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
Math, Antitrust, and Work
“Computers Can’t Do Math.” David Schaengold has a clear and provocative essay on the differences between computer “thinking” and human thinking: “we can be sure there are world states beyond…
COVID, ChatGPT, and PFAS
“The Cultural Roots of Our Demographic Ennui.” Patrick Brown argues that affluence—what regular FPR contributor John de Graaf labeled “affluenza”—lies behind many of our cultural ills: “A world of creature…
Lobsters, Resilience, and Scouting
“DIY.” Bud Smith details the joys of fixing anything that’s broken with the help of the Internet: “YouTube has all the right answers and all the wrong answers. All you…
Every Day Do Something that Won’t Compute
How has your intellectual practice prepared you not just for success but also for failure?
Patriotism, Realtors, and Men
“The Big AI Risk Not Enough People Are Seeing.” Tyler Austin Harper draws on Ivan Illich to distinguish between technologies that empower us and those that erode our human nature:…
Reading, Undset, and Tariffs
“Hope for the Organization Kid.” Joshua Hochschild revisits David Brooks’ classic 2004 essay on college students and considers what’s changed in the two decades since: “I doubt that the keenest…
Reading, Chatbots, and Home
“Our Draymond Green Problem.” Elizabeth Stice draws on Draymond Green and Hannah Arendt to consider what responsibilities we might have for our allies: “What we need then is not exactly…
Hipsters, Cellphones, and Mondragón
“Is Ethical Shopping Only for Hipsters?” Kate Lucky wrestles with ethical shopping, effective charity, and the upside down extravagance of the Kingdom of God: “We anticipate an abundant new earth,…
The Midwest, Adderall, and Avian Flu
“Ending Agriculture isn’t the Climate-Crisis Solution Some Think It Is.” Taras Grescoe weighs in on the debate about lab-grown protein and makes a sensible defense of farming: “we need to…
Conservation, Inflation, and Boeing
“‘This Will Finish Us.’” I finished reading Wendell Berry’s Unsettling of America this week with a group of students, so this heartbreaking essay by Stephanie McCrummen about how the Tanzanian…
Refuge, Levitation, and Hospitality
“The Liberalism of Refuge.” I think that Bryan Garsten’s notion of “refuge” isn’t robust enough to do all the work he’s asking it to do in this account, but he…
Hands, Surveillance, and Church
“Angry Farmers Are Reshaping Europe.” While this New York Times article predictably frames European farmers’ frustrations through the lens of the “far right” and its rising political power, Roger Cohen…