Articles 355

It is natural and normal, when looking at big problems, to look for big answers. Problems do not come much bigger than the subject of Eric Holt-Giménez’s new book, whose driving…

The risks associated with global warming are real, if chronically overstated by many on the left, and the response will require a soberness that is sorely lacking across the political…

I remember being held. I remember, though it was the desert, being cold. I remember the feathers of a headdress, coming up like the sun from behind red boulder. My…

This may be a tad tardy, but Jeff Bilbro's write-up and assessment of the conference about Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed caught my eye for several reasons. One was the…

Among the legion of unjustly forgotten historical figures there’s an eccentric soldier and failed composer named Captain Tobias Hume.  Unless you play the viola da gamba or you’re fond of Polish…

In the Christian imagination, Dorothy Day looms as one of the 20th century’s great saints. A Communist convert to Christianity and co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, her work among…

As someone who appreciates the value of place, rootedness, and limitations on my horizon of vision, I’m afflicted with deep sense of unease as to the nature of my own…

In “Lying,” the late Richard Wilbur diagnoses one of our age’s endemic ills with the paradoxical phrase “fierce velleity.” For those of us who don’t use “velleity” every day, the…

In Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime, Bruno Latour provides a challenging but potentially hopeful take on why climate denial continues to be a political force. For him,…

Any longtime reader of Wendell Berry’s work recognizes two of the many animating forces that give his writing its emotional resonance. These two forces, these two genii loci, revolve around Berry’s approach…

In Gender, Illich reveals the depth and scope to which capitalist modernity has unsettled family life and relations between men and women in general.

It is a cloudless July day in Connecticut—the kind of day that keeps people rooted in this place despite its long winters and high taxes.  From houses up and down the…

Go here to read the first part of this two-part essay on the American Bookstore. Several hours before a home game at the University of Michigan, the owner of a bookstore on a crowded street teeming with…

Some months ago I stood in a basement bookstore in suburban Maryland and pondered a relic of the 1960s, an artifact of dubious worth to the casual observer which had…

It is hard to see a silver lining in the abuse scandal of the Catholic Church. Nevertheless, the scarring crisis has given Pope Francis a rare opportunity to initiate meaningful…

Criticizing the current liberal order is a popular activity. Authors such as Patrick Deneen, Rod Dreher, D.C. Schindler, Mark Lilla, Johnathan Haidt, and Jordan Peterson have generated significant conversation through…

During the fall color tour, we often drive to a ski resort near my home in southwest Michigan. It’s about the only time my family visits the place, which goes…

I love board games.  Truth be told, I am a sucker for games of all types, but there are a number of aspects to playing a board game that simply cannot…

The world wearies of defenses of liberal education and the humanities. What cannot be denied is that all over the country the liberal arts are dying out, with students abandoning…

John Gatta is the William B. Kenan Jr. Professor of English at Sewanee: The University of the South. He’s the author of several excellent books, including Making Nature Sacred: Literature, Religion,…

If you watch a regional sportscast on TV, or some similar out-of-the-way cable fare, you’ll eventually see a commercial featuring a smiling, chubby man wearing casual clothes and speaking in…

A common and often valid critique of many families in the homeschooling movement is that, because of a lingering obsession on, and invisible competition with, the thing they are leaving…

In a lecture on monastic stability delivered at the 2015 Front Porch Republic conference, Benedictine monk Gerard D’Souza noted that the idea of staying in one place for the rest of…

I have just planted two apple trees from what my local nursery calls their “Posterity Collection,” heritage varieties grafted onto a slower-growing but durable and long-lived rootstock so that the trees…