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It’s a Boy! It’s a Girl! It’s a Technology-Enabled “Sex Party”!

How do we explain a culture that tells children that sex doesn’t matter much, that “girls can do anything boys can do,” and at the same moment is treating the…
September 9, 2010

Have We Forgotten the Women?

Tradition supposedly bears the thumbprints of Roman patricians with browbeaten wives or frustrated monks who shivered in mediæval abbeys.
July 30, 2010

Keep the Family, Can the Blog

For several years now, anyone tech-savvy enough to navigate blogspot or xanga has been able to  share their thoughts with the internet world through their personal blog (or sometimes, a…

Preserving Local Memory

My grandma didn’t put up a Christmas tree. She didn’t bake pies. And she didn’t make fudge. Her kitchen was silent. I believe it was her way of mourning, not…
June 4, 2010

Membership

We are here, in part, because choices made in big places have worked against rural places and rural people.
May 24, 2010

Generations

I sense a gap on FPR between NoNamers and most of the rest.

Out of the Fissure, Real Energy: A Response to God’s Economy

Perhaps out of these fissures and the current populist turmoil, someone might be able to craft a new, more coherent, and more promising Christian and Democratic coalition.
April 2, 2010

An Arch Needs Many Stones: A Response to “God’s Economy”

But how can such plural sovereignty be realised under the circumstances of this century? Who will guard the guardians, so to speak? How will the stones of the arch fit…
March 30, 2010

God’s Economy

Bush's strong effort to restore the freedom of the church took the political side of this freedom for the whole meaning of the tradition. At the same time, his supply-side…

An Apologia for Tiger Woods

The rise and fall of Tiger Woods leads to a brief meditation both on beauty and virtue.
Jeff Polet
March 23, 2010

On the Road Again

. . . we rediscovered the meaning of Place. Limits. Liberty.

Friendship with New England Reserve

As the half-savage neighbor in Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” says, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Caritas in the Veritable Welfare State

We need not rely with some desperation on the Hope that is a gift, if we can gin up optimism of our own sort.

The Heart of Light and the Heart of Darkness

He is resigned to the inertia of the old Spanish cult, and willing to just let it fade away. The voluptuousness of European culture had no way to gain traction…

After the Econolypse

Hamilton, Ontario. When remembering a family-owned grocery store in rural Virginia, a first image comes to mind, even though I did not actually witness it. This is my boss, a…

The Economic Stork

The answers we get are dictated by the questions we ask, but there was one question which always grated on my wife's nerves, no matter who frequently she was asked.…

It’s the Family, Stupid

Hillsdale,MI. David the King ordered the beautiful Bathsheba to come to him because he could.    He also could have her husband killed, and sent the letter that condemned Uriah the…

The Vast White Landscape: E.B. White’s “Great Snows” Revisited

Rock Island, IL A century ago in New England, the approach to snow was quite different. When snow began to fly, people switched to runners. Roads were not plowed out,…
Jason Peters
December 23, 2009

Burn the Vineyard

I have just returned from one of the most remarkable journeys of my life, a ten day tour of Romania to promote an anthology of distributist and localist essays, Economic…

Homewreckers

County Kildare, Ireland. A couple I know – we’ll call them Bob and Nancy -- lived in a century-old house in the middle of their town, a few miles from…
December 4, 2009

The Front Porch Agenda?

With all the talk about "what is to be done," in terms of a decentralizing political agenda, I thought I'd throw some ideas out there, with the intent only of…
November 2, 2009

Jawboning: A Tale of Two Hardware Stores

Hamilton, Ontario. The other day I was standing in a cavernous mega-chain hardware store looking for gardening supplies. This was not an easy task because the store, which we can…

The Stories We Tell…

Philadelphia, PA. If you have read just one of Wendell Berry’s novels or short stories, then you have glimpsed this Kentucky farmer’s love for family, place, and story.   In a contemplative…

Sharing the Kids Equally

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Wichita, KS So, Melissa has flown the coop, escaping to Washington D.C. for the next four days to hang out with friends old and new,…
October 15, 2009