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This week marks the fourth anniversary of Front Porch Republic. I recently looked back through these first four years and was struck by the wonderful group of writers who have…

Here's an intriguing example of how a community is attempting to create space for children to play. Opening the streets to children means closing them to cars, and that’s why…

Conor Friedersdorf suggests an interesting thought experiment: Imagine that President Obama is visited by aliens who give him the power to kill any human being with his mind. Simply by…

...a Utica Club.

Perhaps one of the most influential philosophers of of time is Alvin Plantinga. He's just been awarded the prestigious Rescher Prize for his work. Here's a piece describing his work…

For those who are Catholic, or at least have an interest in the fate of the Catholic Church in our contemporary political environment, Chad Pecknold has an interesting piece over…

A few readers in response to my most recent piece expressed some incredulity about the chart showing that Americans paid, on average, about 30% of their income in taxes. This…

Via Reason, my review of Amy S. Greenberg's A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico: http://reason.com/archives/2013/02/05/americas-war-with-mexico.

For those of you in the Louisville area, on February 7, the Mcconnell Center is hosting a discussion titled "reThink Big: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Search for Humane Scale." Here's…

So after the progressive improvers come and leave, someone has to clean up. For years we Michiganders have silently, or not so silently, wept over the plight of Detroit. But…

Here is the video of a talk I gave January 21 at Northwood University. The title: "Beyond Supply and Demand: The Moral Foundation of the Free Market."

Alex Williams writes yet another piece in today's NYTimes on the end of courtship. Mark Mitchell has posted  about this in the past, and I certainly cannot improve on Mark's observations.…

    Washington DC When President Obama took office in 2009, many friends of capitalism were concerned that he would socialize our economy. Yet corporate profits have hit record heights…

Here's the FBI's Crime Statistics for 2011. In every state, more people were killed with hands, fists, and feet than with rifles. More were killed with knives than with rifles.…

Here is a recent podcast interview about my book The Politics of Gratitude: Scale, Place, and Community in a Global Age.

I have been engaged in a minor dust-up with my good friend Conor Dugan over reports that Notre Dame's Brian Kelly has been entertaining talks with the Philadelphia Eagles concerning…

Andrew Ferguson has a very nice profile of Ken Myers, editor of the Mars Hill Audio Journal, in the most recent Weekly Standard. The interviews and commentary featured on Myers's…

Among the various postmortem evaluations of the November election, R. R. Reno's at First Things ("The New Secular Moral Majority," December 2012) caught my eye: The Democratic party is very…

The Gray Lady weighs in today on the so-called "fiscal cliff," correctly pointing out that even if a deal is reached, like the one on the "debt ceiling crisis" before…

In a speech today, NRA president Wayne LaPierre called for a new initiative to place policemen in every school in America. It's curious that in attempting to defend one right,…

Jonathan Zimmerman thinks the answer is yes (thanks to John Fea): At Columbia University, 650 employees wrote checks for the Obama campaign, while only 21 made donations to Mitt Romney.…

Protestant conservatives of the Religious Right variety may be surprised to know that the strongest arguments for undressing the public square (of religious garments) came from Protestants. Whenever Roman Catholics…

Most readers know the line (attributed to Winston Churchill, I believe), if you're not a liberal at twenty, you have no heart. And if you are still a liberal at…

This is a highly confused article on the turn, particularly among women, to forms of "new domesticity."  Its author, Emily Matchar, appears eager to deny that there is anything good to…