The Nightstand 450
No Pawn in the Game: Fannie Lou Hamer, Mississippi, and the Struggle for Human Rights
Like Bob Dylan, Hamer’s life was marked by protest and songs of protest. Her protests, however, grew from her personal experience on the ground in Mississippi. Kate Clifford Larson’s Walk…
A Right to Imperfection
Lauck is unambiguous that he is engaged in a project of “civic retrieval,” to “remind us of our ideals and how many battles we have already won” and promote the…
Delighting in the Great Possessions
Still, Berry maintains, the particularly Amish ways of working, rejoicing, and relaxing work together to promote the “great possessions” enumerated by Kline in his essays. “The lives of fellow creatures…
The Smallest of Seeds: A Review of Fragile Neighborhoods
For Kaplan, when comparing two countries and asking why one has succeeded where the other has failed, what matters most is not national policies but “societal dynamics—the strength of the…
The Cozy Loneliness of Owl at Home
children are inchoately aware of the sadness of the world; it’s another of the human mysteries that they already have access to. Lobel’s genius is in choosing for his subject…
A Humanist Manifesto of Our Times: A Review of The Soul of Civility
In her introduction, Hudson calls The Soul of Civility “a humanistic manifesto.” And she’s right: the book is steeped in humanism, in more ways than one. First, Hudson underscores the…
Walking the Tightrope: A Review of Why Not Moderation?
Liberal values and institutions have failed, that we now require passionate, extreme activists to accomplish what is necessary to address these failings, and that these radical activists must mount campaigns…
Is the Internet to Blame for the Decline of Literary Fiction? Possibly, But Maybe Not in the Way That We Think
It is not solely (or perhaps even primarily) about there being more hours of work and therefore less time for reading. It is about the possibility of work hovering over…
Wisdom is Born of Wonder: A Review of Wonder Strikes
A good number of Christian scholars draw first and foremost on Thomas Aquinas for their accounts of beauty. Desmond, though he’s aware of and engages with the Thomistic tradition, has…
The Power of Place: The Daytripper with Chet Gardner
Daytripper reminds people that you don’t have to go far to see something new. Even small towns have a special local food or watering hole. Every place has history. And…
Happiness Fit for Humans: A Review of A Web of Our Own Making
Barba-Kay argues that we tend to resolve our cognitive dissonance by outsourcing all the choices that do matter and consoling ourselves with a plethora of choices that don't.
The Pantheon of Ancient Wisdom
The liberty and justice which republics are erected to safeguard requires, as Milton and the Founders knew, a moral, virtuous, and religious citizenry. Without this moral and virtuous spirit, the…
Taste and See: A Review of Christian Poetry in America Since 1940
While many recognize the limits of human language and the ways it has sometimes been used to harm, they see language as capable of naming (or, at least, gesturing toward)…
Voices From The Past: The Humanistic Letters of Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More
Babbitt and More advocated the study of the humanities as a tool for the shaping of human souls toward virtue, helping confront what Babbitt characterized as the “civil war of…
Batter My Heart Three-Person’d God–Break, Blow, Burn, and Make New: Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer Re-Members the Poetic as an Opportunity to Consider Redemption
Oppenheimer replies to him “Why I chose the name is not clear, but I know what thoughts were in my mind. There is a poem of John Donne, written just…
Hope for a Humane Agricultural Future: A Review of Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future
The ecomodernist approach of Regenesis relies on a mechanistic understanding of humanity. The presumption is that humans are merely fleshy machines that can adapt to flourish in any environment as…
Pears, Asparagus, and Contemporary Psychotherapy
Even in our modern age, then, it seems that Trueman’s “modern self” as narcissistic echo chamber, unconstrained by relationships with family and community, has not entirely triumphed after all.
A Conversation with Katy Carl on Place, Fiction, and Contemplation
Conjuring makes me think of force and manipulation, which as writers we have to forswear. Readers will either notice they're being manipulated and throw our books aside—or maybe worse, they…
We Were a Peculiar People Once
What comes out is a story of a small group of Reformed Canadian Baptists who are rural, hardworking, self-educated (largely by reading the Bible), and persistent in becoming holy, but…
Back to the New Jeffersonianism: A Review of Tyranny, Inc.
By now, no one should be shocked when a conservative says something unkind about the free market. Still, those unfamiliar with any right-wing tradition predating Reagan react to someone like…
Private Tyrants, Public Remedies: A Review of Sohrab Ahmari’s Tyranny, Inc.
The “freedom to walk away” from at-will employment seems, in many cases, to be the “freedom” to launch yourself into the unsteady winds of “joblessness and financial misery,” particularly if…
Taste and See: A Review of The Liberating Arts
Perhaps people defended the liberal arts to me, and I was too dense to hear, but I truly cannot remember anyone ever setting out a vision for the liberal arts
Liberalism, Postliberalism, and Localism: A Review of Justice By Means of Democracy
Allen notes that in ancient political thought, “the people” or demos referred not to the whole but to one part of the whole political community, namely the poor. The question…
Toward Philosophy of Birth? A Review of Natality
For Banks, the glory of natality is not that it is a passage into the world for something or someone else, but that birth is a tool for our own…