The Wittenberg Door

Paul Kingsnorth and the Truer Path of Worship

A short review cannot do justice to the range of reasons visitors to the Porch should read Kingsnorth’s three novels, so I’ll begin simply by saying: Read them. These are thought-provoking, challenging, and linguistically creative novels.

A Spacious Life

In an excerpt from her book The Spacious Life, Ashley Hales redefines limits as an expression of love and a doorway into rest.

Blessings to Impart

What’s stopping you from blessing your yard, neighbors, and neighborhood, your watershed, the land you drive over everyday? Bless the world, literally, and with your being. Offer it up to the one who has created it and cares for us all.

Asceticism is for Everyone

Those who are inclined to agree with Patrick Deneen (and others) that liberalism has indeed failed may ask what way of life would be...

Reading the Bourgeois Mind with Léon Bloy

Léon Bloy delivers satires that aim to liberate souls from cages they did not even know they occupied.

Athos for All

I have Orthodox friends that find our little chapel concerning, and they are certainly right that a casual use of icons for decorative enhancement is to be avoided. Still, their chief complaint should be directed to the monks of Mount Athos who, infused with God’s flagrant generosity, so recklessly gave their replica icons away.

First Hack: A Techno Myth

Unaware, we can stand in a museum, in a temple of modernity that extracts life from all other temples. We can gaze into the vengeful gift of a god while that god stands right behind us, unseen, not believed in, multiplying his box of miseries into every pocket in the museum and beyond.

Before Ahmari and French, Wills and Bozell

This is awfully late but perhaps also timely (since the spat between Sohrab Ahmari and David French seems to have a long shelf life)....

Ruddy Glory: The Resonance of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

Was May demonstrating, knowingly or not, that even the isolated and disparaged—on the very nose of their ridicule—could be pointing the way brightly ahead through a dark and foggy future? Assuming that he was well aware of the increasing indignities and sufferings endured by his much-maligned people in the wider world, I can only think so.

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...