Culture, High & Low 729
Regarding Porn
As Mary Eberstadt has recently pointed out over at First Things, evidence is accumulating that the current day usage of pornography is taking a toll on marriages and families. And,…
What’s a Localist to Do?
Hidden Springs Lane. It’s not easy being a localist. Vladimir Putin has taken Crimea and many in the West are afraid that he has designs on the rest of Ukraine…
Of Bees and Moonshine
Hidden Springs Lane. In the spring of 2012, I started keeping bees. The first thing to notice is that people do not raise bees or herd bees. In fact, one…
The Crafting of the Fourteenth Amendment
Several years ago, after driving past the impressively proportioned Harrison County Courthouse in my hometown of Cadiz for the hundredth time, I thought I ought to stop and look and…
Rock n’ Roll, Inc: The Power Source Behind America’s Founding and its Operational Strength
It is often said that Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1839 essay, “Self Reliance”, is the real American Declaration of Independence, and to a certain extent this is true. Emerson was a…
Mumford and Suns
“For a child”, I remember our priest saying a few years ago, ”the sun rises over the barn and sets on the further side of the field”. In the next,…
Imagining Healthy Work: Why We all Have to Become Monks
This essay was originally presented at Spring Arbor University’s annual Focus series. I am speaking today not as a literature specialist, nor as a professional economist, nor as a business…
They Been Here
“You don’t say that,” my grandfather was telling me, gently but with obvious annoyance, as I’d just embarrassed him. We were walking out of a small store on a country…
The Patron Saint of Place
For several decades now, the business plan of fast-food chains has been to build restaurants with a similar design: a drive through around the back and side, an indoor playground…
What I Saw at the High School Speech Meet
Here in northwest Indiana, I agreed to be a judge for a recent regional speech meet, partly because our middle daughter was a contestant herself and partly because I love…
A Man’s Home Is His Castle
Hidden Springs Lane. After too long, I finally got around to watching The Castle (1997), a film recommended by FPR’s Jeff Polet. It’s a film you probably haven’t heard of…
Sometimes a Garden is Just a Garden
To the left of our Southern California driveway is a little plot of land, 400-500 square feet. Some homeowners just pave over a space like this, to add another parking…
Slow Growth and Living Form
Everything seeks its own perfection or completion, and, moreover, seeks this perfection in a way proper to itself. Since both the end sought and the way of seeking are attuned…
In Praise of Mediocrity
Berwyn, PA. Everyone knows G.K. Chesterton's aphorism that, if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly. Dappled Things writer Karen Ullo has deepened our understanding of that…
Citizens, Traitors, Misanthropes, and Cosmopolitans
What is it about the modern world that causes us to forget that every choice comes with a cost? The answer cannot be that modern men obsess on wish-fulfillment; ancient…
There’s Equality, and There’s Equality
In one of my favorite movies, John Ford's How Green Was My Valley, a family of coal miners is faced with the prospect of lower wages handed out by the…
McClaughry Memoir: The Thousand Points of Light
The following is the final installment of John McClaughry’s memoir, Promoting Civil Society Among the Heathen. See the previous chapter here. 8. George H.W. Bush and the Thousand Points of Light Inheriting…
Real Presences
Hidden Springs Lane. What’s the deal with Smart Phones? Go to any public gathering and most of the young people (and some of the not-so-young) are clearly more interested in…
Possessive Individualism: Can We Really Own Ourselves?
The bedrock principle of all Liberalism, whether of the Right or the Left, is Locke’s assertion that “every man has a Property in his own Person.” If is from this…
What You Need to Know about Dana Gioia
Dana Gioia has spent his career making metaphors: drawing disparate things together to reveal the breadth and depth of aesthetic experience, but doing so in a way that has frequently…
A Semester of Teaching Sustainability
[Cross-Posted to In Medias Res] The semester has come to an end here at Friends University, and students are leaving campus for their holiday break. Right now I'm grading, and…
The Liberal Arts and the Educational Technology of Language
THE PRESIDENT HAS AN ASSIGNMENT FOR YOU: This is what the bold text on the whitehouse.gov website tells us as it proudly heralds a new national “Student Film Contest”. Next…
McClaughry Memoir: Ford and Carter
The following is the third installment of John McClaughry’s memoir, Promoting Civil Society Among the Heathen. See the previous chapters here and here. 5. Ford and the Ethnics Gerald Ford became…