Writers & Poets 232

Windswept and partially covered in snow, winter debris still clinging to its banks, Walden Pond offered no glamorous window into the preeminent beauty of nature when I visited in early…

In this excerpt from America Moved: Booth Tarkington’s Memoirs of Time and Place, 1869–1928, Tarkington reflects on the changes he observed in America following the end of the Great War.…

Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home -- "Intimations of Immortality," William Wordsworth As…

Her breasts are too good for the local market.

Jeffrey Bilbro reviews Wendell Berry's appearance at SAMLA.

Spring Arbor, MI (Editor's note: Like any real front porch, FPR seeks to be a place where children are valued and welcome. Much of what we do seeks the seriousness…

Manchester, CT “Old Tom Bombadil is a merry fellow, Bright blue his jacket is, and his boots are yellow. None has ever caught him yet, for Tom, he is the…

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Some years ago, some of the folks behind F5, an alternative weekly newspaper here in Wichita, started a different (and, as it turned out, short-lived)…

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Via Rod Dreher, I see that the occasionally interesting blog Postmodern Conservative has departed its longtime home at the (often, if not always) theoconservative journal…

Holland, MI My wife will be the first to point out that I’m not much of one for marking anniversaries, but it seems - to use Lincoln’s language - fitting…

Dramatic paths to glory are viewed with skepticism in our modern democratic age. As Tocqueville suggests, “amongst democratic nations ambition is ardent and continual, but its aim is not habitually…

John Lukacs (1924-) is one of the last great narrative historians, to be numbered among Jacques Gibbon, Jacques Barzun, George Kennan and Samuel A. Huntington. Lukacs wrote more than twenty books,…

History is never merely history.

This is an entry in FPR’s One Thousand Words series. Over the next few months, perhaps longer, several dozen contributors will tell us what we need to know about a…

This is an entry in FPR’s One Thousand Words series. Over the next few months, perhaps longer, several dozen contributors will tell us what we need to know about a…

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Jeremy Beer's recent review of The Little Way of Ruthie Leming leads me to once again reflect upon Rod Dreher's excellent book (about which I've…

This article first appeared in Ethika Politika, the journal of the Center for Morality in Public Life. In May of 1970, back from the Vietnam War and newly released from the…

This Friday, June 28, Copperhead, which Ron Maxwell directed from my adaptation of a Harold Frederic novella, opens in about 70 cities. A second wave of openings washes across the…

For Adams and his peers the trade of art must have itself seemed an imported thing: threatening, rarified, and set apart like thorned peaks of the Swiss Alps rupturing above…

We scrambled up the craterous outcrop that ruptured like an isle in the gray sands spread thin around Cille inne Bay.

God didn't put twelve months on the calendar so we could work them all.

Berwyn, PA.  I was a little surprised, not too long ago, to hear a student mention that The Great Gatsby was her favorite book.  "Because it is the only book you…

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] That's a terrible title for this post, I know. But hopefully it'll make sense, if you actually make it to the end. First of all,…

Berwyn, PA.  In his Degrees of Knowledge, Jacques Maritain argues that one central fault of the modern mind has been its propensity to think of mathematics rather than metaphysics as first…