The Editors
Articles by The Editors
Closing the Circle: An Economy of Values, and Where to Look for It
It is no surprise that many of us connected with FPR welcomed the release in mid July of Pope Benedict XVI’s latest encyclical, Caritas in Veritate. As John Médaille and…
Making (a Virtue of) Vice
Yet more news from the hustings: a growing number of people are growing their own tobacco for their own consumption. Bully for them - depriving the beast of "sin taxes"…
Warren Oates, Constitutional Anarchist
From The American Conservative---you really should subscribe, you know---my piece (www.amconmag.com/article/2009/sep/01/00050/) on the great Kentucky actor Warren Oates.
Big Secrets
Claremont, CA. Yesterday I was walking past the post office in my latte-liberal, bohemian-bourgeois town, when I saw a picture of President Obama made up to look like Hitler.…
How Many Evangelicals Does it Take to Comment on an Encyclical?
68 apparently. I had to laugh when I saw this. I recognize many of them as my interlocutors from the old New Pantagruel days. And if I learned anything, it…
A Short History
Posted originally as a comment to Patrick Deneen's "Road Rage" (and re-posted here at his insistence): The State of Oregon Highway Comm. had a wonderful engineer named Conde McCullough who…
Pomo’s vs. Fropo’s Revisited
I will admit that I did not keep up with all of the discussion that ensued from various blogs that tried to discern the differences between folks that write over…
Who Owns Our Jobs?
Irving, TX. We have all been trained up to the belief that jobs are something in the gift of great corporations or government bureaucracies. True, there are still places in…
Tocqueville on the Shores of Titicaca
Amid Alexis de Tocqueville’s writings on revolution in France, there is a passage that rings true for those of us who have spent time in the countryside. He observed that…
Philip Bess’s Pizza
Last week, Philip Bess - the noted Notre Dame University scholar of architecture - delivered a lecture in Washington under the auspice of the group "Conservatism on Tap." Bess's lecture…
Still’s “River of Earth”
Given domination of the Commonwealth’s institutions by progressivist ideology, it’s unsurprising how few Kentucky students and teachers are familiar with poet-novelist James Still and River of Earth (1940). After all,…
Can Health Care Be Local?
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Wichita, KS Over the past couple of weeks, I've written a few things on the current debate over health care reform. A couple of smart…
Advice For Up-And-Comers
Claremont, CA. I spoke last week at the New Jersey Governor’s School for Public Issues, a (mostly) state-funded summer program for civic-minded students about to enter their senior year in…
Hospitality and the Hopi: Fragmentation and Hope
“Pray for the foothills,/goatherds and windmills/and satellite dishes” – Mark Heard Cincinnati, OH. A comment on my recent post on Hopi hospitality referred to “…satellite dishes on the stone and…
How We Solve Problems in Small Town America
I'm still on my summer blogging hiatus, but this artifact was too good to pass up. Seen at local post office this afternoon.
Cocktails at the Dump
My father in-law, Ron, tells me a story of what life was like when he moved his young family (my wife not yet born) to the bucolic Southern California college…
Class Project
Recently, a friend who is conservative asked me: "What should be the next great project for conservatism?" I mulled this for a bit, and then the conversation quickly passed…
Benedict on Business: What’s Love Got to Do With It?
Irving, Texas. Since its beginnings with Aristotle and Plato, the study of economics has always been regarded as a branch of philosophy, a colony of politics and ethics. But all…
B.S. Degree
College graduates are certainly learning something - all that resume padding isn't worth a bucket of spit when all the imaginary jobs that kept people busy moving around notional financial…
“On the Grid”: When Electricity (and Other Things) Came to the Countryside
“Come in and look,” Quintín urged me, as he disappeared with a shuffle through the low doorway in his adobe house. I got up from the wooden bench on which…
Lookin’ Out My Back Door; Or Sounds From Boo Radley’s Porch
BURNED-OVER DISTRICT, NY---Caleb has proposed this beautiful rendition of “Our Town” by Iris DeMent as the Front Porch theme song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FikZwgj89HI (Anyone not moved by it is either dead or,…
Jesse Walker, No Depressor
Jesse Walker, managing editor of Reason, is one of my favorite writers on matters cultural and political. His fugitive essays for No Depression, the magazine of American music, have just been collected…
The Red Tories and the Civic State
Phillip Blond Irving, TX. It has been sometime since I have called myself a “conservative.” It is not that any of my opinions have changed, but rather that conservatism forgot…
On Feeling “Forgotten”: Agrarian Aspirations in the Andes
“The more things change, the more they remain the same.” The villagers of Pomatambo, Ayacucho, Peru, did not coin the phrase, though it has captured their lives with eerie precision…