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Articles 356

The Storyteller and the Cop

It’s time to walk out of our artificially-lit caves and get as close as we possibly can to real presence and real powerlessness, wherever and however these things come into…

Thinking Like a Lamb

Today I make a COVID resolution: I will learn to be more lamby-like, as Carl would say: to think like a lamb.

Localism and the Church

As a student of Christian history and an off-and-on conservative, I continue to be confused by the combination of Roman Catholic identity and Front Porch location. The idea of localism…

Hillbilly Grace on a Five-Acre Farm in Lincoln, Arkansas: A Review of Minari

Minari is haunted by O’Connor, as Chung explores the theme of misfits and “hard to find” good men (and women) that jolt our senses toward who we truly are, including…

Bridging the Gap Between Narrative and Reality: Guido Preparata

Modest and hopeful, but backed up by a lot of thought and research, Guido Preparata's work is at least a beginning. Surrounded by lies, it’s high-time we started telling another…

Christian Platonism and the Eternal Good

Christian Platonism’s affirmation that we are spiritual beings who will outlive this current life, in one manner or another, lends us powerful impetus to reconsider what it means to spend…

Homecoming in Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman

The Church provides a sacramental and moral framework as well as an ultimate sense of hope in The Irishman, and it is this sense of hope that is so desperately…
March 1, 2021

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…
February 22, 2021

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…
February 17, 2021

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…
February 15, 2021

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.
February 3, 2021

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…
Jeremy Beer
January 25, 2021

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…
January 20, 2021