Articles 355

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…

When asked to share my thoughts on the recent yellow vests protests, I initially demurred, stating that is was simply another case of the French being the French (about benefits)…

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] 2018 has been a busy year for those of us who aspire to--or are at least somewhat animated by--localism here in Wichita, KS, the 50th-most…

It’s 9 a.m. on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, which seems like a reasonable, civilized time to make apple butter. Yet in my mother-in-law’s farmhouse kitchen, 9 a.m. might as well…

Liberalism can be marked by the gospel and still be a political and cultural dead end. As Ivan Illich argued, corruptio optimi pessima.

Fifty years ago today, Thomas Merton died suddenly during a visit to Thailand. During the past few months, I’ve been thinking about the ways his life and writings speak both…

First, a confession: with the exception, at the age of 18, of a brief flirtation with Barry Goldwater’s presidential candidacy, my politics have leaned decidedly Left.  My father, on the other…

“How does one critique globalism without succumbing to would-be nationalist despots like Bolsonaro or Trump?” This was the earnest and sensible question a friend put to me by email the…

Sacred cows exist in almost every industry and sector in America, and the world of philanthropy is no exception. Within the realm of community or place-based philanthropy, one such powerful…

It was hard to resist. John Harrigan’s portrait of Great North Woods stump farmer Jimmie Ricker in our local newspaper compelled me to drive two hundred miles north from Manchester,…

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] The annual Prairie Festival at The Land Institute just outside Salina, KS, was held two months ago, but it's been much on my mind for…

In the spring of this year, some students and I created a modest Heritage Garden—420 square feet of raised beds built from two-by-twelves and filled with a topsoil and compost…

The baseball season has ended. For fans just about everywhere outside of Boston, this will signal either melancholy or relief. Or possibly disgust. Melancholy if your season ended unsatisfactorily, relief…

There’s a certain aching joy in the chill of regret.

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Last week the United States went through another one of our regular, mostly ritualized exercises in mass democracy. What did (or should) localists think of…

When I came across John Hockenberry’s essay, “Exile,” in the October edition of Harper’s Magazine, I had never heard of him. I still know little about him, though a simple Wikipedia glance…

A woman in another kind of grief uttered the terrible “should have been.”

I am an unlikely localist. My life is a product of globalization. My mother’s side of the family is from Singapore, China, and India, linked to each other through the…

While wandering in a used bookstore this summer, I picked up Donald Hall’s String Too Short to be Saved. I enjoyed Hall’s stories about his grandparents’ farm (the book’s title…

One of my heroes of the faith is dead. Eugene Peterson experienced death, but certainly not its sting, as he uttered his final words, “Let’s go,” on Monday, October 22.…

In Charles Frazier’s 1997 novel Cold Mountain, a minister’s daughter decides after her father’s death to remain on their western North Carolina farm, rather than return to the genteel life…

It was said of the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) that he had written more books than most senators had read.  Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) seems to aspire to…

The coming of October, and of the World Series as culmination, invites reflection on yet another season in which the home run (and the strikeout) became the centerpiece of the…