In Memoriam: Roger Scruton, 1944-2020
“The real wealth of a country … does not reside in the hectic exchanges on the stock market or the rivers of commodities that flow through every household without belonging there. It resides in local communities, in the work that holds them together, and the deep investment represented by a home, a place and the endowment across generations of human love.”
Whatever Happened to Communitarianism?
Twenty years ago, the concept and label "communitarianism" was riding high, or at least as high as any broadly applicable yet intellectually coherent ideological...
Puritans and The Pope: The Conflicted Christian History of American Ecological...
The responses from American Christians to Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’ have fallen into two predictable categories: Economic conservatives push back against Francis’ critique...
Contemplation and the Empire of Desire
Philadelphia, PA
R. R. Reno of First Things has recently identified the “Empire of Desire” by its odd combination of regulation and libertinism. On the...
Apocalypticism for Porchers
If it's your thing -- and it's certainly not everybody's thing -- it's not a bad time to be an apocalypticist.
A few weeks ago,...
Illiberal Catholicism One Year On
Just over a year ago John Zmirak caused a stir with his Aleteia article “Illiberal Catholicism.” In it, Zmirak excoriated a fairly broad range of Catholic...
Bar Jester’s Writing Seminar II; or, How to Write Like a...
If you want to write worse than the average undergraduate male, consider philosophy.
Praying in the Streets: Ritual as an Urban Design Problem
"he city as World icon is being destroyed, not by being secularized (it was always secular at base with some sacral potencies shooting through...
Anarchism, Global Citites, and a Confucian Cosmopolitan Education
I recently attended a conference in Nanjing, China, hosted by the Hopkins-Nanjing Center and organized our fellow Porcher, Adam Webb. You can read a...
Archimedean Points, Above and Below
“To the famous Archimedean boast: ‘Give me whereon to stand and I will move the world.’. Rabelais answers: ‘I move with my ship; and...