The Domestic Arts: Finding a Quiet Dignity in the Mundane
As Sarah Orne Jewett knew, "everyday tasks” and the celebrations they engender are the condition upon which many other arts rest, including poetry.
The Allure of Old Tools and Vintage Machinery: Memory, Meaning, and...
Building or re-building things taps into deep and elemental desires embedded in the human experience that in some shadowed sense mimic the Creator.
Building Institutions in an Age of Platforms and Hashtags
When institutions can’t serve their social function, our social problems are harder to address. And a society that cannot adequately respond to its problems is not a society that is cohesive or supportive of the people within it.
Protestants and Western Civ.
Hillsdale, Michigan. Which is more surprising? To read that a Great Booksy curriculum—which you, a fairly committed Protestant who tries to keep faith under...
Should We Read the Words of the Unsavory Dead?
Alan Jacobs is right that if we would receive a blessing from the dead, we will have to wrestle with them.
Free America, The Front Porch Republic, and America’s Decentralist Tradition
The contributors to Free America belonged to one another and to the vision of a humane society, one founded on distributed property. Just because this vision has been drowned out by the purveyors of the bigger-is-better and the latest-is-greatest doesn’t mean a decentralist vision is not worth defending and, even more so, practicing.
Better to Have Loved and Lost: A Review of Peter Wohlleben’s...
If I can value the inner lives and the outer well-being of animals and plants and rocks and stars, because I can see the inherent beauty and goodness that something simply is, then I can be trusted with believing myself of higher status than animals.
Exile as Resettlement: A Review of The Best Poems of Jane...
Jane Kenyon was foremost a poet of place. Not of the State of New Hampshire, though she was its Poet Laureate, but of the much smaller and less abstract corner of it in and around Eagle Pond.
Calling For A 21st-Century Magna Carta: A Review of Joel Kotkin’s...
The global middle class of Kotkin’s subtitle must unite with the working class for a new Magna Carta for the 21st Century, one that will, in Lincoln’s words, make us “independent of crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings.”
For the Hog Killing, 1979 and the Work of Photography
Perhaps the appealing vision of neighborliness that For the Hog Killing, 1979 presents, and the image of agricultural community that it provides, can challenge those of us who are encouraged by the book to channel our memory into the practice of hope.