Jeffrey Bilbro
Website Editor-in-Chief
Jeffrey Bilbro is a Professor of English at Grove City College. He grew up in the mountainous state of Washington and earned his B.A. in Writing and Literature from George Fox University in Oregon and his Ph.D. in English from Baylor University. His books include Words for Conviviality: Media Technologies and Practices of Hope, Reading the Times: A Literary and Theological Inquiry into the News, Loving God’s Wildness: The Christian Roots of Ecological Ethics in American Literature, Wendell Berry and Higher Education: Cultivating Virtues of Place (written with Jack Baker), and Virtues of Renewal: Wendell Berry’s Sustainable Forms.
Articles by Jeffrey Bilbro
Madeleine L’Engle, Slow Media, and Populism
“A Flourishing Tree.” Tamara Hill Murphy reviews Placemaker: Cultivating Places of Comfort, Beauty, and Peace by Christie Purifoy, a book that circles “round and round the subject of finding, losing, and making…
Monsanto, the Heartland Forum, and Becoming Creaturely
“The Center Holds.” Nicole M. King reviews The Midwestern Moment: The Forgotten World of Early Twentieth-Century Midwestern Regionalism, 1880-1940, edited by Jon K. Lauck, for the University Bookman. The table of contents…
The Table, Topsoil, and the Midwest
Plough Quarterly No. 20: The Welcome Table. The Spring issue of Plough Quarterly is online and has many essays of interest to Porchers. To mention just a few, Norman Wirzba writes about hospitality…
Dairy Farmers, Nebraska, and the Common Good
"Sealed in Blood: Aristopopulism and the City of Man.” Susannah Black wrote a small book in response to Patrick Deneen’s recent talk on aristopopulism. It’s quite rich and merits slow,…
Caretaking, Decadence, and Widow Places
“Caretaking.” There are many gems in this conversation between Wendell Berry and Helena Norberg-Hodge in Orion Magazine. Here’s one from Berry: My quarrel with “movements,” and the reason I use it…
Aristopopulism, Partisan Divides, and John Ruskin
Make plans to join FPR in Louisville on September 14th for our fall conference: Paying Tribute to Wendell Berry. "The Integralist Mirroring of Liberal Ideals." Timothy Troutner offers a critique…
Seeds, Workism, and Stoner
“Seeding Control to Big Ag.” Gracy Olmstead marvels at the wonders of seeds and explains the complex history by which a few large companies have come to dominate their distribution…
The Invisible Hand, Context, and Farm Robots
“Liberalism and the Invisible Hand.” Adrian Vermeule’s essay in American Affairs is worth printing and reading with care. He argues that “the key hallmarks or notes of liberalism’s invisible hand systems are…
Fierce Velleity: Poetry as Antidote to Acedia
In “Lying,” the late Richard Wilbur diagnoses one of our age’s endemic ills with the paradoxical phrase “fierce velleity.” For those of us who don’t use “velleity” every day, the…
Green New Deal, Tech Utopia, and Faith
“Growing a Green New Deal: Agriculture’s Role in Economic Justice and Ecological Sustainability.” Fred Iutzi and Robert Jensen consider the promise and peril of the Green New Deal and warn…
Robots, Andrew Jackson, and Spiritual Journeys
“Best of Bacevich.” Mark G. Brennan reviews Andrew Bacevich’s new collection of essays and finds his assessment of American foreign policy to be, as one would expect, pugnacious and provocative.…
Conservative Treehuggers, Manufacturing, and Monks
“Farms, More Productive Than Ever, Are Poisoning Drinking Water in Rural America.” Jesse Newman and Patrick McGroarty find that fertilizer and concentrated manure are polluting many rural wells. (Recommended by…