“I Wouldn’t Take Nothing for It”: An Appreciation of Love for...
“Heeding lessons from farmers who persist in place, we can embrace these virtues. Rather than give up or get out, we can dig in. Rather than go big, we can go home."
At Home with Dragons
The past is not completely lost to us, and the fascination with fantastic beasts remains.
Monuments to Human Stupidity? A Review of David Betz’s A Guarded...
The film Patton contains many quotable quotes, some of which cannot be repeated on a family friendly website such as Front Porch (for example,...
Why We Don’t Believe in Free Will
A quarter of a century ago, Wendell Berry wrote, “the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.” That division has come, and all must choose on which side of the divide to stand.
Abandoned Altars
Here, in this shed’s unremarkable pool of silence, I am reminded of other places where silence stretched like an ocean. I happened upon one of those waning shores the previous year when I resided in the mountains of the high desert.
The Timeless Way of Building: A Review
Why is it that we can all say that this building works, that this room is just right, that this town is good and pleasing? Why is it that we can all imagine some beautiful and perfect home, complete with all its habits and accouterments, but we can’t say exactly what it is about that home that is so perfect without describing the whole thing?
The Census Taker In a Church Pew, Part 4
Yet our little sister does not play the victim. She presses on, a sufferer who labors as best she can while shadows and thorns press in against her. And she prays to God like the woman persistent in her case when contending with an unjust judge; and since God is just, since He is the Good and Righteous Judge of All the Earth, our little sister’s hope remains “deeper still.”
Southern Hospitality in the New Machine Age
It’s not perhaps that the world doesn’t need change, but that as anti-Machine author Paul Kingsnorth put it in these pages, “the first work is changing yourself.” We have to live where we’re placed, and for Eve at the Meat and Malt, right now that means continuing to serve the guests who entreat her for sustenance, despite the intrusion of the impersonal into her hospitality.
Two Leftists Walk Into a Pandemic . . .
Not only did the worst consequences of lockdowns occur in the Global South, but lockdowns were pushed on the South from the North, through well-known strongarm tactics of neocolonialism that have consistently pushed neoliberalism, austerity, and impoverishment on the South for the last several decades.
Federalism Frees Us to Flourish
Although it may seem counterintuitive, freedom is actually enhanced, not curtailed, when states have the right to experiment, subject to important federal constitutional limitations, with social and economic polices till they do right by their citizens.