Articles 356
The Leavening Effect of Seeking the Truth: A Review of Untrustworthy
In Untrustworthy, Kristian sets an objective for Christians to be faithful, factual, and fair. In some cases, this must be practiced in a somewhat extreme environment. What do we do…
Two Yells for Football?
If beer and football are just the modern bread and circuses of a declining empire, then these are spectacles best avoided. However, if such gridiron microcosms of the human experience…
The Elephant in the Formula Can: Medicine’s Overlooked Influence on Breastfeeding Failure
To acknowledge the harm that has been inflicted on uncountable human lives is to invite doubt about the underpinnings of our technologically sophisticated world. That is an uncomfortable and lonely…
Stumbling toward Vulnerable Interdependence: A Review of The Ink Black Heart
Not only is this a literary accomplishment, it’s an example that both Rowling and her critics – and, by extension, all of us who wish to live in compassionate community…
The Republic of a Restaurant
We sense that there’s more at stake in a restaurant visit than simply gustatorial or financial gain. Eating out, as Plato might have observed, is a chance to reinforce or…
Along the Garden Path of my Fathers
They know their neighbors; they know their village; they know their land. They have their own vernacular that everyone who lives there understands because their father and mother taught them,…
The Cake of Many Layers: Walking a City through Time
To walk a place is to open the door to the possibility that you will grow to love it. With time, you could get to know it in an intimate…
A Pathway to Peace: Hope in The Need to Be Whole
Berry, with an insistence that defies despair, is still carrying out his calling. He notes the discouraging odds his kind has faced not just now but in the past. Imperial…
Identity and Integration: A Whole Lot of Wendell Berry
Berry connects these major themes from The Hidden Wound to other themes from his many works—work, agrarianism, industrialization, citizenship, affection, and place. In so doing, he offers his readers a…
Seeking Clarity: Wendell Berry’s New Book on Race
These are not compassionate times—not in the public square, and not in all too much of our increasingly chaotic private life, though I think many people are trying. Mr. Berry…
Practicing Authentic Conversation
If I attempt to follow Berry’s underwater route too closely, I’m afraid I will drown. Rather than try to summarize it, then, I will instead distill from it a set…
Patriotic Work: Wendell Berry’s The Need to be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice
No one can be whole alone; no one can be free alone. Rather, Berry holds that “[t]o be whole and free is…to be at home in a place and in…
Walking alongside Wisdom: A review of Learning the Good Life
Lying on a bed at 2:00 AM idly flipping through a book while texting a friend isn’t likely to be a transformative experience. Treating education as a hoop to jump…
Not Vanity
I worked alongside Dad many times. I have also worked alongside other men and women with a disposition towards work like my father’s. They do their labor with skill, creativity,…
The Jeffersonians on the Margins of NatCon
What is being outlined here is fundamentally a Wendell Berry conservatism: our solutions are not global in nature. They might not even be national in nature. It asks individuals to…
Flowers and Dust: Summer in The Great Gatsby
The summer, its heat and its flowers, has finally been put to death. But the dust remains. George Wilson is covered in it, alive and dead, and as Nick told…
The Dignity of Craft: In Praise of Mortise & Tenon
Beyond writing about craftmanship and antique furniture, M&T explores ideas about human work in a technological age, work in the context of community, and the relationship between craft and tradition.…
Focus on the Local: A Conversation with Carl Trueman
Though his recent bestselling books trace the roots of several deeply entrenched beliefs about human nature and our world that have led us into bewildering territory, Trueman concludes both books…
Uprooted
We are the blind, each calling out that which we are so sure we see. No longer aware that the sight we now marvel at is little more than one…
Ride Into the Day: Images That Remain
“Choose you this day whom you will serve,” the Old Testament leader, Joshua, charged his fellow Jews. And that choice, while crucial, while fundamental, must also be borne out during…
Perspectives of History: Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle
Turmoil is present throughout Dick’s world, and this is clearly reflected in each of the three characters discussed here. Tagomi, Wegner, and Childan’s lives are greatly influenced by events precipitated…
The This-ness of This Place: Introducing Belle Point Press and Mid/South Anthology
Raised in Eastern Oklahoma with roots older than living memory in the Natural State, we look forward to supporting new authors while connecting readers with the long thread of our…
The Insistent Cough of Grace: Remembering Frederick Buechner
His books are not a diminishment of historic and intellectual Christianity. They are a translation of Aquinas, Barth, Calvin, and the rest into the language we all speak innately but…
It’s Been a Fun Ride
Venus’s love for her sister, and Serena’s recognition of it, has also shown us the transcendent power of family, the possibility of forgetting the accolades and the worldly recognition and…