Articles 356

A machine can read books out loud to the baby. A machine can rock the baby to sleep. Smart devices and apps can do these and many other things. But…

Rudyard Kipling’s 1902 Just So Stories are a delightful anomaly—they feel like folk tales but were largely invented by Kipling himself as bedtime stories for his eldest daughter, Josephine.

America is known for its English-Protestant roots, for the pilgrims who settled the Eastern seaboard and the Anglos who descended from them. But America has a French-Catholic history, too, and…

As she engages ultimate questions about human life, Little models the pursuit of virtue and the concomitant wrestling with vice involved in this pursuit.

Despite Trump’s own divisive rhetoric, he makes rural Americans feel heard in ways neither majority party has in decades. Any politician or scholar who actually wants to address the root…

Cash may as well be situated in an Anglo-Saxon mead hall, a broken ring-giver, a pagan, who for all his good intentions, cannot heal that which infects his people and…

If the sky clears above us, we won’t suddenly find ourselves saints. But at least, perhaps, we’ll be able to see the stars.

Without God, a spiraling fertility rate seems certain. But on spiritual grounds, there’s always room for hope and renewal. When the seed is sown on the good soil, it bears…

To gaze upon creation through a sacramental lens is to admit that God is God and we are not; it is an antidote to the poison of Genesis 3.

Civil society relies on common spaces where people of all backgrounds can meet, but states and cities have been pursuing semi-privatization of public spaces.

In expressing his love through epistolary lament, it may be that Freud discovered the precise meaning he felt he had lost.

Culture is the ever-evolving play that takes place on that stage, as new props come and old props are replaced, even as the theater remains the same. Of course, the…

Jobs in construction, health care, and manufacturing technology need not lead to dead ends...

It’s ironic that this whole Impossible Question — whether to have children in this age of climate change — springs from the same mentality underpinning the forces tearing the world…

Perhaps in the coming decades we shall have, so to speak, not a straightforward demographic slope downward, but more of a dip and a levelling off in the next century.

But I wonder: as it strains to get over Christ, will the West survive without noticing all the other beaten horses of the world? Or will it one day break…

It would be easy to dismiss my argument as a simple platitude: “Trust God.” But it is trust in the infinite that allows us to trust finite beings.

The execution of Marie Antoinette and the treatment of her family is nothing for France to be proud of. Her punishment is the first evidence of a revolution run amok.

But even a novice like me—hobbled by an ignorance of veterinarian science and perennially pulled toward too many projects—found the book interesting and useful.

...the real artist, for both O’Connor and Ference, is one who sees and expresses gratitude for what is already there, and deals with it in such a way as to…

We cannot give into the temptation of thinking that our times are so different that basic civility must be cast aside. Once we have done that, we are lost.

As the sun rises over the Nile or my daughter’s grave, it occurs to me that the ancient Egyptians may have been onto something. Jess lives on, her soul soars…

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Donald Trump’s selection of J.D. Vance as his vice presidential running mate has put “postliberalism” back in the news, assuming it had ever left. Vance’s…

Plant biology seems to be revolutionizing our understanding of what a plant is and can be. This is a gift that may help us grow in wisdom, in reverence, and…