as a tool for the shaping of human souls toward virtue, helping confront what Babbitt characterized as the “civil war of…
Batter My Heart Three-Person’d God–Break, Blow, Burn, and Make New: Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer Re-Members the Poetic as an Opportunity to Consider Redemption
Oppenheimer replies to him “Why I chose the name is not clear, but I know what thoughts were in my mind. There is a poem of John Donne, written just…
Perseverance and Grace: Or, Why I Don’t Deserve a Damn Bit of Credit for my Life
I’ve found that in perplexing or challenging circumstances, “why?” is a boring question. We like why. The leadership guru Simon Sinek asks us to start with why. It’s a popular…
Homeschooling and Red Herrings
Repeatedly, some of the best students I have taught have been homeschooled. What set them apart was precisely the spirit of bold curiosity that I see in my own kids:…
Hope for a Humane Agricultural Future: A Review of Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future
The ecomodernist approach of Regenesis relies on a mechanistic understanding of humanity. The presumption is that humans are merely fleshy machines that can adapt to flourish in any environment as…
Pears, Asparagus, and Contemporary Psychotherapy
Even in our modern age, then, it seems that Trueman’s “modern self” as narcissistic echo chamber, unconstrained by relationships with family and community, has not entirely triumphed after all.
Rooted in Reality
We were all, adults and children alike, doing things that really mattered to the whole free world, and we’d better get on with doing them, every day, all the time.…
A Conversation with Katy Carl on Place, Fiction, and Contemplation
Conjuring makes me think of force and manipulation, which as writers we have to forswear. Readers will either notice they're being manipulated and throw our books aside—or maybe worse, they…
Little League, Then and Now
But that love for baseball didn’t mean that we organized our lives around the sport, or that any parent with a Little Leaguer had baseball scholarships in mind. It didn’t…
Laird Mackintosh: The Last Phantom
Laird Mackintosh is a longtime Broadway actor who had the opportunity and privilege to play the Phantom himself in the final performances of the Phantom of the Opera. The Phantom…
We Were a Peculiar People Once
What comes out is a story of a small group of Reformed Canadian Baptists who are rural, hardworking, self-educated (largely by reading the Bible), and persistent in becoming holy, but…
Back to the New Jeffersonianism: A Review of Tyranny, Inc.
By now, no one should be shocked when a conservative says something unkind about the free market. Still, those unfamiliar with any right-wing tradition predating Reagan react to someone like…
Private Tyrants, Public Remedies: A Review of Sohrab Ahmari’s Tyranny, Inc.
The “freedom to walk away” from at-will employment seems, in many cases, to be the “freedom” to launch yourself into the unsteady winds of “joblessness and financial misery,” particularly if…
Taste and See: A Review of The Liberating Arts
Perhaps people defended the liberal arts to me, and I was too dense to hear, but I truly cannot remember anyone ever setting out a vision for the liberal arts
In Praise of the Humble Slow Cooker
One easy solution is the crockpot. Why? You can throw in some basic ingredients in the morning before work or school, and then when you get home in the evening,…
The Country Mouse in 2023
Vermont dumps almost all of its own garbage into Mount Casella, though it exports some to New Hampshire and New York. Its own consumption of goods–often including unhealthy processed foods,…
