Uncategorized 1144
Fear and Hope in the Hay Field
We need to love smaller, more energy-efficient houses and cars in order to love people more. We need to give up much of our casual oil consumption for leisure. We…
The Cozy Loneliness of Owl at Home
children are inchoately aware of the sadness of the world; it’s another of the human mysteries that they already have access to. Lobel’s genius is in choosing for his subject…
Map-Burning
My point is not to get lost in conventional debate here. But seeking to heal from the culture war, I want to uncover the bodies of my neighbors, which industrial…
A Humanist Manifesto of Our Times: A Review of The Soul of Civility
In her introduction, Hudson calls The Soul of Civility “a humanistic manifesto.” And she’s right: the book is steeped in humanism, in more ways than one. First, Hudson underscores the…
The Art(s) of Liberation
None of us gets to choose where we land. But if we cannot choose the times in which we live, we can choose how we live in the time we…
Conservatives Should Take Another Look at Cohousing
Maybe we can just call it something else, like, “Living with family and friends in a neighborhood designed to encourage the building of social capital, relying on them in real…
Is the Internet to Blame for the Decline of Literary Fiction? Possibly, But Maybe Not in the Way That We Think
It is not solely (or perhaps even primarily) about there being more hours of work and therefore less time for reading. It is about the possibility of work hovering over…
Wisdom is Born of Wonder: A Review of Wonder Strikes
A good number of Christian scholars draw first and foremost on Thomas Aquinas for their accounts of beauty. Desmond, though he’s aware of and engages with the Thomistic tradition, has…
Happiness Fit for Humans: A Review of A Web of Our Own Making
Barba-Kay argues that we tend to resolve our cognitive dissonance by outsourcing all the choices that do matter and consoling ourselves with a plethora of choices that don't.
The Pantheon of Ancient Wisdom
The liberty and justice which republics are erected to safeguard requires, as Milton and the Founders knew, a moral, virtuous, and religious citizenry. Without this moral and virtuous spirit, the…
Home Alone
This trend is peaking in a small rectangle, the smartphone. As Marc Barnes observes, the smartphone has replaced the TV. The smartphone is portable and personal and has enticed us…
An Empty Room of One’s Own
There are things that a full room can do for us. It can reassure us. It can offer comfort. It can offer luxury and pleasant distractions. A full room can…
Responding to Your Email: Better Late Than Never
It is, I realized, handy to have a proper template handy, ready to use, should my fears come true, and I discover that I really did forget to answer an…
Taste and See: A Review of Christian Poetry in America Since 1940
While many recognize the limits of human language and the ways it has sometimes been used to harm, they see language as capable of naming (or, at least, gesturing toward)…
Voices From The Past: The Humanistic Letters of Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More
Babbitt and More advocated the study of the humanities as a tool for the shaping of human souls toward virtue, helping confront what Babbitt characterized as the “civil war of…
Perseverance and Grace: Or, Why I Don’t Deserve a Damn Bit of Credit for my Life
I’ve found that in perplexing or challenging circumstances, “why?” is a boring question. We like why. The leadership guru Simon Sinek asks us to start with why. It’s a popular…
Why Pursue an Education?
The course I am teaching is part of the university’s core curriculum. Core comes from the Latin word for “heart,” I told my students. The same Latin root, cor, gives…
A Saintly Character Seen Through a Glass Darkly: A Review of Walking with Father Vincent
Mr. McNabb recognizes the central passion of Fr. Vincent: his deep love for Christ, expressed through a severe asceticism, a total devotion to traditional Catholic doctrine and social teaching, a…
Homeschooling and Red Herrings
Repeatedly, some of the best students I have taught have been homeschooled. What set them apart was precisely the spirit of bold curiosity that I see in my own kids:…
Hope for a Humane Agricultural Future: A Review of Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future
The ecomodernist approach of Regenesis relies on a mechanistic understanding of humanity. The presumption is that humans are merely fleshy machines that can adapt to flourish in any environment as…
Rooted in Reality
We were all, adults and children alike, doing things that really mattered to the whole free world, and we’d better get on with doing them, every day, all the time.…
Little League, Then and Now
But that love for baseball didn’t mean that we organized our lives around the sport, or that any parent with a Little Leaguer had baseball scholarships in mind. It didn’t…
We Were a Peculiar People Once
What comes out is a story of a small group of Reformed Canadian Baptists who are rural, hardworking, self-educated (largely by reading the Bible), and persistent in becoming holy, but…
Planting Our Flag in the Real World: Parents Take the Postman Pledge
Do real things together. Celebrate. Take delight in the world—together. Don’t feel compelled to broadcast your views about the dangers of technology. Let your life speak, but be prepared to…
