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When enough people recognize their emasculated state and demand change through the political process, then authority and resources will be given back to the local community so that people can…

Tempe, AZ. “Why do soldiers miss war?” This is the provocative question at the heart of Scott Beauchamp’s essay collection Did You Kill Anyone?: Reunderstanding My Military Experience as a…

Ironically, by searching for the self, we also lose ourselves. The more intently we look within, the more elusive our sense of self becomes.

Clay County, MO. At first blush, independent interdependence may seem an oxymoron. Yet people exercise a kind of balance between their need for autonomy and their need for what others…

I recently visited a barber in my Virginian hometown whom I had not patronized in more than a year (I’d taken to getting my haircuts during lunch breaks at my…

The failure to distinguish between art and beauty has caused much confusion. Art and beauty have two different but overlapping trajectories–one towards union and the other towards transcendent reality.

I am in love with my neighborhood because I am in love with the people, how resilient and complicated they are, and how they teach me how wrong I have…

In Canto XXX of the Inferno, Dante becomes fascinated with an argument between Sinon the Greek and Master Adamo, both of them condemned for sowing discord. Virgil, his guide through…

It is a cloudless July day in Connecticut—the kind of day that keeps people rooted in this place despite its long winters and high taxes.  From houses up and down the…

It is hard to see a silver lining in the abuse scandal of the Catholic Church. Nevertheless, the scarring crisis has given Pope Francis a rare opportunity to initiate meaningful…

While wandering in a used bookstore this summer, I picked up Donald Hall’s String Too Short to be Saved. I enjoyed Hall’s stories about his grandparents’ farm (the book’s title…

From a jail cell in Birmingham, Martin Luther King, Jr. charged us to acknowledge our “inescapable network of mutuality.”  Fifty-five years later, our networks of mutuality remain inescapable.  And they’re…

Earlier this year, after the Charlie Hebdo shootings, I reflected on the conversations that may or may not ensue from the changing of a facebook profile picture.  As my facebook…

I recently had a chance to watch the film The Giver. Sometimes we get films early, sometimes late, sometimes at the same time as they are released in the United…

Or, "Shaken and Stirred: The Cosmopolitan, the City, and the Regime of God" Queens, NY The following essay was presented at FPR's annual conference in Louisville on September 27. What…

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] It's clear to me that one of the primary things people (in the United States, certainly, but also elsewhere) think about when trying to understand…

In some ways, the little farming community of Hallettsville where I have spent a writing sabbatical still resides in a simpler time. Czechs and Germans came in the 1800s and…

[This post is adapted with permission from “Making Places: The Cosmopolitan Temptation,” an essay in the anthology Why Place Matters: Geography, Identity, and Civic Life in Modern America, edited by…

This is what we all need now: a deep belly-laugh.

History is never merely history.

Many FPR readers may be interested in attending the Abbeville Institute's Eleventh Annual Summer School: "Understanding the South and the Southern Tradition." It will be held at St. Christopher Conference Center, Seabrook…

The family’s life in this village had come to an end when the lake was dammed in 1958. One wonders who would consider such things worth it.

He was looking at me with what appeared to be some degree of disbelief.

The following is a talk given at the annual conference of The Academy of Philosophy and Letters on June 16, 2012 in Baltimore, MD. In her book The Need for…