Philosophers & Saints

Will Wendell Be Jailed?

Claremont, CA. Wendell Berry, writer and farmer and hero to the people, might move from the farmhouse to the big house. Speaking at one of...

Bacevich to Miller to Lasch

How's that for a triple play? Andrew Bacevich reviews Eric Miller's new biography of Christopher Lasch.

Big Societies, Christian Communities, and Tories (Red or Otherwise)

Whatever the results of the British election, the Red Tory ideal remains promising...and yet, absent a robust civic religion, also probably wanting.

Gratuitous Foundations: Benedict XVI’s Humanism of the Gift, Part I

Benedict XVI's first social encyclical, "Caritas in Veritate," challenges long-accepted understandings of the relation of faith and reason and of charity and justice. In so doing, he not only calls into question the failed rationalism and failed conceptions of ownership that have done so much to harm and misshape the modern west; he also revises the Catholic Church's social doctrine, in some respects drawing it away from its origin in the neo-Scholastic political theory of Leo XIII, while in others renewing and strengthening the profound continuity of the Church's Gospel message.

Christian Democratic Communities and Teleological States: A Response to God’s Economy

If your religion--or at least your concept of the moral norms of the civil order--lacks a notion of grace, it therefore also lacks a notion of gifts; all it can say is that some people are lucky, not that some people are blessed.

The Culture of Atomic Eros and the Hatred of the Church

It is time to consider what the latest uproar against Pope Benedict XVI and the Catholic Church tells us about the state of our society. It is an ugly truth: the reordering of western society to the one imperative of sexual fulfillment. But, ultimately, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, we shall die not of decadence but of boredom.

Against Pessimism

Alexandria, VA My last post has led some to conclude that I am a pessimist. Even Ross Douthat, among the most perceptive commentators...

First They Came for the Horses

  Jefferson County, Kansas. The following is a short excerpt from a longer essay in the forthcoming book The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry, co-edited by...

On Memories as a Starting Point: A Review of “Encounters” by...

(An Eastern-European Reading). In a scene from a great movie called Transsiberian, a Russian traveler tells some innocent American tourists about the “Gulag” and...

The Alternative Tradition in America

Alexandria, VA Since Caleb has posted his lecture from a legendary conference a few years ago that a number of future Front Porchers attended...