The Wittenberg Door

This is awfully late but perhaps also timely (since the spat between Sohrab Ahmari and David French seems to have a long shelf life). What follows is the talk I gave at…

The mighty cosmos of the modern economic order determines, with overwhelming coercion, the style of life not only of those directly involved in business but of every individual who is born into this mechanism,…

We know now that much of the Notre Dame Cathedral survived and that it will be rebuilt. But while the fire at the Notre Dame Cathedral burned, Americans mourned. They didn’t just…

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river Is a strong brown god— . . . Unhonoured, unpropitiated By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and…

Conservation is at the heart of conservatism. And the root of our contemporary ecological crisis is a careless, profligate mode of relating to the world; Francis Bacon would be proud of our…

I remember being held. I remember, though it was the desert, being cold. I remember the feathers of a headdress, coming up like the sun from behind red boulder. My family didn't…

This may be a tad tardy, but Jeff Bilbro's write-up and assessment of the conference about Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed caught my eye for several reasons. One was the relatively under…

In the Christian imagination, Dorothy Day looms as one of the 20th century’s great saints. A Communist convert to Christianity and co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, her work among the poor,…

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 OED defines…

A common and often valid critique of many families in the homeschooling movement is that, because of a lingering obsession on, and invisible competition with, the thing they are leaving behind, (in…

In a lecture on monastic stability delivered at the 2015 Front Porch Republic conference, Benedictine monk Gerard D’Souza noted that the idea of staying in one place for the rest of one’s life…

Liberalism can be marked by the gospel and still be a political and cultural dead end. As Ivan Illich argued, corruptio optimi pessima.