liberty 33

As Americans, we must remember that place matters, and our founding principles are best understood when we look at how they were made real in the city of brotherly love.

Wendell Berry's fiction shows what relationships look like with skin on—how real relationships are enacted between people. As the characters who inhabit the fictional town Port William interact, they demonstrate…

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…

Livy asserts that shamelessness led to decadence which, in turn, led to greed and eventually devolved into demagoguery and tyranny. His assertion that Roman liberty and equality were destroyed by…

Prolific author and social critic Os Guinness discusses the current challenges for liberty and his hopes for the future. The Chinese-born, English-educated, Irish-rooted scholar who lives in America also shares…

The same things that happened to the family farms, and to farmers like my father, are now happening to the colleges, and to faculty like me.

Capitalism as Theology In his seminal work, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, Michael Novak provides his readers with a “Theology of Democratic Capitalism.”1 Now, some might find his theology a…

Patrick Deneen’s new book, Why Liberalism Failed, is a manifesto in defense of place, limits, and liberty. And the amount of attention it’s received (how often does The New York…

So long as gravity obtains, sawing off the branch you’re sitting on is never a good idea.

[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…

A few days ago was the first time I heard Chinese being spoken with a heavy Indian accent.  Given the tenor of our times, one might expect this to have…

This is my contribution to ISI’s symposium, Conservatism: What’s Wrong with it and How Can We Make it Right? In one sense, there is nothing wrong with conservatism. The principles…

FPR readers can now enjoy another web magazine that complements the already excellent work of the Front Porch Republic. Nomocracy In Politics is a new website that explores Liberty, Prudence, Imperfection, and…

Hidden Springs, VA. Recently Ross Douthat commented on Rod Dreher’s new book in a column devoted to the rising incidence of suicide and the problem of loneliness. In a follow-up…

Hidden Springs Lane. A couple months before my wife and I were married, a friend ask me "why do you want to get married so young?" My fiance and I…

Hidden Springs Lane. As the Fiscal Cliff looms, as Red States and Blues States stand more divided than ever, as the gap between the wealthiest Americans and the rest continues…

One thing that has amused me in these first three years of FPR’s existence is the tendency of some readers to single out one or two articles and lament that…

Ron Paul didn't win Iowa but he did well. What should he do now?

This is Part II of a III Part series on C.S. Lewis and Statism. The series originally appeared at theIndependent Institute. See Part I here and Part III here. Moral…

The habit of questioning, of civil debate, of negotiating, and compromise are the habits necessary for a thriving democracy.

What would Sam Adams, Patrick Henry, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson say if they were transported to our day?

Now that GM stands for “Government Motors” who can love a Chevy? In many ways, seat belt laws paved the way for this transformation. Government straps me in, government keeps…

Patrick Deneen's excellent post this morning on populism, directly invoking Kansas, gives me the occassion to repost a short essay I wrote last year for my on again off again (more off…

Amid Alexis de Tocqueville’s writings on revolution in France, there is a passage that rings true for those of us who have spent time in the countryside.  He observed that…