The Stump 340

A quarter of a century ago, Wendell Berry wrote, “the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish…

As Americans, we must remember that place matters, and our founding principles are best understood when we look at how they were made real in the city of brotherly love.

Our duty is to live lives that conform to what is good, true, and beautiful. Natural rights in general, and the rights enshrined in the Constitution in particular, are means…

Let’s have a localism without nostalgia, a practical but also a faithful localism. As localists let’s be committed to an accurate accounting of the checkered past that grounds our hope.

Although it may seem counterintuitive, freedom is actually enhanced, not curtailed, when states have the right to experiment, subject to important federal constitutional limitations, with social and economic polices till…

For brokenists, the new regime is not just a matter of garden-variety regulatory capture, and “the rules” are just as often a symptom of the problem as a solution to…

Weak parties are susceptible to extreme candidates who take advantage of party weakness to run shallow, populist campaigns. These people seem fun. They appeal to our political id, mostly in…

A skeptic’s take on such a variety of experience would chalk it up as privileged gonzo larkishness or chest-beating thrill-seeking—an understandable take, one likely partly true. But there was more…

Why does my third child, my little son whom I mention above, need me to be in physical contact with him while he reads? Because it helps him feel warm…

Modernity has become permanently liquid; it no longer seeks solid replacements to the pre-modern world but finds greater value in transience, not just of institutions and things, but of human…

We can never ossify the world because it is always moving and changing like the river. Yet we can open ourselves to this ever fluctuating movement. This is manifested in…

Before we totally condemn the Athenians as selfish, entertainment-addicted bad citizens—which, to be fair, they sometimes (or often?) were, just like us—it is worth considering what such shared democratic spaces…

Whether America ever was or is exceptional is a matter for further discussion; but Tocqueville’s own estimate of America in the early nineteenth century was mixed at best and negative…

My point is not to get lost in conventional debate here. But seeking to heal from the culture war, I want to uncover the bodies of my neighbors, which industrial…

Vermont dumps almost all of its own garbage into Mount Casella, though it exports some to New Hampshire and New York. Its own consumption of goods–often including unhealthy processed foods,…

To appeal to personal rights seems to be an appeal to the highest value, and it is no wonder that people are feeling spiritually and socially starved. No one in…

That with which we fill our time, after all, is what ends up filling our minds, hearts, and souls. More than simply responsible scheduling, our very character is on the…

This is the spirituality of a man post-tragedy, post-heroin, post-forty-days-in-the-wilderness. Not the self-pleased, spick-and-span, airbrushed piety we’ve come to expect from presidential candidates these days but practical spirituality.

What starts as a method to optimize reading, exercise, or relationships becomes an end in itself. The native physiological benefit of the morning walk or bed-making is overshadowed by appeasing…

Swift knocked out several tracts and sermons on the problems of the Irish economy. And in them he said, in good FPR fashion, several FPRish things—for example, that place matters.

What I failed to realize was that the conservatism I was shifting away from was not a historical conservatism at all—rather, it was a distinctly 2000s neoconservatism that I had…

Taken alone, the tactical state of childhood itself mounts a magnificent resistance to the rigidity of the adult world. But children do not live in a vacuum: they live in…

What is more radical, and more conservative, than to cast the ring into the fire? That would be a real “regime change,” would it not?

Debates over the fate of the nation-state are largely driven by the fundamental problem of how we respond to guilt in a post-Christian age. Our politics will thus reflect the…