On Flannery O’Connor and Jack Black
Maybe O’Connor’s narrative can teach us that people—and the places they call home, the places that form them—need not be defined by their flaws.
Failing in a Pandemic
The whole mode of online education screams that now I must be the source of attraction. But I’m not entertaining. In fact, I’m pretty unentertaining. If you ask most of my students, they may even say I’m boring.
Forget Karen, Think Lisa
It was the reaction I had seen so often in public school classrooms from teacher's pets: Conformity is always the right course. Rocking the boat is disruptive. Teachers and principals know what's best.
They Stood On Their Feet
The poetry in this book captures some of those everyday moments and holds them up in a light that makes possible another kind of clarity, not that of simply worded declarations on a page, but that which concerns our own selves and souls.
Walking in the Suburbs
Flânerie is a kind of silent revolt. The chief virtue in an industrial society is efficiency, but by its very nature, flânerie is inefficient. It doesn’t even pretend to care about that value.
Clearing Ground
The romantic impulse toward wholeness, or the longing for when things were better—take a few bad turns in that mood, and you find yourself chanting hymns to blood-and-soil. People can start out defending Berry’s proper prejudices and end up celebrating prejudice itself.
Coming to Ourselves in 2020
Of course, Amash may well not win, but that really is not the point. The prodigal son had limited hopes when he said goodbye to the pigs, but he had come to himself and he was heading home regardless.
Last Will and Sacrament
PHOENIX, ARIZONA. I don’t think that many reviews have yet appeared, but John Lukacs has just published another memoir, titled Last Rites. Patrick Allitt has an appreciative, but not uncritical, review (subscribers only) in the latest American Conservative. He is right that this volume is not, for a variety of reasons, as “scintillating” as Lukacs’s Confessions of an Original Sinner (1990). But then, Confessions truly is scintillating. It’s one of the finest American memoirs of the twentieth century. What makes it so fine is that it is not simply American. It is also deeply Pennsylvanian. In a state blessed with many more great quarterbacks than great writers, the Hungarian-born, British-educated Lukacs can lay claim to have evoked the character of the southeastern corner of the state as well as anyone ever has. (In this respect, add to Lukacs’s Pennsylvania oeuvre his Philadelphia: Patricians and Philistines and certain sections of A Thread of Years, one of the most memorable books I have ever read.)
Limbaugh vs. the Front Porch
DALLAS, TX. I am bemused, appalled, and fascinated -- more or less at the same time -- by the foofarah over Rush Limbaugh's CPAC...
Freedom Among Themselves
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS.
E.D. Kain had a fine quote from Wendell Berry that provides a good definition of community to start any discussion of place and limits:
A...