Dear Eugene
One of my heroes of the faith is dead. Eugene Peterson experienced death, but certainly not its sting, as he uttered his final words,...
We Need a lot More than Romance
When I came across John Hockenberry’s essay, “Exile,” in the October edition of Harper’s Magazine, I had never heard of him. I still know little...
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.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...