The Nightstand
What a Victorian Novel Teaches Us about Friendship and Civil Order
America has a crisis of friendship
More Articles in The Nightstand
Practicing Authentic Conversation
If I attempt to follow Berry’s underwater route too closely, I’m afraid I will drown. Rather than try to summarize it, then, I will instead distill from it a set of guidelines…
Patriotic Work: Wendell Berry’s The Need to be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice
No one can be whole alone; no one can be free alone. Rather, Berry holds that “[t]o be whole and free is…to be at home in a place and in a community…
Walking alongside Wisdom: A review of Learning the Good Life
Lying on a bed at 2:00 AM idly flipping through a book while texting a friend isn’t likely to be a transformative experience. Treating education as a hoop to jump through to…
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 us at…
Perspectives of History: Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle
Turmoil is present throughout Dick’s world, and this is clearly reflected in each of the three characters discussed here. Tagomi, Wegner, and Childan’s lives are greatly influenced by events precipitated by others,…
The Scholarly Lewis: A Review of The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis
Baxter articulates two central features of the Medieval Model: the ordered and iconic nature of reality. Reality is not a chaos waiting for us to impose structure on it or make it…
What in the World is the World?
Perhaps it’s the nudge you need to reconsider your little actions and the grand narrative which guides and orients them. And, perhaps, you’ll go out to confront the real in all its…
Agrarian Theology and its Limits: A Review of Agrarian Spirit
I am not faulting Wirzba for failing to include these examples of more conservative Christians who practice agrarianism. But I would ask whether his theology of agrarianism, written in an academic context,…
Defining Race: A Review of Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America
In their newest incarnation, American racial preferences are advertised to the public as compensating for prior pro-white discrimination and promoting racial diversity. Problems of definition persist under the new order of things,…
The Only Bonds to Be Found: A Review of The Most Beautiful Place on Earth
An imagination like his, fictions like his – born from affection – may not provide us with data or answers but may help us feel “somehow more substantial and less troubled, characters…
Hunting, Hearing Loss, and Environmental Ethics: A Review of A Catechism of Nature
Brown stresses the need to pay attention to “what God has said, and nature is his most primordial and exoteric word”; after all, within this word, human nature is situated too. But…
Restoring Ideas and Structures: A Review of The Right to Repair
For readers exhausted by the seemingly intractable erosion of society by powerful forces, Perzanowski, has, thankfully, included many tales of heroic and insurgent successes sure to inspire readers, and his treatment of…
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