The Wittenberg Door

Notre Dame and the Need for the Past

We know now that much of the Notre Dame Cathedral survived and that it will be rebuilt. But while the fire at the Notre...

Salvaging: Boat Trailers, T.S. Eliot, and Resurrection

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river Is a strong brown god— . . . Unhonoured, unpropitiated By...

Conservatism and the Ecological Crisis

Conservation is at the heart of conservatism. And the root of our contemporary ecological crisis is a careless, profligate mode of relating to the...

Some Reservations: Thinking about Native American Spirituality

I remember being held. I remember, though it was the desert, being cold. I remember the feathers of a headdress, coming up like the...

What Is Radical Christianity?

This may be a tad tardy, but Jeff Bilbro's write-up and assessment of the conference about Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed caught my eye...

The Saint of the City Goes Rural: Dorothy Day and the...

In the Christian imagination, Dorothy Day looms as one of the 20th century’s great saints. A Communist convert to Christianity and co-founder of the...

Fierce Velleity: Poetry as Antidote to Acedia

In “Lying,” the late Richard Wilbur diagnoses one of our age’s endemic ills with the paradoxical phrase “fierce velleity.” For those of us who...

Avoiding “A World Without Women,” or Porches

A common and often valid critique of many families in the homeschooling movement is that, because of a lingering obsession on, and invisible competition...

Instability and the Noonday Devil

In a lecture on monastic stability delivered at the 2015 Front Porch Republic conference, Benedictine monk Gerard D’Souza noted that the idea of staying in...

Whose Nostalgia? Which Liberalism? Reflections on “Faith and Democracy in America”

Liberalism can be marked by the gospel and still be a political and cultural dead end. As Ivan Illich argued, corruptio optimi pessima.