localism 172

Amateur operations are fragile and tenuous. But we’re grateful for a much-improved virtual home.

The politics of Jesus are “brutally modest.” “Jesus’ life seems to have been mostly one of local, familial labor and relations, carried out in the compass of a small town…

This year the big boys dominated.

However, the widespread association of these events with the closing of the Hotel Harrington has overshadowed the preceding history of the hotel

I believe in personal responsibility; insurance companies believe in impersonal responsibility.

College football is a local endeavor that should be enacted by those with a connection to that place.

I am not sure if Garfield ever made chili for his supporters. The men and women who descended on his property were there to meet a future president. What Garfield…

I mourn the storm. It’s far from over. But I also do not mourn without hope.

Our need for privacy has been accentuated by the way we live, in which goods and services arrive seemingly out of the ether, things we’ve bought to consume, throw away,…

I belong to this place—if not for the next thousand years, at least for the summer. In such a displaced age, even that has to mean something.

You don’t have to be normal. You don’t have to be weird. You just have to be a person – which is a moral ideal, not a fact of nature…

If we don’t experience full, unqualified “concrete, historical community,” then we won’t experience full, unqualified “genuine deliberation.”

America is known for its English-Protestant roots, for the pilgrims who settled the Eastern seaboard and the Anglos who descended from them. But America has a French-Catholic history, too, and…

Civil society relies on common spaces where people of all backgrounds can meet, but states and cities have been pursuing semi-privatization of public spaces.

Knowing your family’s past fugitives and pretty boys is the kind of localism anyone can aspire toward and practice.

Kennard himself, though worrying about his legacy during his last illness, seemed remarkably free of bitterness. Concerning a prison guard who had abused him, he thought that the abuse had…

That’s the great cultural task now: to relearn this old language, to keep it from dying out, to nurture it and refine and expand it, to develop new idioms and…

“By their fruits you will recognize them,” Jesus tells his disciples. If what appears is bad or worthless, you’ll have been made aware of what was there all along, incipient.…

Walk boldly. Whistle not, but do keep walking. Keep walking right on by it and let the dead bury the dead.

The Empire did not fall the day Front Porch Republic rose. But in 15 years FPR has done much more than simply add weight to the human scale. It has…

Rushing to enslave themselves like animals in a cage, the animal rights and climate activists who think they are on the “right side of history” are unwittingly reinforcing their dependence…

If I am therefore departing one field in which I hoped to do some good work in place, I hope to deepen my practice as an English professor who lives…

If we imagine that the fate of our times hangs upon our efforts, we’ll deceive ourselves and miss out on the goods and pleasures that are at hand waiting to…

The promise and peril of current forms of localism, with Trevor Latimer.