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...
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...
The Wonderfully (if Perhaps Insufficiently) Radical Bill McKibben
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,...
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 tools make us.”
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 own communities.
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...
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...
The Monkey in the Margin: History, Tradition, and Transgression
he early scholastic notion of revelation was more dynamic than the modern one. Revelation does not occur, in the medieval understanding, once and for...
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...