Region & Place 430

Tolkien understands the deepest of our longings and makes us understand them better than before.

Interest in agrarian politics can start in childhood. As feminists used to say, "The personal is political."

The James Madison Program at Princeton often provides an unexpected breath of common-sensical fresh air in the academic fever-swamps.  Last March it held a conference on the work of the…

The South, repatriated ex-slave Ned Douglass lectured his Louisiana neighbors in Ernest J. Gaines’s novel The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, is “yours because your people’s bones lays in it;…

  Last Sunday I sat on the church porch, smoked my pipe and listened as some of our musicians played their guitars and mandolins. One of the songs we sang…

They say that funerals are for the living, which of course they are. The deceased, now lifeless, causes us to reflect upon their life as well as our own which…

These days I care more about the results of local sporting events than I do national or out-of-state elections, but I was pleased that Golden Staters put Jerry Brown back…

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Wichita, KS So last night, the Republicans in the Wisconsin state senate passed the bill which Governor Scott Walker has made the cornerstone of his…

Those who benefit most from collective bargaining limits in Wisconsin can’t speak as loudly as those who oppose such legislation.

A review of a fine book by Glenn Moots which opens the door to rethinking about America theologically.

A visit to a CAFO makes it clear that to have sustainable agriculture, you have to make sustainable the lives and livelihoods of the people who do the work.

The Green Bay Packers – like America itself - are a study in ironies: the smallest city owning a franchise in the largest professional sport, a non-profit corporation in one…

Here are two scenarios: one leads through democratic enlightenment to peace and prosperity, and the other through intractable economic problems to war and disintegration.

Is there any difference now between college ball and the NFL?

What is the point of eating local? Are we actually feeding something besides our own ego and gluttony?

Not even suburban planners have come up with names like Archduke Ferdinand Estates or King of England Place.

Batavia's Tom Gahr on bummin' with his Dad.

They never quite got it when they asked me if I was “going home for Christmas” and I replied, “I live at home.”

“You go two blocks one way, you're in public housing. You go two blocks the other way, you're at Banana Republic."

It was the kind of responsibility that forces a kid to grow up.

But then Dylan is 69, and old enough to remember when the people of his place looked askance at empire. There were giants in the earth in those days.

Ross Douthat suggests that the culture wars have moved to a different battlefield. I dissent.

I value a writer who makes me read with a dictionary. Godspeed the man with a memory.

Gram Parsons, Southern hippie aristocrat Byrd progenitor of “Cosmic American Music” who spent too much tyme eight miles high, expressed his Christian faith in a number of tunes, none lovelier…