Meaningless Manchester: Do Provincial Cities Exist?
It is meant to reference, to supplement, but also to circumvent. Manchester doesn’t do smog or spinning jennies anymore. It’s a friendly city. Come on in.
The Irony of a Wendell Berry NFT
While some are admittedly pleasing, NFTs will not be the great decentralizing force many of us long for. Instead, their rapid profusion creates speculative bubbles and too often rewards unvirtuous swindlers while harming the environment.
Turning Heritage into History
Disenthralling ourselves from the past is an American tradition, and gaining a clear-eyed vision of the flaws and achievements of previous generations is itself part of our heritage.
Two Yells for Football?
If beer and football are just the modern bread and circuses of a declining empire, then these are spectacles best avoided. However, if such gridiron microcosms of the human experience can unite us with our neighbors and point us to the bigger and more real story, then football, for all its flaws, deserves a yell, maybe two.
Alone Together on the Internet
The happy traveler is apt to become even happier as he crosses a state line into Vermont or Maine. These two misfits of the...
How to Make and Lose Friends (& Influence a Few People):...
I guess that paradox is what intrigues me about Carry and Dale’s differing personal constitutions and methodologies. I see them appealing to all of us in different ways—whether we have many friends or few, whether our influence is recognized or not—to embark upon the truly influential gift of friendship.
Joe Rogan’s Speech Impediment
A decent society must be characterized by individuals who reject designations of class guilt and innocence, who are capable of seeing the image of God in the face of the other, and who are willing to forgive. The alternative is the will-to-power that, in practical terms, becomes the rage-to-destroy.
Free Labor: The Liberation Theology of Capitalism
Capitalism as Theology
In his seminal work, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, Michael Novak provides his readers with a “Theology of Democratic Capitalism.”1 Now, some...
Urban Questions (and Responses) for Krugman
Over a month ago, Paul Krugman used his space at The New York Times to ask "what, in the modern economy, are small cities...
Playing the Long Game: A Review of Abraham Lincoln’s Statesmanship
The Lincoln that Schaff puts forth cultivated liberal democracy by placing limits and crafting public consensus. In order to see Lincoln in a new light, Schaff applies Aristotle’s ideas of moderation and prudence as his lens. It is not simply that Lincoln knew the good, but, as a good steward of liberal democracy, he embodied the good.