The Stump

The Burden Of Youth

Why are so many of Uncle Sam’s children so miserable? What is going on? The reasons are one part mystery and one part well-known. It is worth reflecting on them.

Planning and The Politics of Beauty: Reflections on Stewart Udall

If you’ve ever visited Canyonlands National Park, or hiked the Appalachian Trail, or spent time at over a hundred other similar locations across America’s beautiful and diverse ecosystems and geography, it’s likely that you have Stewart Udall at least partly to thank.

How to Be a Liberal-Socialist-Conservative

The mark by which we recognize a rightly ordered way of thinking about politics, it seems to me, is that such a way of thinking should recall us to the fact that we are, and that we receive, gifts.

Democracy’s Despotic Drift

A court decision that returns to the people the power to decide the pressing questions of the day could be considered fatal to democracy only in an age as Orwellian as this one, when doublethink routinely masquerades as rational thought.

Putting Two Things Together: Reflections on Institution Building

I came away from Steubenville, as I came away later from Grove City, with the startling idea that things are possible. Small things; local things; putting two things together, not all things but two things.

Reject the Consumer: Imagining A New Identity Politics

Freeing ourselves from the corrosive Consumer identity isn’t an individual task, but a call for system change rings hollow if we are afraid of personal change. How can we imagine a world beyond the Consumer if we can’t talk about our experiences of consuming and acknowledge that down-powering will not be easy?

Back to the Bottom-Line (Apocalyptically and Practically Speaking) at the Land...

Wendell Berry has written endlessly about the goodness of local work; if, for Berry, the goodness of such work is connected to agrarian virtue, while for Jackson it is connected to ecological necessity, does that make much practical difference?

On Scruton and Settling: From the Editor

Scruton, from that day in France until the end, could never situate himself in the fugitive and cloistered comfort of the academic and intellectual orthodoxy.

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.

The Elephant in the Formula Can: Medicine’s Overlooked Influence on Breastfeeding...

To acknowledge the harm that has been inflicted on uncountable human lives is to invite doubt about the underpinnings of our technologically sophisticated world. That is an uncomfortable and lonely place to be. Yet it’s necessary if humans have any hope of reclaiming their birthright at mama’s breast.