No Wealth But Life
JEFFERSON COUNTY, KANSAS. William Allen White, the noted editorialist of Emporia, once named our shared home country America’s tenth muse—the muse of prophecy. If...
A Note on Immigration
South Bend, IN. Back here, in the city where the St. Joseph River takes her perpetual turn for the worse, my family and I...
Homes, New and Old
CLAREMONT, CA. We have become homeowners.
This week, my husband and I are moving boxes from our latest rental into a house that we may...
Churches with Porches
JEFFERSON COUNTY, KANSAS. In the comments somewhere below, Prof. Fox mentions the regional artist John Steuart Curry. A fitting topic for my first foray...
Agrarians Rejoice!
We do live in a remarkable age. The last time agrarianism and distributism were taken seriously in America was during the 1930s. The economic...
Made in Vermont
BURNED-OVER DISTRICT, NY. It’s town meeting day in the once and future republic of Vermont. Herewith, from the American Conservative, my profile of Frank...
A Republic of Front Porches
ALEXANDRIA, VA. Names are important, and few can be more significant than what a new publication calls itself. Perhaps at first greeting the...
Last Will and Sacrament
PHOENIX, ARIZONA. I don’t think that many reviews have yet appeared, but John Lukacs has just published another memoir, titled Last Rites. Patrick Allitt has an appreciative, but not uncritical, review (subscribers only) in the latest American Conservative. He is right that this volume is not, for a variety of reasons, as “scintillating” as Lukacs’s Confessions of an Original Sinner (1990). But then, Confessions truly is scintillating. It’s one of the finest American memoirs of the twentieth century. What makes it so fine is that it is not simply American. It is also deeply Pennsylvanian. In a state blessed with many more great quarterbacks than great writers, the Hungarian-born, British-educated Lukacs can lay claim to have evoked the character of the southeastern corner of the state as well as anyone ever has. (In this respect, add to Lukacs’s Pennsylvania oeuvre his Philadelphia: Patricians and Philistines and certain sections of A Thread of Years, one of the most memorable books I have ever read.)