localism 172

Purcellville, VA. Our readers will be delighted to know that Mr. Wendell Berry has been named the 41st Jefferson Lecturer in the Humanities. The 2012 Jefferson Lecture, sponsored by the…

If you think you may legitimately enjoy the physical benefits of a place while dwelling in the airy regions of judgment above it, you’d better think again.

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] As Christmas and the end of 2011 approaches, I find myself thinking gratefully about what Leroy Hershberger has enabled my students and me to learn…

The Euro is in trouble, and the news just keeps getting worse. There is now open talk of a post-Euro Europe, and such a turn would be a serious strike…

“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…

For those of you who were not able to be in Emmitsburg on Saturday, you missed a wonderful day. The rain stopped sometime in the night and the early morning…

The federal courts' extraordinarily broad interpretation of the Constitution's interstate commerce clause has long posed a problem for localists -- which is to say, for community self-governance. That has never…

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

  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…

While there is much work to be done and there are no guarantees of success, we don’t have to look far for the foundations upon which to build. They are…

Then it’s a bit up to you to be jolly crusty and jolly full of hell-fire and sin and damnation.

On the banks of a river, but can't get a drink.

Here are the local puzzle pieces that we somehow need to fit together: great farms; committed, hard working farmers; a university of world class researchers; a highly participatory local political…

Gossip, under the right circumstances, acts as a virtue which demonstrates concern and thickens social ties.

The prevailing model of local voting has deep defects, which often work against strong communities. The modern standard is one person, one vote, one place. While this standard is simple,…

Should you have, for some reason, an interest in goings-on in the world of philanthropy and civil society, I invite you to lumber on on over to Philanthropy Daily.

If Lasch couldn't express a way for leftists and localists to speak the same language, perhaps no one can.

Whatever the results of the British election, the Red Tory ideal remains promising...and yet, absent a robust civic religion, also probably wanting.

Teaching Wendell Berry to students today isn't a thankless task, but the victories are small and far between (which, one might say, is all the best victories always are).

If voting for your favorite baseball player doesn't prove his greatness, does the same lesson apply to your favorite or even your own community?

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.

If your religion--or at least your concept of the moral norms of the civil order--lacks a notion of grace, it therefore also lacks a notion of gifts; all it can…

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…

A homogeneous global consumer culture flattens its victims. And, perhaps in the same vein, our meanderings around the dying furniture capital of Yecla turned up nothing: virtually everything on display…