Articles

A Conservative for Our Time

In a letter he wrote to his grandchildren, Udall challenged them to "Support all endeavors that promise a better life for the inhabitants of our planet. Cherish sunsets, wild creations and wild places. Have a love affair with the wonder and beauty of the earth.”

Poor Little Lamb

Colin Phelps is not the first to discover a graced thing in college: it’s the unchosen self-knowledge that is most liberating.

Human Interaction: The Most Essential Business

Scotsdale, AZ. With a vaccine on the horizon, it is time to think hard about how our country should look when the pandemic ends....

Ravining

I have spent considerable time in ravines, drawn to them by an appetite for domestic exploration: though they worry me, I have also been drawn to them; I traverse the ravines to find the spirit of my place.

Sacred Reality: The Augustinian Vision of Goodness in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead

Robinson presents us with an encounter: a participatory, embodied experience; a blessed and broken reality; the sacraments. And from this encounter, we receive courageous eyes to see the precious things that have been placed in our hands and to honor them accordingly.

The End of Childhood Play

Too many children grow up learning no lessons, organising no peers, and exploring no territory, unless it be shifting electrons around a screen, and the screen becomes their world.

A Time for Local Democracy

In these days of Twitter democracy, when platforms for political expression are so accessible, it sometimes seems, paradoxically, that citizens have little actual say in decision making about our country’s future.

A Jane Austen January

The enduring value of adding Jane Austen to my disciplines was not beholden to my expectation of enjoyment from a happy wedding nor was it dependent on my recognition that vice and virtue are at war in me and in the world. She won me by shaping a vision of joy built on virtue and a corresponding vision—gently elided in her prose—of the despair of vice.

Another Night Like All The Rest

Men are fallen creatures who think they’re perfectible when in fact they’re hardly improvable.

The Worst?

2020 has certainly had real trials and tribulations, but our approach to it is also reflective of a culture in which everything disliked has long been “the worst.”