The Nightstand

It’s true that we don’t yet have a colony on Mars. But countless people are living very ordinary lives and doing very ordinary things that are true, good, and beautiful.

Wendell Berry’s sprawling, uneven, brilliant, and sometimes frustrating The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice will likely not, I think,...

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 of regime analysis or prescription was the question of which part actually ruled or ought to rule on behalf of the whole.

An imagination like his, fictions like his – born from affection – may not provide us with data or answers but may help us feel “somehow more substantial and less troubled, characters more permanent.” And they may show us how we can help the land we find underfoot become a beloved, well-cared-for place. Stewart’s book goes a long way towards helping us see the world, and its people, the way Stegner hoped we could.

Community Land Trusts, at their best, are less about development and more about stewardship, creating just places for the long-term. CLTs are thus the ultimate preservationists, the developer/landowner who never abandons the property.

Popular discourse in the United States today—as well as in many places around the world—hasn’t been so open to alternatives to the liberal capitalist mainstream for close to a century.

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.

Perhaps, without silence for a reference point—something out there that reminds us of our place in the big order of things—the masters of information feel free to shade, obscure, or otherwise manipulate their messages.

Here is what Seren of the Wildwood has done for me: it’s rekindled my love of narrative poetry. Once I have read several of my old favourites, I’ll read it again, and then I’ll move on to the rest of Youmans' work. In the meantime, dear reader, put your order into Wiseblood Books and get to reading the instant your copy of Seren of the Wildwood arrives.

Reading the Lutheran Letters today, I cannot help but think about woke capitalism. The fundamental economic and cultural and human issues are obscured by clashes regarding discourse and slight gestures.