The Stump

Before we totally condemn the Athenians as selfish, entertainment-addicted bad citizens—which, to be fair, they sometimes (or often?) were, just like us—it is worth considering what such shared democratic spaces of entertainment…

Whether America ever was or is exceptional is a matter for further discussion; but Tocqueville’s own estimate of America in the early nineteenth century was mixed at best and negative at worst.…

My point is not to get lost in conventional debate here. But seeking to heal from the culture war, I want to uncover the bodies of my neighbors, which industrial stories kick…

Vermont dumps almost all of its own garbage into Mount Casella, though it exports some to New Hampshire and New York. Its own consumption of goods–often including unhealthy processed foods, shipped huge…

To appeal to personal rights seems to be an appeal to the highest value, and it is no wonder that people are feeling spiritually and socially starved. No one in earlier times…

That with which we fill our time, after all, is what ends up filling our minds, hearts, and souls. More than simply responsible scheduling, our very character is on the line, and…

This is the spirituality of a man post-tragedy, post-heroin, post-forty-days-in-the-wilderness. Not the self-pleased, spick-and-span, airbrushed piety we’ve come to expect from presidential candidates these days but practical spirituality.

What starts as a method to optimize reading, exercise, or relationships becomes an end in itself. The native physiological benefit of the morning walk or bed-making is overshadowed by appeasing the voice…

Swift knocked out several tracts and sermons on the problems of the Irish economy. And in them he said, in good FPR fashion, several FPRish things—for example, that place matters.

What I failed to realize was that the conservatism I was shifting away from was not a historical conservatism at all—rather, it was a distinctly 2000s neoconservatism that I had assumed was…

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 homes; they…

What is more radical, and more conservative, than to cast the ring into the fire? That would be a real “regime change,” would it not?