Articles 356
Democracy’s Despotic Drift
A court decision that returns to the people the power to decide the pressing questions of the day could be considered fatal to democracy only in an age as Orwellian…
The Wicked Common Good: An All Hallows’ Eve Meditation
The spirit of community that arises from festivals such as Halloween is a common good. I suggest that it is also a great time to practice the virtues of shared…
Putting Two Things Together: Reflections on Institution Building
I came away from Steubenville, as I came away later from Grove City, with the startling idea that things are possible. Small things; local things; putting two things together, not…
Reject the Consumer: Imagining A New Identity Politics
Freeing ourselves from the corrosive Consumer identity isn’t an individual task, but a call for system change rings hollow if we are afraid of personal change. How can we imagine…
Mark Mitchell on Plutocratic Socialism
Mark Mitchell, author of Plutocratic Socialism: The Future of Private Property and the Fate of the Middle Class and President of Front Porch Republic, joins the podcast. Mitchell and Murdock…
Back to the Bottom-Line (Apocalyptically and Practically Speaking) at the Land Institute
Wendell Berry has written endlessly about the goodness of local work; if, for Berry, the goodness of such work is connected to agrarian virtue, while for Jackson it is connected…
Family over FIRE
What is the goal of life? Cultural messaging has tricked many of us into thinking it is wealth and status, or career advancement. For us, it is the project of…
On Scruton and Settling: From the Editor
Scruton, from that day in France until the end, could never situate himself in the fugitive and cloistered comfort of the academic and intellectual orthodoxy.
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…
