Seeing Like A Traffic App
A year ago I started exploring my traffic navigation app, wondering what advice it would give about the various routes I took to work...
Christopher Lasch and the Lasting Dilemma of Localism
This past weekend, at the annual Front Porch Republic gathering (this year held at SUNY-Geneseo), three scholars reflected upon the writings of the historian...
Wichita and the Dilemma of Mid-Sized Cities
There's been some depressing news here in Wichita, Kansas, of late. Not the sort of depressing news that one might typically fear to hear...
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...
Kids These Days: Why We Shouldn’t Worry if They Don’t Leave...
A popular version of the undying nostalgia for a golden era gone by is the view that this era was a time when men...
30 More Years of Rootless Professors
In the thirty years since writer-professor Eric Zencey first published his essay “The Rootless Professors” in the Chronicle of Higher Education, much has changed, and...
Witchcraft in Church? Against Glamorous Worship
Recently, our local Trappist Monastery, the Abbey of the Genesee, unveiled a renovation of the sanctuary of the Abbey church. To the shock of some...
Hanging Out with, and Learning from, Some Thoroughly Material Benedictines
A few weeks ago I was able to, once again, do something that I enjoy doing immensely--take a group of students out on a...