The Barbershop

Eisenhower’s Grief

Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower found solace in their dead son’s favorite color

Twenty Years with Philip

The difference a pen pal can make

Roosevelt’s Grief

Theodore Roosevelt never recovered from the loss of his son in WWI

The Hidden Sorrow of Valentine’s Day

Surviving the holiday without our loved ones

The Census Taker In a Church Pew, Part 4

Yet our little sister does not play the victim. She presses on, a sufferer who labors as best she can while shadows and thorns press in against her. And she prays to God like the woman persistent in her case when contending with an unjust judge; and since God is just, since He is the Good and Righteous Judge of All the Earth, our little sister’s hope remains “deeper still.”

On Bars in Church Basements

Might our local faith communities support such cultivation of virtue, while also restoring what might again be a hub of parish social life?

Housekeeping: The Unhinged Edition

I guess it’s time to sweep. Again. And then again. But we can embrace the gentler side of housekeeping. Besides, if you leave be those spiders in the corners, they might yet catch some other bugs for you, performing an essential service.

Southern Hospitality in the New Machine Age

It’s not perhaps that the world doesn’t need change, but that as anti-Machine author Paul Kingsnorth put it in these pages, “the first work is changing yourself.” We have to live where we’re placed, and for Eve at the Meat and Malt, right now that means continuing to serve the guests who entreat her for sustenance, despite the intrusion of the impersonal into her hospitality.

Petroleum and Me

I wish environmentalists would better understand that there are no mustache-twirling billionaires drilling and digging and burning oil just for the hell and the money of it. Like money, petroleum is a very effective way to get the things we all want at the best convenience. And those in the oil industry are simply happy to oblige us and profit by their labors.

Small Plastic Gods: On the Tabletop Renaissance

Tabletop games put something in our twitchy, swipe-hungry fingers other than a digital device—a hand of cards, a pair of dice, a plastic Zeus. And since others have put down their phones too, we can look out over those cards into a human face, a present human face.