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Responding to Your Email: Better Late Than Never
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…
Why Pursue an Education?
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…
Rooted in Reality
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.…
Little League, Then and Now
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…
Planting Our Flag in the Real World: Parents Take the Postman Pledge
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 Defense of Playdates
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…
Filling Time Filling Minds
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…
Stepford, A Parable of Freedom
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…
From Prison to Public School Mentoring
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…
Living the Dream: Unicorn Town
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…
A Recipe for a Festival
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…
There’s No More Room: Toward an Anarcho-Pastoralism
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…
A Community of Aliens
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…
The Power of Community: Tracksmith
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…
Remembering Loss Together: A Review of The Meaning of Mourning
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…
The Borough Playground
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…
When Work Disappears: A Review of The Other Side of Prospect
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…
Ripples of Grace in Works of Mercy
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.
How to Make and Lose Friends (& Influence a Few People): Learning from Carry Nation and Dale Carnegie
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…
A Man From Nowhere
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…
Call the Midwife: Twenty-First Century Edition
Having experienced pregnancy and childbirth with both a traditionally trained OB/GYN and with midwives, the philosophical differences are abundantly clear.
Hard Times, Landscape, and Memory
The memory of pain has the power to protect our joy. The land, the place, the names, the people; these are what connect us to today and to every past…
Cancel War Stories
People often want to ignore the complexity of that process, downplay how often interests conflict, and avoid confrontation. In this essay, I suggest we throw ourselves into the mess and…
House Calls, Handicraft, and the Human Community
The reason I lament the loss of home visits is because in the doctor’s journey to see the patient as a person (which is essential to the therapeutic relationship) the…
