Michial Farmer
Michial Farmer is a poet, essayist, and history teacher. He is the author of Imagination and Idealism in John Updike’s Fiction (Camden House, 2017) and the translator of Gabriel Marcel’s Thirst (Cluny, 2021). He lives in Atlanta.
Articles by Michial Farmer
The Race to the Bottom: A Review of Ross Benes’s ‘1999’
It never fails—whenever Benes defends low culture, he does so in the exact terms that he ought to be using to criticize it
From Postliberalism to Preliberalism: A Review of The Church Against the State
Next time we’re drinking bourbon together, I look forward to telling him that he’s got all the right impulses and is coming to the wrong conclusions.
Unpacking My Library (Again)
Maybe, in the end, a home library does what a long-inhabited home does: charts a middle ground between the chaos of the world and the hyper-rationality of modernity.
Human Dominion in Kipling’s Just So Stories
Rudyard Kipling’s 1902 Just So Stories are a delightful anomaly—they feel like folk tales but were largely invented by Kipling himself as bedtime stories for his eldest daughter, Josephine.
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…
Flowers and Dust: Summer in The Great Gatsby
The summer, its heat and its flowers, has finally been put to death. But the dust remains. George Wilson is covered in it, alive and dead, and as Nick told…
The Insistent Cough of Grace: Remembering Frederick Buechner
His books are not a diminishment of historic and intellectual Christianity. They are a translation of Aquinas, Barth, Calvin, and the rest into the language we all speak innately but…
Calvino’s Leonia and the Weight of History
The conservationist recognizes that the society we live in, as much as the natural world we live in, was given to us as a gift with the demand that we…
Celebrity, Success, and the Kingdom of Heaven
Atlanta, GA. It’s been a rough few years for celebrity evangelicals. In the summer of 2019, Joshua Harris—the Calvinist pastor who became a national sensation in the late ‘90s with…
Walking in the Suburbs
Flânerie is a kind of silent revolt. The chief virtue in an industrial society is efficiency, but by its very nature, flânerie is inefficient. It doesn’t even pretend to care…
The Uses of Nostalgia
Nostalgia's got a bad rap, but, in addition to being nearly inescapable, it has indispensable benefits, provided it’s kept within reasonable limits.
Two Forms of Despair
What I’m writing is not an exposé of the Christian college, nor a bitter and defiant account of my triumph over an evil system, but a confession of my own…