“Magically Turning White”: A Family Story of Slavery, Racism, and Redemption
Mark Clavier describes coming to terms with the fact that he is a white Southerner descended from enslaved Africans who subsequently became slave-owners. Reflecting on an ancestry containing triumph and shame, he discovers how closely the commendable and corrupt can be intertwined.
Bring Me My Bow of Burning Gold: Micturition and Its Discontents
Why have we persisted in peeing outdoors well after the advent of outhouses and toilets?
Dying Properly—like a Dumb Ass (A Dispatch)
Little do I know that in a few days I will have died properly: by explosion.
Still Singin’
That this country boasts something called “The Great American Songbook” is one of the best jokes around. The Great American Songbook? Our songs—let alone...
Ecce Hortus: A Dispatch from Dumb-Ass Acres
Put in a garden and watch it come to life.
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...
Spirits of Place
John Gatta is the William B. Kenan Jr. Professor of English at Sewanee: The University of the South. He’s the author of several excellent...
Local Identity and Cities In-Between
2018 has been a busy year for those of us who aspire to--or are at least somewhat animated by--localism here in Wichita, KS, the...
Parenting, Geoengineering, and Picking up Trash
“Corporate Progressivism.” Patrick Deneen reviews Darel Paul’s From Tolerance to Equality: How Elites Brought America to Same-Sex Marriage. Here’s a taste:
There is a striking...
Gone Fishing (2)
Sometimes the deluge of content that pours from our 24/7 media threatens to drown us under its cacophony of disinformation. Periodically, then, it is...