The Editors
Articles by The Editors
Justice, Sovereignty, and the Throwaway Culture: Reading Charles Camosy
We live in a time of political disruption. In the United States and around the developed world we are seeing nationalist and populist agitation against the established liberal order. While…
Rise Up, O Saints, and Plant Gardens
Jake Meador’s In Search of the Common Good: Christian Fidelity in a Fractured World is a remarkably successful attempt to bring together the core teachings of Christianity and the community-centered…
Building Folklore Wealth
Our lives depend upon the restoration of intergenerational stability within our local communities as a norm that is loved and nurtured. Moreover, our recent obsession with measures such as GDP…
Puppets and Portraits: Two Victorians
In “The Dreams of Mrs. Flintwinch thicken,” a short chapter of Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit (1857), the kind-hearted Arthur Clennam visits his childhood home. “Oppressive secrets” pervade the crumbling house…
Creator as Creature: Rowan Williams on Christ and Creation
Christ the Heart of Creation renders fruitful the richness in, and the virtue of, the Christological grammar that rules faithful speech and thought about the person and nature of Jesus…
Blessed Are the Working Poor
I am in love with my neighborhood because I am in love with the people, how resilient and complicated they are, and how they teach me how wrong I have…
Before Ahmari and French, Wills and Bozell
This is awfully late but perhaps also timely (since the spat between Sohrab Ahmari and David French seems to have a long shelf life). What follows is the talk I…
A Politics of Presence
When we stop trying to be everywhere at once, we have enough time for the meaningful things.
Abortion: Realpolitik, Kulturkampf, and Evangelization
One side has dominated the story while the other has tried to dominate the politics. But separating culture and politics is a self-defeating strategy.
The Wonderfully (if Perhaps Insufficiently) Radical Bill McKibben
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] I've been a fan of Bill McKibben's writings for close to 30 years. That doesn't mean I've agreed with, or even enjoyed, everything this endlessly…
The Case for Confucianism in America: How an Ancient Chinese Philosophical Tradition Could Save Our Fraying Democracy
In such times, a centripetal lurch is what we desperately need.
Regional Universities Educate for Merit—It’s too Bad Our Elites Just Want Prestige
The Varsity Blues parents didn’t really care if their children learned anything; they were concerned that they got their ticket to success stamped by the right institution.
Time and Place in Eugene Vodolazkin’s Imagination
We occupants of the Porch can profitably read Vodolazkin in light of our own concern to acknowledge human limitations and find ways to live well and more fully in our…
The Most Polarized Era Ever?
In selecting reading material, the average reader might not immediately reach for a book about Congress in the nineteenth century. That would be a mistake, as Joanne Freeman’s book The…
Imagining Humane (Household) Economies
Hirschfeld’s assessment of what we as Christians should and should not accept in mainstream economics, informed by her training in both economics and theology, is thus a most welcome resource.
On Being Watched, and Remembered
“Don’t take my gun, Nightlife!” Tol called, trying to sound not too much concerned, and yet unable to keep the tone of pleading entirely out of his voice. “I’m liable…
The Monkey in the Margin: History, Tradition, and Transgression
[T]he early scholastic notion of revelation was more dynamic than the modern one. Revelation does not occur, in the medieval understanding, once and for all in the static letters of…
“Who’s going to take care of these people?”
This is a sad and beautifully written portrait of a hospital in rural Oklahoma shutting down, perhaps to be re-opened, but probably for good. It is, of course, implicitly a…
The Yankee Southern Agrarian
Wendell Berry, while still writing more than most of us, is squarely in the awards and laurels stage of his earthly journey. Who will continue the call for sanity and…
Bringing Wendell Berry (and Business) to Sterling
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] A week ago I was able to organize a small group of friends to attend a fine, relatively intimate event at Sterling College, a small…
A Case for Shame
In Canto XXX of the Inferno, Dante becomes fascinated with an argument between Sinon the Greek and Master Adamo, both of them condemned for sowing discord. Virgil, his guide through…
Solar’s Dirty Secret
In 2017 I moved back home to Livingston County after serving seven years in the United States Marine Corps. A father, a veteran, and a millennial, I spent the last…
Taxes from the Porch
Local communities, not the federal government, should hold the true authority over one’s life, especially in matters of taxation.
“Ora et Anti-Labora”? Kathryn Tanner on Finance Capitalism
The mighty cosmos of the modern economic order determines, with overwhelming coercion, the style of life not only of those directly involved in business but of every individual who is born into…




















