The Editors
Articles by The Editors
Consider the Forest: A Review of Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees
If a human timescale—privileging our experience and our hopes—is insufficient to understand the forest, then maybe we will be provoked to reconsider both the human and forestal timescale.
Between Port Royal and Patagonia
Being wealthy doesn’t make Chouinard a better representative of the values that he shares with Berry, but recognizing that Berry is not alone and that these values can be brought…
“And the Word Was Made Flesh”: Placing Ethnicity in the Gospels and Making Conservative Politics Humane
It is a recognition of the beauty and goodness of ethnic diversity combined with a message of universal love and mercy that should be at the heart of a true…
With Students At Home, Let’s Make America Local Again
Perhaps we ought to hope that things won’t quite go back to what’s normal: rootless young folk siphoned away by elite universities and groomed to lead the managerial bureaucracies and…
Remembering After Coronavirus
Shortly after the 2001 terrorist attacks, Wendell Berry wrote, “The time will soon come when we will not be able to remember the horrors of September 11 without remembering also…
Flatten the Curve and Respect the Experts
The issue is not the the health care experts versus the ordinary American who doesn’t like the way this shutdown is going. It is actually a question of expertise worthy…
Of Heat, Houses, and Heuristics
Thinking about ecology from a national perspective, my house with standard R-19 walls and R40 roof, standard windows, and so on, is a “problem.” From a local perspective, though, there’s…
Confused and Contented: On Gardening
Gardening is wholly mundane, but in a way that complements our pursuit of holiness and spirituality because it keeps us properly focused and disposed.
Spring Fever
I had bought a few baseball cards when I was eight years old, mostly for the gum, but the start of fourth grade, in 1967, was when I became serious.
With One Eye Squinted: R.R. Reno and Living Life in a Time of Death
Let us not, however, in our haste to condemn Reno for his imprudent practical advice, ignore the truth of the underlying point. Religious believers hold that there is more to…
Cities, Common Spaces, and the Coronavirus
To be isolated from one another, and in particular from those third places where the rich possibilities of community are most regularly realized strains urban interdependence as nothing else.
The Metamorphoses and #MeToo
As difficult as some content is to teach, we have a responsibility to educate our students about the past, good and bad. A curriculum which leaves out the bad would…
Wholeness and Gratitude: Working through Scott H. Moore’s How to Burn a Goat
Moore insists that his book about farming is not exclusively about rural places: “the point is not even about farming . . . most of what I’ve said in this…
Poems, Essays, Stories, and Songs for a Pandemic
When despair for the world grows in me . . .
The Classroom as a Welcoming Space
If we have all the knowledge in the world but have not love, the apostle Paul says, then we’re as annoying as a banging cymbal. It’s no wonder students wouldn’t…
Learning about Food and Proper Nouns
Berry moves the conversation from common nouns to proper ones and implicates us all in something deeply practical and doable, yet inexplicably difficult: to love our neighbor, the person right…
The Ordinary Christian Option
Elevated figures in church history have a great deal to teach us, but we should not forget that we can also learn from the early, run-of-the-mill Christians who were as…
An Artistic Ecosystem: A Review of Makoto Fujimura’s Culture Care
If truth, beauty, and goodness are truly and mystically related, beauty really is dangerous—but only to evil. Reading Culture Care, and contemplating Makoto Fujimura’s art, I can believe it.
Why Love Belongs in Politics
Lubbock, TX. One month ago, the Senate concluded the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump. The process was almost purely partisan: Republicans, who control the Senate, stymied Democrats’ attempts to…
The Road Back from Impeachment: Are We There Yet?
So why am I against all these impeachments, investigations and inquiries? It is because in every one of these instances, the ultimate goal, far outweighing any truly high-minded purpose, is…
The Uses of Nostalgia
Nostalgia's got a bad rap, but, in addition to being nearly inescapable, it has indispensable benefits, provided it’s kept within reasonable limits.
Liberty or Empire? Reconsidering the Articles of Confederation
The Articles of Confederation undoubtedly had their problems. But the spirit of concurrence they embodied is worth celebrating. To revitalize American public life, we should revisit this period in our…
Graced Grit: A Hymn-laced Eulogy to True Grit Author Charles Portis
U.S. Marshal Reuben J. “Rooster” Cogburn and Mattie bring a type of vigilante justice to Tom Chaney, and we are glad, but Portis doesn’t allow us to be easy about…
Old Tracks Toward New Connections
A new walking trail brings economic benefits, but its more enticing, though less measurable, value lies in the deeper, more appreciable sense of place that the rail trail should cultivate.
