Place. Limits. Liberty.
Join us for FPR’s 2025 Conference on “Work and Leisure”

Articles 355

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…
October 6, 2023

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…
October 4, 2023

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…
September 29, 2023

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.
September 27, 2023

The College Diploma Shakedown

The aim is to get young people, of all backgrounds and races, on their feet with as little fuss and expense as we can, regardless of whether their families can…
September 26, 2023

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…

Bill Kauffman in Conversation

Bill Kauffman, author of multiple books including Poetry Night at the Ballpark and long the closing speaker at FPR conferences, talks about the origins of Front Porch Republic and his…
John Murdock
September 24, 2023

An Empty Room of One’s Own

There are things that a full room can do for us. It can reassure us. It can offer comfort. It can offer luxury and pleasant distractions. A full room can…
September 21, 2023

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)…
September 18, 2023

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…
September 14, 2023

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…

Perseverance and Grace: Or, Why I Don’t Deserve a Damn Bit of Credit for my Life

I’ve found that in perplexing or challenging circumstances, “why?” is a boring question. We like why. The leadership guru Simon Sinek asks us to start with why. It’s a popular…
September 13, 2023

Camping and Homemaking

You can’t actually get to utopia; it only seems like you can because it looms so large. I think it’s better to start wherever you are, and ask what it…
September 11, 2023

Why Pursue an Education?

The course I am teaching is part of the university’s core curriculum. Core comes from the Latin word for “heart,” I told my students. The same Latin root, cor, gives…

A Saintly Character Seen Through a Glass Darkly: A Review of Walking with Father Vincent

Mr. McNabb recognizes the central passion of Fr. Vincent: his deep love for Christ, expressed through a severe asceticism, a total devotion to traditional Catholic doctrine and social teaching, a…

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…

The Year We Went Inorganic

When my wife and I started our rural homestead, we were suburbanites with a lot of ideas. For one, we’d do everything organically. No question. Second, we’d endeavor to only…

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.
August 31, 2023

Rooted in Reality

We were all, adults and children alike, doing things that really mattered to the whole free world, and we’d better get on with doing them, every day, all the time.…
August 30, 2023

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…
Seth Wieck
August 28, 2023

Little League, Then and Now

But that love for baseball didn’t mean that we organized our lives around the sport, or that any parent with a Little Leaguer had baseball scholarships in mind. It didn’t…