The Nightstand 450
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…
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…
Infinite Baseball review
The official scorekeeper for my sixth-grade baseball team was our catcher’s mom. Sometimes she couldn’t be there, and it would fall to our coach to keep score. Sometimes he didn’t…
Without Athens, There is No R.E.M.: The Loss of Local Cultures
In high school, I had a friend who simply loathed Michael Stipe. This was in the late nineties, at the tail end of R.E.M.’s cultural dominance, but the band was…
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…
What Are People For? Control or Love?
The arguments that Deneen and Shatzer advance are really two sides of the same coin; as one interpreter of Marshall McLuhan put it, “We make our tools, and then our…
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…
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…
“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…
Fighting Demons, Liberal and Otherwise
We like to flatter ourselves that we live in extraordinary times. Every four years, for example, we are told that this presidential election is “the most important of our life.” Those of…
Toward a Somewhere Suburb
In his 2017 book The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics, British commentator David Goodhart seeks to understand the recent populist moments that have shaped the…
What Urban Liberals Might Learn From Rural Rebels
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Loka Ashwood, a rural sociologist at Auburn University, visited The Land Institute in Salina, KS, last September, and gave a presentation on her then just-published…
American Conservatism, and the Socialist Specter Which Haunts It Still
[Cross-posted to In Media Res] Back in February, Rod Dreher shared with his readers an idea for a new book: to introduce conservative Christians in America to "the warnings that…
Feeding the World from the Bottom Up
It is natural and normal, when looking at big problems, to look for big answers. Problems do not come much bigger than the subject of Eric Holt-Giménez’s new book, whose driving…
Pilgrims Longing for Home
As someone who appreciates the value of place, rootedness, and limitations on my horizon of vision, I’m afflicted with deep sense of unease as to the nature of my own…
Rethinking the Local vs. Global Divide
In Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime, Bruno Latour provides a challenging but potentially hopeful take on why climate denial continues to be a political force. For him,…
The Crisis of Love in a Global Age
Any longtime reader of Wendell Berry’s work recognizes two of the many animating forces that give his writing its emotional resonance. These two forces, these two genii loci, revolve around Berry’s approach…