The Editors

Like other readers here at FPR, and across the web, I have been following the Great Salyer/Carter Debate of 2012 with much interest. I thought Mr. Salyer’s original article was…

Once again St. Michael Orthodox Church here in Louisville will be hosting the annual Climacus Conference, with this year's event focusing on the artistic, intellectual, and spiritual legacy of Byzantium.…

In the January 9, 2012 issue of Time magazine, Fareed Zakaria comments on what he calls “A Post-American World in Progress.”  Zakaria observes that none of the world’s rising powers,…

Washington, Ct. The recent contretemps between the blessedly described “liberal conservatives” at the First Things web site and our own clutch of barking mongrels here at the homespun Porch revealed…

I start my meditation with a true story that will serve as a parable. On his 21st birthday, the nature writer Francis Thompson was presented by his father with a…

Brian (no relation to Lefty) Frizzell, Brooklyn's archivist of Americana, sends a link to Matt Morris's Pickin' & Trimmin' http://vimeo.com/31066145, a lovely documentary short film about a barbershop in Drexel, North…

Ron Paul didn't win Iowa but he did well. What should he do now?

You who think that all of the principle and most of the color have gone out of politics never had the opportunity to vote for Gatewood Galbraith.

A response to Joe Carter from flyover country.

This is the kind of states' rights I like: Montana’s Supreme Court has issued a stunning rebuke to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010 that infamously decreed…

Several times lately I’ve opened my email and found notices about people who want to friend me, but I don’t think that means they want to befriend me. Thanks to…

George Will has penned an end-of-year pick-me-up for conservatives, counseling them that the likely prospect of Republican Presidential electoral defeat in November (given their sad slate of potential nominees) ought…

BURNED-OVER DISTRICT, NY---Our daughter will be spending the snowy months rehearsing her role as Marian the Librarian in her high school’s production of Meredith Willson’s “The Music Man,” that tuneful…

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] As Christmas and the end of 2011 approaches, I find myself thinking gratefully about what Leroy Hershberger has enabled my students and me to learn…

This Christmas--like last Christmas, and the one before that , and the one before that....--hundreds of thousands of our countrymen and women are far from their homes and families, fighting…

I’ve just finished Andrea Wulf’s beguiling book entitled “ Founding Gardeners, The Revolutionary Generation, Nature and the Shaping of the American Nation”. Published this year by Knopf, it delves into…

In this season of the "holidays," it was announced several days ago that Fairfax County schools would be permitted to install video surveillance cameras in High Schools. Fairfax County is…

Devon, PA. We face only two feasible policies in America's engagement with the world.  We can seek to be a bomb-throwing hegemon until the money, and the credit, and the bodies, run…

“The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what he saw in a plain way …” John Ruskin I do not…

I am angry with my friend; he has betrayed a secret of mine perhaps, or maybe instead he has formed an intimacy with persons he knows to be my enemies. …

Burned-Over District, NY---I’m reading Charles J. Shields’s absorbing new biography of Kurt Vonnegut, And So It Goes, and while its morose subject deservedly never won Father or Husband of the…

Queens, NY -- The idea was to design an English village from scratch, within railroad-commuting distance of Manhattan.  It was meant to include homes for families of different income levels,…

Do we get an economy that serves the people? Or do we get the right people to serve the economy?

My latest book was cited as an "authority" before the Supreme Court in Florida v. HHS, the "Obamacare" case. You can read the brief here, if you are bored. This…