Articles 356
Of Bees and Moonshine
Hidden Springs Lane. In the spring of 2012, I started keeping bees. The first thing to notice is that people do not raise bees or herd bees. In fact, one…
The Crafting of the Fourteenth Amendment
Several years ago, after driving past the impressively proportioned Harrison County Courthouse in my hometown of Cadiz for the hundredth time, I thought I ought to stop and look and…
Rock n’ Roll, Inc: The Power Source Behind America’s Founding and its Operational Strength
It is often said that Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1839 essay, “Self Reliance”, is the real American Declaration of Independence, and to a certain extent this is true. Emerson was a…
Mumford and Suns
“For a child”, I remember our priest saying a few years ago, ”the sun rises over the barn and sets on the further side of the field”. In the next,…
A Militarism We Call Patriotism
With the U.S. military experience in Iraq finally concluded, in January of 2012, President Barack Obama bookended his State of the Union address with an appeal for the nation to…
Imagining Healthy Work: Why We all Have to Become Monks
This essay was originally presented at Spring Arbor University’s annual Focus series. I am speaking today not as a literature specialist, nor as a professional economist, nor as a business…
A Genuinely Original Libertarian Argument?
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Yesterday evening, I participated in a symposium sponsored in part by Northfield School of the Liberal Arts, a private Christian academy, here in Wichita, KS.…
They Been Here
“You don’t say that,” my grandfather was telling me, gently but with obvious annoyance, as I’d just embarrassed him. We were walking out of a small store on a country…
The Patron Saint of Place
For several decades now, the business plan of fast-food chains has been to build restaurants with a similar design: a drive through around the back and side, an indoor playground…
California Splits
When a "boomer" hits the Pacific Ocean, how does he redefine starting anew? Here are some suggestions from the West Coast.
American Political Praxis
What words best describe present-day Washington politics? The commonplace answer, endlessly repeated by politicians themselves and media observers alike, is this: dysfunction, gridlock, partisanship, and incivility. Yet here’s a far…
What I Saw at the High School Speech Meet
Here in northwest Indiana, I agreed to be a judge for a recent regional speech meet, partly because our middle daughter was a contestant herself and partly because I love…
The Real Social Network
The other night I saw the end of a life well-lived. I didn’t know him; I just saw his funeral. My bus rolled through the dark night I was riding…
A Man’s Home Is His Castle
Hidden Springs Lane. After too long, I finally got around to watching The Castle (1997), a film recommended by FPR’s Jeff Polet. It’s a film you probably haven’t heard of…
Liberty and Circuits of the Sacred
A few days ago was the first time I heard Chinese being spoken with a heavy Indian accent. Given the tenor of our times, one might expect this to have…
Nature, Labor, and a Goat Named Alcibiades
As I cranked the lever I could watch the forest become pasture. I was using a come-along, a simple winch for tightening wire, to run a new fence. As the…
Sometimes a Garden is Just a Garden
To the left of our Southern California driveway is a little plot of land, 400-500 square feet. Some homeowners just pave over a space like this, to add another parking…
Slow Growth and Living Form
Everything seeks its own perfection or completion, and, moreover, seeks this perfection in a way proper to itself. Since both the end sought and the way of seeking are attuned…
In Praise of Mediocrity
Berwyn, PA. Everyone knows G.K. Chesterton's aphorism that, if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly. Dappled Things writer Karen Ullo has deepened our understanding of that…
Citizens, Traitors, Misanthropes, and Cosmopolitans
What is it about the modern world that causes us to forget that every choice comes with a cost? The answer cannot be that modern men obsess on wish-fulfillment; ancient…
Can We (not) Talk?
Hillsdale, Michigan. Patrick Deneen posted a vigorous rejoinder to pro-free market critics of Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium. Deneen’s takedown of Rush Limbaugh got me thinking less about the…
There’s Equality, and There’s Equality
In one of my favorite movies, John Ford's How Green Was My Valley, a family of coal miners is faced with the prospect of lower wages handed out by the…
McClaughry Memoir: The Thousand Points of Light
The following is the final installment of John McClaughry’s memoir, Promoting Civil Society Among the Heathen. See the previous chapter here. 8. George H.W. Bush and the Thousand Points of Light Inheriting…
