community 222

I’ve been told that workers have had to step away from the register while checking out paying customers to chase away repeat shoplifters as they hurled all kinds of epithets…

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…

Maybe we can just call it something else, like, “Living with family and friends in a neighborhood designed to encourage the building of social capital, relying on them in real…

This trend is peaking in a small rectangle, the smartphone. As Marc Barnes observes, the smartphone has replaced the TV. The smartphone is portable and personal and has enticed us…

It is, I realized, handy to have a proper template handy, ready to use, should my fears come true, and I discover that I really did forget to answer an…

The course I am teaching is part of the university’s core curriculum. Core comes from the Latin word for “heart,” I told my students. The same Latin root, cor, gives…

We were all, adults and children alike, doing things that really mattered to the whole free world, and we’d better get on with doing them, every day, all the time.…

But that love for baseball didn’t mean that we organized our lives around the sport, or that any parent with a Little Leaguer had baseball scholarships in mind. It didn’t…

Do real things together. Celebrate. Take delight in the world—together. Don’t feel compelled to broadcast your views about the dangers of technology. Let your life speak, but be prepared to…

In a perfect world, our children would romp out the door after completing their chores and their schoolwork (we homeschool) and knock politely at their best friend’s door, who lived…

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…

In Stepford, everyone has forgotten how to do nothing, as children used to do: the blessed nothing that is full of receptivity and calm, and that is at the heart…

However, my role that day was not to frighten but inspire, as all the other mentors would do. My message was simple: I wanted these energetic students to know that…

Once upon a time, different businesses and professions in a town would have their own baseball teams and play each other. At a minimum, we could do more to bring…

They know their neighbors; and their neighbors, after all, are probably their kinsmen too, though it might take a careful genealogist to trace two neighboring streams back to their originating…

What I’ve just attempted to describe are the joys of the edge. Freedom, I believe, has a limited half-life when it’s in the heart of civilization. Anarcho-pastoralism means that there’s…

I continued to stumble on, frequently forgetting my own story, seeking evermore opportunities for dislocated, immortal, heroic freedom from the chains of that finite, particular history. It was only a…

Tracksmith makes beautiful things and promotes a beautiful vision of the world. So much the better. It is not fast fashion. It embraces the concepts of tradition and place and…

The need to reconcile with one’s finitude and live as good a life in light of this was made clear by many of the more successful essays and tallied with…

It’s children that make the neighborhood, and when children are outdoors, you’ll want porches in the front of your houses, so that you can see the streets where they often…

Certainly there is a need for a national conversation and national solutions... But reading The Other Side of Prospect, one is left with the sense that the ultimate authors of…

Thomas’s novel suggests that those who would answer these difficult vocations well must learn to look through the pain and see the light shining through.

I guess that paradox is what intrigues me about Carry and Dale’s differing personal constitutions and methodologies. I see them appealing to all of us in different ways—whether we have…

I am not now lamenting my station, which is a kind of existential loneliness, though at times I do. I’m putting it down in writing because I know for certain…