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Articles 356

Are Americans Better Off?

Let’s just say you’d better have great discipline and a very rich interior life if you expect to be happy amid great affluence. If this is true of individuals, that…
May 17, 2023

Silage and the Silence of the Corncrake

I’ve been talking to elderly friends here in the Irish countryside about what they used to do when the sun shone. The answer, of course, was that they made hay.

One Homeschool Year: A Local Story in Four Seasons

One learning outcome I had in mind for this academic year was to teach all students to close the bathroom door when using the facilities. Alas, we seem to have…

Composition as the Art of Loading Brush

Instead, we have the opportunity to spur students to true and healing composition through the exercise of creativity, precision, care, and nuance. The best analytical writing assignments in the future…

The New House, The New Life

I fear that neither liberals nor most self-styled conservatives want to reexamine the habits, both economic and sexual, that have impoverished the working class, set the middle class on the…

Antonin Scalia: A Man for All Seasons

Antonin Scalia’s judicial legacy was ratified on June 24, 2022 as the Supreme Court effectively overturned Roe v. Wade with the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision.

Get Off the Bench: Host a Cocktail Party

As someone who squirms every time I see a couple or family all quietly tapping their cell phones, a room of twenty people talking is a beautiful sight. It is…

Good Conversation and the Talking Cure: A Review

One cannot really have a book about conversation alone. Conversation is so much a fruit of individual persons and their relationship to one another, that a book about that fruit…

A Journey to Right Worship: A Review of Learning to Love

I was encouraged by Sosler and all the many ways he connected love and knowledge to the journey that a rightly ordered education invites students to take. The infilling of…

Prophetic History: A Review of A History of the Island

Contemporary sensibilities tend to prefer the nihilist abyss to such salvation, even as we pathetically pursue the latest "cure" for that emptiness—be that radical politics, surgical revisions to our anatomy,…

An Extraordinary School for Girls: Learning the Things You Wish Grandma Taught You

It is daunting to envision running a pleasant, blessed household. This is why we're not meant to do it alone. Women are meant to flock together, with their words and…

Cyber-Sophistry, or How ChatGPT Unmasks the Emptiness of AI

AI is the culmination of an ideological fantasy of elite control, woven into the very infrastructure of commonplace media technologies. When it gets used to talking to us, we may…
April 26, 2023

On Milosz, Exile, and Humane Art

Was it his commitment to truth in art that ultimately preserved his faith? Perhaps—God may have worked in that mysterious way. He seemed, late in life, to come to an…

The Power of Place: Payphones

The value in seeing payphones is the way it develops a practice of seeing. So often we are driving or walking down streets, unaware of what serves us no purpose…

Bono’s Search for Home

To hear that message of tough love for which he seems to be yearning, those who represent the church to Bono will have to have the courage to break through…

A Sabbath Reflection on Artificial Intelligence & the Human Body

Will we distance ourselves from machines that, like carnival attractions, buzz and ping and light up with those grand prizes of ease and efficiency so that we might remember Christ’s…

Man Without A Village: A Beast Or A God

Genuine community only arises when we need one another, and to the extent that we can fool ourselves into thinking we’re self-sufficient, we will find ourselves living in Frankenstein communities…

That Dog Won’t Hunt!

Whether hunting or watching TV at home, you will never be alone with a good dog by your side.  Dixie and I may never get another bird, but a bird…

Learning to Love the Brazos with John Graves

With some little local knowledge now in mind, I too may, day by day, attune myself to the Way, How ever imperfectly I go about What I am striving to…

The Power of Place: Northern Exposure and South Side

Places shape us and provide the contours of our communities. And despite the grittier dramas, the grip that a place has on us is not always all about past crimes…

Tree Tipping

Many Marches ago, a tree cracked in half, and my life began to change into what it’s become today.

A Plunge into the Mythic Wood: A Review of Seren of the Wildwood

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…

‘Art Will Touch Lives’: An Aging Farmer Adds a New Dimension to his Ministry

Ralph's art might never grace the walls of collectors or galleries or museums in his lifetime, but he knows from experience art’s potential to draw crowds that can encounter the…

Updating Homer for Sensitive Modern Readers: A Tongue-in-Cheek Proposal

As we reflect on the importance of this work in ensuring that Homer remains appropriate and enjoyable for future readers, we can surely agree that it is fully worth it.