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The Editors

Articles by The Editors

Mark Mitchell on Plutocratic Socialism 

Mark Mitchell, author of Plutocratic Socialism:  The Future of Private Property and the Fate of the Middle Class and President of Front Porch Republic, joins the podcast.  Mitchell and Murdock…

Back to the Bottom-Line (Apocalyptically and Practically Speaking) at the Land Institute

Wendell Berry has written endlessly about the goodness of local work; if, for Berry, the goodness of such work is connected to agrarian virtue, while for Jackson it is connected…
October 25, 2022

Family over FIRE

What is the goal of life? Cultural messaging has tricked many of us into thinking it is wealth and status, or career advancement. For us, it is the project of…
October 24, 2022

Annette Kirk: From Long Island to Mecosta

Annette Kirk was kind enough to sit down with me to talk on a recent visit to Piety Hill in Mecosta, Michigan in the brick Italianate home that she and…
Alan Cornett
October 19, 2022

The Leavening Effect of Seeking the Truth: A Review of Untrustworthy

In Untrustworthy, Kristian sets an objective for Christians to be faithful, factual, and fair. In some cases, this must be practiced in a somewhat extreme environment. What do we do…

Two Yells for Football?

If beer and football are just the modern bread and circuses of a declining empire, then these are spectacles best avoided. However, if such gridiron microcosms of the human experience…
John Murdock
October 18, 2022

The Republic of a Restaurant

We sense that there’s more at stake in a restaurant visit than simply gustatorial or financial gain. Eating out, as Plato might have observed, is a chance to reinforce or…

Along the Garden Path of my Fathers

They know their neighbors; they know their village; they know their land. They have their own vernacular that everyone who lives there understands because their father and mother taught them,…
October 12, 2022

The Cake of Many Layers: Walking a City through Time

To walk a place is to open the door to the possibility that you will grow to love it. With time, you could get to know it in an intimate…
October 10, 2022

A Pathway to Peace: Hope in The Need to Be Whole

Berry, with an insistence that defies despair, is still carrying out his calling. He notes the discouraging odds his kind has faced not just now but in the past. Imperial…
October 7, 2022

Luke Sheahan on The University Bookman and Academic Freedom

Luke Sheahan of Duquesne University and the newly appointed editor of The University Bookman, a book review journal founded by Russell Kirk and edited by him until his death. Dr.…
Alan Cornett
October 5, 2022

Seeking Clarity: Wendell Berry’s New Book on Race

These are not compassionate times—not in the public square, and not in all too much of our increasingly chaotic private life, though I think many people are trying. Mr. Berry…

Patriotic Work: Wendell Berry’s The Need to be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice

No one can be whole alone; no one can be free alone. Rather, Berry holds that “[t]o be whole and free is…to be at home in a place and in…
October 3, 2022

Walking alongside Wisdom: A review of Learning the Good Life

Lying on a bed at 2:00 AM idly flipping through a book while texting a friend isn’t likely to be a transformative experience. Treating education as a hoop to jump…
September 30, 2022

The Jeffersonians on the Margins of NatCon

What is being outlined here is fundamentally a Wendell Berry conservatism: our solutions are not global in nature. They might not even be national in nature. It asks individuals to…
September 27, 2022

Flowers and Dust: Summer in The Great Gatsby

The summer, its heat and its flowers, has finally been put to death. But the dust remains. George Wilson is covered in it, alive and dead, and as Nick told…
September 26, 2022

Jason M. Baxter & The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis

Jason M. Baxter is a professor at the University of Notre Dame and has a new book from InterVarsity Press titled The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis. Dr. Baxter and…
Alan Cornett
September 21, 2022

Perspectives of History: Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle

Turmoil is present throughout Dick’s world, and this is clearly reflected in each of the three characters discussed here. Tagomi, Wegner, and Childan’s lives are greatly influenced by events precipitated…
September 14, 2022

The This-ness of This Place: Introducing Belle Point Press and Mid/South Anthology

Raised in Eastern Oklahoma with roots older than living memory in the Natural State, we look forward to supporting new authors while connecting readers with the long thread of our…
September 12, 2022

The Insistent Cough of Grace: Remembering Frederick Buechner

His books are not a diminishment of historic and intellectual Christianity. They are a translation of Aquinas, Barth, Calvin, and the rest into the language we all speak innately but…

It’s Been a Fun Ride

Venus’s love for her sister, and Serena’s recognition of it, has also shown us the transcendent power of family, the possibility of forgetting the accolades and the worldly recognition and…
September 8, 2022

Meditation in a Local Orchard

Do I know by pruning the tree, picking the apples, and eating them? Perhaps, Pickstock proposes, truth is what we find when we act in the world. Our true condition…
September 7, 2022

How Shall We Train Up A Child?: The View From One State

All education programs enculturate students. There is no neutrality here. The question is not whether education will form our students, but how they will be formed. Proverbs (22:6) says, “Train…
September 2, 2022

The Scholarly Lewis: A Review of The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis

Baxter articulates two central features of the Medieval Model: the ordered and iconic nature of reality. Reality is not a chaos waiting for us to impose structure on it or…