Articles 356
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…
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…
Conservatives Should Take Another Look at Cohousing
Maybe we can just call it something else, like, “Living with family and friends in a neighborhood designed to encourage the building of social capital, relying on them in real…
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…
Kayaking with Lambs
The newest book from FPR Books is Brian Miller's Kayaking with Lambs. Enjoy this excerpt, and then pick up a copy of the book. This life is not what was…
