Articles 355
A Tale of Three “Porchers”
We live in fractured days, lacking in harmony, civility, and comity. “Comity,” an old word for courtesy and kindness, is related etymologically to the Sanskrit word for “smile.” As it…
Lessons on Limiting Liberty from Hannah and Burley Coulter
Wendell Berry's fiction shows what relationships look like with skin on—how real relationships are enacted between people. As the characters who inhabit the fictional town Port William interact, they demonstrate…
Learning to Read in 2023
Why does my third child, my little son whom I mention above, need me to be in physical contact with him while he reads? Because it helps him feel warm…
How to Buy a Dumb Phone (and How Not to Use It): A Reflection on FPR 2023
I did some research with the help of a “dumb phone finder” which told me the functions, network compatibilities, and reviews of the available flip phones and other simplicity-oriented devices.…
Off the Beaten Path with County Highway
County Highway is not county-specific. It’s for all of America outside major cities. Well, outside of New York and Los Angeles, for sure. In the second issue, there’s a piece…
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…
Paul Kingsnorth and “The Blizzard of the World”
Paul Kingsnorth delivered the keynote address at the 2023 FPR conference in Madison, Wisconsin. With help from a diverse band of fellow travelers including Jewish-Canadian songwriter Leonard Cohen, Anglo-Catholic social…
Only Men
The children’s pastor made his point about who was serious or not when it came to serving God. He could have closed the service, and I would have been out…
Paul Kingsnorth’s Opening Prayer
Paul Kingsnorth, the keynote speaker at the 2023 FPR conference in Madison, Wisconsin, begins things with a bonus talk on the power of prayer in a desecrated western world. Highlights …
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…
Seeds
These days invasive species in my home are once again in a spiral of negative attention. As usual, the dandelion is ignored, except by children seeing the world as the…
On Writing Oklahoma City
What if you can’t live in the place where your imagination feels at home? What if you can’t ever stay in one place long enough to grow roots? What if…
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…
Modernity is a Dirty Diaper
Modernity has become permanently liquid; it no longer seeks solid replacements to the pre-modern world but finds greater value in transience, not just of institutions and things, but of human…
Fly Fishing and Henry Bugbee
We can never ossify the world because it is always moving and changing like the river. Yet we can open ourselves to this ever fluctuating movement. This is manifested in…
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…
Democracies Need Shared Literature
Before we totally condemn the Athenians as selfish, entertainment-addicted bad citizens—which, to be fair, they sometimes (or often?) were, just like us—it is worth considering what such shared democratic spaces…
Against the Ministry-Industrial Complex, For the Local Membership
Criticizing the ministry-industrial complex does not mean professional resources have no place in ministry. It is not so much their use as their guiding role in congregational life that prevents…
Fear and Hope in the Hay Field
We need to love smaller, more energy-efficient houses and cars in order to love people more. We need to give up much of our casual oil consumption for leisure. We…
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…
Alexis de Tocqueville and American Exceptionalism: Exegeting Tocqueville
Whether America ever was or is exceptional is a matter for further discussion; but Tocqueville’s own estimate of America in the early nineteenth century was mixed at best and negative…
Map-Burning
My point is not to get lost in conventional debate here. But seeking to heal from the culture war, I want to uncover the bodies of my neighbors, which industrial…
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…
The Art(s) of Liberation
None of us gets to choose where we land. But if we cannot choose the times in which we live, we can choose how we live in the time we…
