Articles 355
Telling the Stories Right
Though he may be better known as an essayist or poet, Berry calls himself a storyteller, and the best introduction to his agrarian vision is his fiction.
What Wendell Berry’s Brush Teaches Us About Capitalism, Community, and “Inevitability”
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] The Art of Loading Brush: New Agrarian Writings, the latest collection of writings by Wendell Berry, isn't a perfect book, nor the perfect expression of…
A Tale of Two Tragedies
This past week, the Baton Rouge district attorney announced he would not press charges against the two police officers who shot and killed Alton Sterling when attempting to arrest him.…
Education and the Quest for Association
Plato remarked in the Republic that if one wanted to know the health of a city, we could simply look at the souls of its citizens. In conjunction with Aristotle,…
College and its End(s)
“College and its End(s)”---that was the title I had given to the section of senior seminar I taught this past fall. The class was conceived with two animating questions in…
Cutting a Farm into a Forest
A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke of the axe he is writing his signature on the face of the land. --Aldo Leopold, Sand County…
The New Yorker’s Latest Contribution to Trumpian Populism
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. --George Orwell, Animal Farm This past Thursday, I opened my mailbox and saw a naked President Trump staring…
Identity and Ethnos in Socrates’s Athens: A Response to Jordan Wales
Jordan Wales has recently gifted the conservative movement a sober and justly-timed critique of Richard Spencer and the alt-right. Unfortunately, much of the analysis of Spencer and the movement Spencer…
Technology and the Virtues: Scale Matters
When an autonomous Uber vehicle struck and killed a pedestrian in Arizona, Uber suspended its fleet of self-driving cars and assured everyone that it was “cooperating with authorities.” Such “cooperation”…
The Economic Value of Streetcars
Although you would hardly know it today, Baltimore was once a city of streetcars. Crackling densely across the city’s center like fissures in old pavement and then sprawling thinly outward…
Communal Self-Reliance: A Tie to Bind Black and White
Two recent incidents have made clear to me how the culture wars can stultify the fecund complexity of our common life. Recently, my wife and I attended a lecture on…
Learning from The Left Behind
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Robert Wuthnow's new book, The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America, is the best book I've read on the rural-urban divide in the…
The Practice of Attachment and A Comprehensive Social Order
Shortly after Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, Columbia University professor Mark Lilla took to the pages of the New York Times to offer an edifying perspective as to why…
Reading Chatwin in Silesia
When I moved to Poland it was the first time I had left Britain. I have lived in the same town for four years and a month. Tarnowskie Góry is…
Joyless Moderns
The modern age, in almost every detail, began with the flat rejection of joy. And the modern condition consists in alternately lamenting that there is nothing in which to take…
The Winter of our Disconchickentent: A Dispatch
Nature stepped in in her wonted way and took complete control.
Feeding Pigs and Solving for Pattern
Oakland Township, MI My small, exurban farmstead is sustained, in part, by the relationship I forged with my local feed store. To help the reader appreciate the practical and economic…
Reviewing Cræft: An Inquiry into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts
Taking up a craft—such as knitting, woodworking, or gardening—restores focal practices, re-connects us with the physical world, and provides the satisfaction of self-reliance. These benefits are good news to a…
Good News and Bad News
As always, the Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. On the good side of the ledger, the facts seem incontrovertible: more and more people riding bikes when they decide…
Captioning Over our Grief
In the spirit of Oscar season, we do well to look back at what the 2017 ‘Academy’ ignored. One such film is this fall’s Wind River, the directorial debut of…
Prairie Fires and Prairie Romances
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Caroline Fraser's wonderful Prairie Fires is many things. Primarily it's a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the justly famous Little House books, and…
Love the Evangelist, Not the Evangelism
Most of the reactions to Billy Graham's death yesterday have been, as you might expect, positive, which is welcome considering the way every day brings some news of how hypocritical…
What is Liberty Anyway?
Patrick Deneen’s new book, Why Liberalism Failed, is a manifesto in defense of place, limits, and liberty. And the amount of attention it’s received (how often does The New York…
Letter from the Electronic Jail
From a jail cell in Birmingham, Martin Luther King, Jr. charged us to acknowledge our “inescapable network of mutuality.” Fifty-five years later, our networks of mutuality remain inescapable. And they’re…
