Articles 356

The dark side of religion cannot be completely vanquished because human reason pales in the comparison to the highest reality, which is known through the light and the darkness of…

Our lives depend upon the restoration of intergenerational stability within our local communities as a norm that is loved and nurtured. Moreover, our recent obsession with measures such as GDP…

In “The Dreams of Mrs. Flintwinch thicken,” a short chapter of Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit (1857), the kind-hearted Arthur Clennam visits his childhood home. “Oppressive secrets” pervade the crumbling house…

Christ the Heart of Creation renders fruitful the richness in, and the virtue of, the Christological grammar that rules faithful speech and thought about the person and nature of Jesus…

I am in love with my neighborhood because I am in love with the people, how resilient and complicated they are, and how they teach me how wrong I have…

This is awfully late but perhaps also timely (since the spat between Sohrab Ahmari and David French seems to have a long shelf life). What follows is the talk I…

The official scorekeeper for my sixth-grade baseball team was our catcher’s mom. Sometimes she couldn’t be there, and it would fall to our coach to keep score. Sometimes he didn’t…

In high school, I had a friend who simply loathed Michael Stipe. This was in the late nineties, at the tail end of R.E.M.’s cultural dominance, but the band was…

When we stop trying to be everywhere at once, we have enough time for the meaningful things.

One side has dominated the story while the other has tried to dominate the politics. But separating culture and politics is a self-defeating strategy.

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] I've been a fan of Bill McKibben's writings for close to 30 years. That doesn't mean I've agreed with, or even enjoyed, everything this endlessly…

Put in a garden and watch it come to life.

The arguments that Deneen and Shatzer advance are really two sides of the same coin; as one interpreter of Marshall McLuhan put it, “We make our tools, and then our…

In such times, a centripetal lurch is what we desperately need.

The Varsity Blues parents didn’t really care if their children learned anything; they were concerned that they got their ticket to success stamped by the right institution.

What is culture? What hath attachment to do with culture? Why are front porches necessary for culture? Culture is something vibrant. Something living. Something that runs through the veins of…

We occupants of the Porch can profitably read Vodolazkin in light of our own concern to acknowledge human limitations and find ways to live well and more fully in our…

In selecting reading material, the average reader might not immediately reach for a book about Congress in the nineteenth century. That would be a mistake, as Joanne Freeman’s book The…

Hirschfeld’s assessment of what we as Christians should and should not accept in mainstream economics, informed by her training in both economics and theology, is thus a most welcome resource.

“Don’t take my gun, Nightlife!” Tol called, trying to sound not too much concerned, and yet unable to keep the tone of pleading entirely out of his voice. “I’m liable…

[T]he early scholastic notion of revelation was more dynamic than the modern one. Revelation does not occur, in the medieval understanding, once and for all in the static letters of…

As is so often the case when new technology promises to correct the errors of human fallibility, robo-umps could be bad for everyone involved.

Wendell Berry, while still writing more than most of us, is squarely in the awards and laurels stage of his earthly journey. Who will continue the call for sanity and…

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] A week ago I was able to organize a small group of friends to attend a fine, relatively intimate event at Sterling College, a small…