nature 45

Our dwelling place is the state not of nature but of culture.

But, as Shakespeare wrote, we sometimes “by indirections find directions out.”

Contraception as Apparent Moral Good.  Most persons who use contraception conceive of it as a moral good.  They see an unruly, pullulating nature directed toward nothing other than its own…

I’ve just finished Andrea Wulf’s beguiling book entitled “ Founding Gardeners, The Revolutionary Generation, Nature and the Shaping of the American Nation”. Published this year by Knopf, it delves into…

Perhaps the tension will be useful when it comes time to make something of what is. Just be sure you make it in a place called home.

The diversity club ran its course, and has been replaced with "second-wave environmentalism," a.k.a. our culprit, sustainability.

To him, the created world is merely “resources” and fodder for “job creation.”

Call it Factory Planet: a world in which natural processes are treated as parts of a vast world-machine operated to produce a maximum amount of wealth for humans.

Washington, Connecticut. The urge, some might say mania with which our species has attempted to distance itself from Nature is a defining occupation and it appears to be quickening in…

“Hontar:  We must work in the world, your eminence. The world is thus. Altamirano: No, Señor Hontar. Thus have we made the world. Thus have I made it.” From The…

Coeur d'Alene, ID. One evening our family and two cousins were playing Uno. It’s a simple game requiring nothing more than a deck of Uno cards. We’ve played this game…

Democratizing eighth-grade algebra promotes social justice. (Brookings Institution) Money, mechanization, algebra. The three monsters of contemporary civilization. Complete analogy. (Simone Weil) Mt. Airy, Philadelphia. There are a lot of conspiracy…

Many who are alarmed at the prospect of the “abolition of man” have found in Huxley’s Brave New World a dark and salutary warning – an imaginative rendering of our…

Alexandria, VA The other night I happened to catch the second half of an ABC special program, "Earth 2100."  The program was a "speculative history" of what the world might…

Washington, CT. Winter was a hard-nosed professional this season just past. It sunk its icy teeth in long and hard and mocked us with a one day January thaw that…

April was "Media Awareness Month" at our sons' school. I took a couple weeks off from the Porch, and I also published a first draft of this piece in the…

Mt. Airy, Philadelphia. Before it became a science of supply and demand and the circulation of commodities, economics was originally understood as the wisdom of household management. The Greek word…

The obscuring of the faith in creation is a fundamental part of what constitutes modernity. As I survey all the perplexing shifts in the spiritual landscape of today, only these…

Mt. Airy, Philadelphia. Imagine human beings brought up from childhood in a cave, bound fast with their heads all facing one direction. On the wall before them they see only…

  Alexandria, VA . The causes of the current economic collapse have been widely discussed and minutely explored.  However, to date I do not believe that I have yet seen…

E.D. Kain identifies a paradox in modern American conservatism that will be familiar to students of George Grant. Forty years ago, Grant wrote this in his essay, "In Defence of…