Philosophers & Saints

What You Need to Know About Simone Weil

Born in 1909 to secular Jewish Parisians, at age 10 Simone Weil was memorizing Racine and marching in labor union protests.  She attended the...

What You Need to Know About Hans Urs von Balthasar

This is an entry in FPR’s One Thousand Words series. Over the next few months, perhaps longer, several dozen contributors will tell us what...

Thoughts on Elshtain

Jean Bethke Elshtain, a profound and important political theorist and ethicist, died yesterday I was lucky enough to have met her perhaps a handful...

Veritatis Splendor at 20—Lessons for Localists

Veritatis Splendor, John Paul II’s encyclical letter, The Splendor of Truth, is now twenty years old. Promulgated August 6, 1993, the letter addressed fundamental...

Pondering St. Francisville, Gilead, and our Stories of Place

Jeremy Beer's recent review of The Little Way of Ruthie Leming leads me to once again reflect upon Rod Dreher's excellent book (about which...

Radical Traditionalists: The Fall of Triumph Magazine

This article first appeared in Ethika Politika, the journal of the Center for Morality in Public Life. In May of 1970, back from the Vietnam War...

Do Protestants Belong?

Hillsdale, Mich. Ever since I have lived, moved, and had my being in conservative circles, I have encountered an unspoken ambivalence about Protestantism. (Truth...

The Problem of Undertheorized Agrarianism in Most Actually Argued Localism

That's a terrible title for this post, I know. But hopefully it'll make sense, if you actually make it to the end. First of...

The Pythagorean Temptation

Berwyn, PA.  In his Degrees of Knowledge, Jacques Maritain argues that one central fault of the modern mind has been its propensity to think of...

Ruthie Leming’s (and Rod Dreher’s) Little Way

Rod Dreher's 2006 manifesto, Crunchy Cons, was an inspiration (and provocation) to many, on both the left and the right. It wasn't that the...