Articles 356
On Memories as a Starting Point: A Review of “Encounters” by Paul Gottfried
(An Eastern-European Reading). In a scene from a great movie called Transsiberian, a Russian traveler tells some innocent American tourists about the “Gulag” and the millions of people killed and…
Pomo’s vs. Fropo’s Revisited
I will admit that I did not keep up with all of the discussion that ensued from various blogs that tried to discern the differences between folks that write over…
Voices Against Progress: What I Learned from Genovese, Lasch, and Bradford
The following is excerpted from Paul Gottfried's Encounters: My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers, recently published by ISI Books. I met Christopher Lasch for the first…
Without Borders, Ltd.
Kearneysville, WV. Question: what do these two books have in common? A Garfield the Cat book and My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One Night Stands. Or what about these:…
Who Owns Our Jobs?
Irving, TX. We have all been trained up to the belief that jobs are something in the gift of great corporations or government bureaucracies. True, there are still places in…
Tocqueville on the Shores of Titicaca
Amid Alexis de Tocqueville’s writings on revolution in France, there is a passage that rings true for those of us who have spent time in the countryside. He observed that…
Philip Bess’s Pizza
Last week, Philip Bess - the noted Notre Dame University scholar of architecture - delivered a lecture in Washington under the auspice of the group "Conservatism on Tap." Bess's lecture…
Still’s “River of Earth”
Given domination of the Commonwealth’s institutions by progressivist ideology, it’s unsurprising how few Kentucky students and teachers are familiar with poet-novelist James Still and River of Earth (1940). After all,…
Can Health Care Be Local?
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Wichita, KS Over the past couple of weeks, I've written a few things on the current debate over health care reform. A couple of smart…
Advice For Up-And-Comers
Claremont, CA. I spoke last week at the New Jersey Governor’s School for Public Issues, a (mostly) state-funded summer program for civic-minded students about to enter their senior year in…
The Eccentricity of the Saints
Devon, PA. Earlier this week, some devout and worthy reader on the Porch proposed G.K. Chesterton as the patron saint of the Front Porch Republic. Aside from heartily endorsing the…
Hospitality and the Hopi: Fragmentation and Hope
“Pray for the foothills,/goatherds and windmills/and satellite dishes” – Mark Heard Cincinnati, OH. A comment on my recent post on Hopi hospitality referred to “…satellite dishes on the stone and…
Cocktails at the Dump
My father in-law, Ron, tells me a story of what life was like when he moved his young family (my wife not yet born) to the bucolic Southern California college…
Class Project
Recently, a friend who is conservative asked me: "What should be the next great project for conservatism?" I mulled this for a bit, and then the conversation quickly passed…
Characteristics of the Modest Republic
Erie, PA. Readers of the Front Porch Republic are likely looking for new ways to conceive of American politics and culture. They are in search of alternative categories to the…
Benedict on Business: What’s Love Got to Do With It?
Irving, Texas. Since its beginnings with Aristotle and Plato, the study of economics has always been regarded as a branch of philosophy, a colony of politics and ethics. But all…
“On the Grid”: When Electricity (and Other Things) Came to the Countryside
“Come in and look,” Quintín urged me, as he disappeared with a shuffle through the low doorway in his adobe house. I got up from the wooden bench on which…
The Strange Lament of a Bohemian Conservative
“Half-knowledge is more victorious than whole knowledge: it understands things as being more simple than they are and this renders its opinions more easily intelligible and more convincing.” --Nietzsche Several…
Lookin’ Out My Back Door; Or Sounds From Boo Radley’s Porch
BURNED-OVER DISTRICT, NY---Caleb has proposed this beautiful rendition of “Our Town” by Iris DeMent as the Front Porch theme song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FikZwgj89HI (Anyone not moved by it is either dead or,…
When Lawyers Catch the French Disease
Devon, PA. No observer of American culture grasped its implicit contents better than did Alexis de Tocqueville, and no one since has better grasped its potencies as they have actually…
What’s in a Name?
Holland, MI. I live in the only part of the country where the “V” section is the largest part of the phone book. When your landscape contains burgs with names…
The Red Tories and the Civic State
Phillip Blond Irving, TX. It has been sometime since I have called myself a “conservative.” It is not that any of my opinions have changed, but rather that conservatism forgot…
Family Matters
Kearneysville, WV. The debate, such as it is, between liberals and conservatives frequently centers on issues pertaining to that oldest of institutions, the family. On the one hand, there are…
Buddhist Economics: The Eight-Fold Path
Cold Spring, N.Y. In order to get people thinking rightly about economists, Fritz Schumacher used to tell the story of an architect, a priest, and an economist talking about which…