The Stump

The Paradox of American Places

Daniel Elazar was emphatic that a “renewed sense of localism” was essential to America’s future. For Americans, this means renewed intentionality about our local communities, not merely living in one place for a sustained period of time.

Organized Leisure and the Construction of American Community 

Was the experience of “community” in an Ohio town during Ervin’s lifetime fundamentally more compelling and authentic than has been possible after the post-war economic boom? Or should Ervin’s passion for organizing and social service be seen as an attempt to compensate for an actual fragility of communal life?

The Place (and Place-ness) of Occupy, Ten Years On

Holding up a sign, sitting at a lunch counter, sticking a flower in a gun, setting up a tent, and occupying a space in the face state and corporate power is an act of utopian belief and faith. A belief, to go back to Berry's insight above, that something may not be--and should not be accepted as being--an economic, and therefore social, inevitability.

Breaking our Concentration: Lessons from Jefferson, Hamilton, and Lincoln on Local...

Lincoln wishes to promote Jeffersonian virtues by Hamiltonian means. In a Jeffersonian vein, Lincoln wants to encourage small, independent operations that free people from dependence on “the man.”

Civilization, Escape, or Community: Revisiting Into the Wild with Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry pleads with us to see that true joy and fulfillment— the very motivations at the heart of Huck Finn and Christopher McCandless—are to be found not in escape and isolation, but in willing membership and participation in community life.

Regarding Mutualism, Cooperativism, and Other (Interstitially) Anti-Capitalist Alternatives

Popular discourse in the United States today—as well as in many places around the world—hasn’t been so open to alternatives to the liberal capitalist mainstream for close to a century.

Bowels, Diets, and Other Lies: An essay on God and Food

Ethan Jones explores the harmful ways our culture relates to food, and concludes that food’s purpose is not beautification of the body. Rather, food itself is beauty. Inside and outside the walls of church buildings, itd raws us to God and one another.

Cartoon Sex Ed

For those who still stand by the essential limiting power of words, these are trying times. In an age when homosexuality is immutable but gender is fluid, things can get a bit confusing.

The Tyranny of Big Tech Demonstrates the Tyranny of Faulty Ideas...

Hawley’s book goes some way towards providing a framework for using the threat of a legislative boot to stomp Big Tech back down to size. Whether the Right will listen is another thing altogether.

Collectivism and Violence are One

The left is collectivizing, the right falling apart. Can a pragmatic, humanist center hold?