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The Census Taker In the Church Pew, Part 2

At the time of this writing, W. and D., with W. staying at D.’s side, remain faithful attenders of our church’s worship services and Bible studies. How long will this…

Returning to the Love of the Book

Hooten Wilson draws on theological as well as literary works to demonstrate various approaches to a text, leading to the contemplative mode, which she asserts should be “the end of…

The Poetics of Family Life

Taken alone, the tactical state of childhood itself mounts a magnificent resistance to the rigidity of the adult world. But children do not live in a vacuum: they live in…
June 21, 2023

Advisor Wanting: The Absence of Moral Limits in Lady Macbeth

Our best ally should not be a man or woman who lacks the aptitude to discern right from wrong...one should not draw unto himself or herself a companion like Lady…

Vaya con Dios: Cormac McCarthy (1933-2023)

Somewhat surprisingly, this is also McCarthy at his most delighted at everyday joys. There are many tender passages of drinking coffee in porcelain cups in diners, eating tortillas and beans…

Cornmeal and Butter: On the Significance of Temperature

At all hours of the day and night in the Mannon house, you’ll find butter in its designated dish on the dinner table and cornmeal in the fridge. I hold…
March 9, 2023

The Joyful Christian Nationalist: How Stephen Leacock Loved His Home by Resisting the World

Undergirding Leacock's work was not a desire to restore a previous version of Canada, but to preserve the gifts God had given: the best traditions of the past, the communities…

From Technological Nostalgia to Technological Faithfulness

I bought myself an iPad in August 2016, and to say that it changed my life would be only a slight overstatement. For several years I had been experiencing increasingly…
August 20, 2021

“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…

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 songbooks—don’t stick around long enough to…
September 2, 2019

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 for several reasons. One was the…
February 27, 2019

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 books, including Making Nature Sacred: Literature, Religion,…
Jeffrey Bilbro
January 14, 2019

Local Identity and Cities In-Between

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] 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 50th-most…

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 alignment between this progressive valorization…

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 necessary to turn off the spigot…
Jeffrey Bilbro
June 20, 2018

Social Justice vs. Social Charity

The Pernicious Nature of Charity There is a pernicious force that operates in all societies, but especially in ours and especially in these sad days. It is a force that…

At Last, the FPR Manifesto

... where human affairs are conducted as if place really matters, where economic affairs are conceived as if limits really matter, and where political power is exercised as if liberty…

The Economic Value of Streetcars

Although you would hardly know it today, Baltimore was once a city of streetcars. Crackling densely across the city’s center like fissures in old pavement and then sprawling thinly outward…

Updating the Porch

The noise you are hearing is the furniture moving on the porch. You may have already noticed the redesigned site. Jeff Bilbro has taken the helm as Editor-in-Chief, replacing Jeff…
Mark T. Mitchell
February 12, 2018

Reviving the Conversation on the Porch

I’m honored and excited to be joining the Front Porch Republic in a more official capacity and taking over the editorial duties for this site. When I stumbled across FPR…
Jeffrey Bilbro
February 8, 2018

Podcast Recommendation – Crim and Potts

Chuck Marohn over at Strong Towns does some interesting podcasts, but none more so than a recent one with FPR regulars Elias Crim and Rebekah Grace Potts (somehow Susannah Black…
Jeff Polet
June 12, 2017