Place. Limits. Liberty.
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Articles 356

The Call of Farm Life: The Challenge of Constancy and Fidelity

While in my current brief stint in D.C., I am often given a puzzled look when I tell someone that I am going back to the farm: “You’ve made it…

Consent to be Used or Vow to Love: a Review of Christine Emba’s Rethinking Sex

What Emba most successfully conveys throughout the entirety of her brief book is an awareness that we are never “our own.” This is certainly right, but she does not go…

Paradigms of Math and Non-quantifiable Values

The dominant lens through which our world views mathematics is undeniable. Yet as we careen down this path, we feel a dearth of important and weighty things in our life–community,…
April 6, 2022

Farming as Poetical: Masanobu Fukuoka and Wendell Berry on Agriculture’s Poetical Form

Poetry is the creative ordering of words to bring forth the fruits of the human heart and intellect. The poet is called to lose himself, so to speak, in listening…

Bridging the Gap between Bitter Conservatives and Glib Liberals

The day will come when parents in the poorest communities will be able to say that they cannot imagine a better place to raise their children than in their neighborhoods…

Actions Speak Louder than Words, or a Midwestern Accent

On return trips to Illinois, or when talking to relatives on the phone, I can tell the difference. Life is a little slower where I grew up, and the people…
March 31, 2022

Spaces for Speech on Today’s College Campus

Reviving campus newspapers and radio stations and student-led clubs, and putting resources behind them, could create more space for speech, help foster campus community, and model a level of comfort…

Found in the Cosmos

People with cosmic self-respect can reconcile themselves with the possibility that there is no conductor, and that after death comes only silence. And they can muster the strength to keep…

Into the Whirlpool: Is Secession a Solution to Our Woes?

Can a renewed or more explicitly acknowledged federalism keep us from the whirlpool of secession? We should all hope so. But what if we have already been sucked in?

Jessica Hooten Wilson, Doug Sikkema, and Christine Norvell on Rescuing Socrates

One gets the clear sense from Montás that these voices from the past are not just texts with trivial information, but real presences, real friends who have had a significant…
March 23, 2022

Liberal Learning for All: A Review of Rescuing Socrates

Montás deserves great credit for illuminating the perverse priorities of American higher education throughout Rescuing Socrates. It must be admitted, however, that the book suffers from occasional missteps. A fuller…
March 21, 2022

Tending a Rooted Congregation: A Review of The Power of Place

If “church” is the body of Christ in its local manifestation, where each and every member is connected to one another and everyone knows each other’s names and stories, have…

Localism, Intentionality, and Utopia (Socialist or Otherwise)

If you're looking intentionally at your locality, wanting to make it more just and more civil and more communal--with, say, better food practices, more responsible energy usage, and social arrangements…

Seeing the Midwest New: A Review of The Everlasting People

It is perhaps that personal search for contentment that makes this book a notable contribution to the literature on the American racial problem: Milliner’s “penitent Midwest regionalism” is first of…

Allowing a Little More Room for Subsidiarity: A Review of Adrian Vermeule’s Common Good Constitutionalism

Harvard Law School produces many of our future rulers, and it may be better for us if aspiring federal administrators learn from Vermeule at least the presumptive desirability of honoring…

Attentional Arts and Beholding Beauty

Contemplation of God is paying attention to what demands one’s attention—more than information discovered or expression felt. Contemplating art can be a means, a sort of preparatory practice, of contemplating…

Dos Passos: The Modernist Path That Wasn’t

We have lost something of great value in forgetting the work of John Dos Passos. He was a man who knew who deserved his sympathy, and his work followed his…
March 7, 2022

We Should All Stop Talking About Harvard So Much

It is not because I bear Harvard any ill will that I wish we could all just shut up about it already. Rather, I am concerned that our national obsession…

In Defense of Nature Writing

Perhaps this, above all, is the work of nature writing: to bring the wild and the domestic together and to reveal the mystery at the heart of both. That Springer’s…

Athos for All

I have Orthodox friends that find our little chapel concerning, and they are certainly right that a casual use of icons for decorative enhancement is to be avoided. Still, their…

Ayn Rand: Russian Nihilist

Aaron Weinacht’s book is a needed corrective to the public misperception of Ayn Rand as radical capitalist. She was, first and foremost, a radical nihilist. Insofar as Rand embraced capitalism,…

The Geography of the Future

At a time when ideologies and slogans often pull us away from the difficult task of finding realistic solutions and building a world together, the approach of these authors reveals…

Principles Over Power: Lessons from Bush and Nixon

If there is to be the equivalent of a Reagan following President Biden, he or she will face a more difficult task than the one leaders faced in 1980. Reagan…
John Murdock
February 21, 2022

Is Progressivism Sustainable?

We cannot sustain the rhetoric of conservation and sustainability if our society remains fixated on ideas of economic and technological progress. We cannot become a people who cherish the land…