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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…

Many FPR readers will enjoy "Derrida’s Hope and Despair for Globalization" in ANAMNESIS.

FPR readers are invited to attend the coming Ciceronian Society Conference at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, March 29-31. All attendance to observe the panels is free of charge.…

FPR readers will be interested in both (1) K.R. Bolton's traditionalist Conservative critique of Marx and Ideological-Capitalism and (2) Lee Trepanier's examination of the use of history in Hawthorne.

“I don’t care if you bring the president of Peru and a thousand police—we’ll be carried out dead before you dig here!”  Thus was the position of the twenty or…

Springsteen’s music does indeed return to the things that are most important in an hour of crisis. But contrary to popular impressions, these things turn out to have very little…

What ironies of fate converged that morning, such that a mob was about to come out on a march against us?

And I'm certain my bovine stare was a dead giveaway that I found it troubling to imagine him wearing anything but a felt fedora while riding a horse named Hobby.

  Last Sunday I sat on the church porch, smoked my pipe and listened as some of our musicians played their guitars and mandolins. One of the songs we sang…

They never quite got it when they asked me if I was “going home for Christmas” and I replied, “I live at home.”