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The Editors

Articles by The Editors

The Place (and Place-ness) of Occupy, Ten Years On

Holding up a sign, sitting at a lunch counter, sticking a flower in a gun, setting up a tent, and occupying a space in the face state and corporate power…
December 24, 2021

Buddy from Belfast: Pondering How to Belong

Belfast is a lovely movie for remembering the power that places have in defining who we are and the beauty of belonging well, even to a broken place.
December 22, 2021

Canadian Story Cycles: A Conversation with author John Van Rys

Van Rys hopes readers are shaped by his tales of domestic comedy to see that love for the long haul, difficult as it is, is not only possible but greatly…
December 20, 2021

Sonnets in Advent with Dunstan Thompson

Dunstan Thompson's poetic prayer reminds me how necessary Advent is and leaves me grateful for Christ’s work that makes his former foes members of his household.
December 17, 2021

“unsafe, unnumb”: The Unshod Poetry of Bower Lodge

This is poetry that focuses its readers on the true, good, and beautiful. Here, we are reminded that Christ took on flesh like ours, that he was born as we…
December 15, 2021

Fact’s Two Faces: On the Masking of Children at School

Life is ambiguous, murky, rife with situations that elude dogma’s capture. When the seas get rough, however, our tolerance of this is one of the first things hucked overboard. For…
December 8, 2021

Reviving the Cult of Citizenship: Tony Woodlief’s I, Citizen

If you do follow Woodlief's advice, you'll need a thick skin and a dogged commitment to first principles. Self-government takes time and effort, and too many people really do want…
December 6, 2021

Speaking Freely in Times of Crisis: A Conversation with Paul Kemeny, Ben Faber, and Richard Gamble

Examining, with Paul Kemeny, Richard Gamble, and Ben Faber, fraught moments in history where questions about communication and censorship, politics and propaganda, freedom and government intervention came to a head.…
December 3, 2021

“Oh, Wow.” A Benediction for Ed McClanahan

Immortality might not last forever. But I contend that Ed will—through his words and through the lives of those he touched with his generosity and his grace. All of which…

Columbiana: In Want of Cram

Neither Columbiana nor Sewickley perfectly realize the role of Cram’s ideal walled town, but Sewickley comes much closer. While not perfect, it offers a real-world example of an economically vibrant,…
November 29, 2021

The Hidden Life of Ignatius J. Reilly

John Kennedy Toole denies Ignatius such a happy ending, subverting the traditional redemption narrative. In so doing, he arguably gives us a better portrait of what life actually tends to…

Poetry and Politics with A.M. Juster

Michael J. Astrue has earned degrees from Yale and Harvard. He had a long and distinguished legal career and held several government positions as well as leadership posts in biotech…
John Murdock
November 23, 2021

Ted Lasso and the Temptation of “Aww, Shucks” Idealism

Is there an alternative to the Ted Lasso cynicism-versus-optimism dichotomy, an alternative that recognizes human limitations but nonetheless offers hope? I might start with becoming attentive enough to our ignorance,…
November 22, 2021

Hunting and the Body of Christ

As we come to the supper table to feast upon pheasant breast or the backstrap of a whitetail deer, we gain an inkling of that invitation to the true Table…

P.D. James’ Children of Men and Modern Parenting

I didn’t intend to welcome two children into an era marked by so much bleakness and turmoil. With James’s help, I’ve remembered that there is no project more local, no…
November 15, 2021

You Are Not Your Own With Alan Noble

Alan Noble is author of the new book You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World from IVP. Dr. Noble is a professor of English at…
Alan Cornett
November 9, 2021

The Road Taken

Sometimes an important change becomes evident only in retrospect - not while it’s happening across quiet broken days alone in a house while autumn succumbs to shadow and cold.
November 5, 2021

The Missed Opportunity of “Rugged Individualism”

The tragedy of the hold Hoover’s rugged individualism continues to have on the American psyche in our increasingly atomized age is that his formulation risks presenting a false dichotomy between…
November 3, 2021

Will Hoyt‘s Ohio River Journey to the Middle Ages

Host:  John Murdock Guest:  Will Hoyt Will Hoyt, author of The Seven Ranges, discusses his journey along the Ohio River into the physical, historical and philosophical interior of the strip-mined…

Why We Must Recover Thinking as a Practice

Thinking as a practice places a check upon the self. It offers us a way out of our "res idiotica." If our universities are faithful to their missions, they must…
November 1, 2021

This Valetudinarian World

Valetudinarianism connects arguments about the pandemic and the climate, with, on the one side, a distrust of experts and politicians, and, on the other, the belief that science (however defined)…
October 29, 2021

Free Speech as a “A Delicately Manicured Garden”: A Review of Speechless

Michael Knowles: “Free speech cannot be an open plain; nor can it be a jungle; it must be a delicately manicured garden."
October 27, 2021

A Time to Build Anew With Todd Hartch

My guest is Professor Todd Hartch of Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond. A specialist in the history of religion, particularly Latin American religion, Todd has written a new book A…
Alan Cornett
October 26, 2021

Not Hasty Enough: The God of the Garden by Andrew Peterson

“Growing things are good” isn’t a sufficiently coherent claim for a book. While the questions and problems that Andrew Peterson raises in The God of the Garden are thorny and…
October 25, 2021