Articles 356
The Roots of America’s Falling Fertility
Human fertility is not the root of our problems. It is but one symptom of a deeper, more elemental problem.
The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: A Review
The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self draws on a deep reservoir of erudition rather than the shallow puddle of populism.
From God’s Dark Materials, Comes Jack’s Dark Arts
The longing created in the reader to want to know Jack is not easily articulated. It is difficult to admit that though we love happy endings, we are inexplicably drawn…
Men in the Field: The Farming Stories of Leo L. Ward, C.S.C.
The best stories in the volume offer Cather-esque explorations of the links between place and people. The stories are remarkable for their dense layers, for their social, psychological, and emotional…
Reading Petrarch’s Secretum with College Sophomores
When Petrarch uses Augustine to call himself out for being bound and dragged down by the “chains of love and glory,” students are forced to consider what it is they…
Live Not by Lies from Neither the Left nor Right
Who wins in a contest between Woke Soft Totalitarians and Fringe Right Conspiracists? Nobody. But there will be many losers, not least among them Christians who fail to stand for…
Education and Democracy in Disembodied Times: Emerson and Dewey on Humane Technology
In an age of knee-jerk innovation, the warnings articulated by Emerson and Dewey are more needed than ever. They advocated for applied knowledge, but they also insisted such technology must…
The Front Porch and the American Dream
Perhaps, just perhaps, COVID has restored some of the beauty and desirability of the front porch.
A Pastoral Inheritance: James Rebanks and a Tribute to Our Late Cathedral Sacristan
There is much wisdom contained in English Pastoral for suffering churches. If the last fifty years have shown that innovation and modernization aren’t the solution to our ill-health, they have…
Ted Lasso as Parish Priest
Ted Lasso offers a compelling model of a good parish priest: this fictional football coach exemplifies how to lead others with care.
Grandmother’s Wisdom
When I hear some folk wisdom that I would have previously dismissed as backwards or ridiculous, I now look for the guardrails it establishes and what they might be protecting.
Celebrity, Success, and the Kingdom of Heaven
Atlanta, GA. It’s been a rough few years for celebrity evangelicals. In the summer of 2019, Joshua Harris—the Calvinist pastor who became a national sensation in the late ‘90s with…
Prospects for Localism (and a New Podcast)
This recording also serves as the inaugural episode of the Brass Spittoon, a new podcast from the Front Porch Republic. We’ll chew on issues timeless and timely, with a focus…
Remembered Relationships: A Review of John Berryman and Robert Giroux: A Publishing Friendship
As the late historian John Lukacs would insist, all stories as we know them and retell them are remembered. This means they are, inherently, personal. John Berryman and Robert Giroux:…
Limits, Risk Aversion, and Technocracy
What about Lasch’s analysis of limits? I have in mind two contemporary cultural developments, the rise of technocracy and our extreme aversion to risk, that seem to challenge certain aspects…
Finding Rest in the Immanent Frame: a Review of Tish Harrison Warren’s Prayer in the Night
This prayer, which enumerates what Warren calls “a taxonomy of vulnerability,” epitomizes how, far from being irrelevant or obscure, the mysteries of God fill the hardest parts of life.
Playing the Long Game: A Review of Abraham Lincoln’s Statesmanship
The Lincoln that Schaff puts forth cultivated liberal democracy by placing limits and crafting public consensus. In order to see Lincoln in a new light, Schaff applies Aristotle’s ideas of…
A Conservative for Our Time
In a letter he wrote to his grandchildren, Udall challenged them to "Support all endeavors that promise a better life for the inhabitants of our planet. Cherish sunsets, wild creations…
Poor Little Lamb
Colin Phelps is not the first to discover a graced thing in college: it’s the unchosen self-knowledge that is most liberating.
Human Interaction: The Most Essential Business
Scotsdale, AZ. With a vaccine on the horizon, it is time to think hard about how our country should look when the pandemic ends. The state of America under the…
Ravining
I have spent considerable time in ravines, drawn to them by an appetite for domestic exploration: though they worry me, I have also been drawn to them; I traverse the…
Sacred Reality: The Augustinian Vision of Goodness in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead
Robinson presents us with an encounter: a participatory, embodied experience; a blessed and broken reality; the sacraments. And from this encounter, we receive courageous eyes to see the precious things…
The End of Childhood Play
Too many children grow up learning no lessons, organising no peers, and exploring no territory, unless it be shifting electrons around a screen, and the screen becomes their world.
A Time for Local Democracy
In these days of Twitter democracy, when platforms for political expression are so accessible, it sometimes seems, paradoxically, that citizens have little actual say in decision making about our country’s…
