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The Uglification of Michigan Lake Towns

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…

A Rural White American’s Reflection of White Rural Rage: Resentment is Toxic

Despite Trump’s own divisive rhetoric, he makes rural Americans feel heard in ways neither majority party has in decades. Any politician or scholar who actually wants to address the root…
September 3, 2024

Who Has Children Anymore Anyway?

Without God, a spiraling fertility rate seems certain. But on spiritual grounds, there’s always room for hope and renewal. When the seed is sown on the good soil, it bears…

Boom Towns Go Bust

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.

American Holland and Dutch America: On the Exoticization of Culture

Culture is the ever-evolving play that takes place on that stage, as new props come and old props are replaced, even as the theater remains the same. Of course, the…

Past, Future, and Breeding Out of Captivity

Perhaps in the coming decades we shall have, so to speak, not a straightforward demographic slope downward, but more of a dip and a levelling off in the next century.
August 19, 2024

An Introductory Course in Apicultural Science: Tracy Farone’s Honey Bee Vet

But even a novice like me—hobbled by an ignorance of veterinarian science and perennially pulled toward too many projects—found the book interesting and useful.
August 12, 2024

The Jigsaw Revolution: Finding Peace, Piece by Piece

The way of the puzzler is not about reaching a certain goal. If it were, the perfectly fine image would never have been broken up to begin with. The way…

The Census Taker in a Church Pew, part 6

This rural mountain church continues to be good because it continues to do what is necessary.

Remembering Family History: A Mess, a Murderer, and a Matriarch

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

Sore Mouth Pond

In this way, “idleness as such is by no means a root of evil; quite the contrary, it is a truly divine way of life so long as one is…

Against the Florida-fication of the World

And this progression from the raw, unabated natural Florida to the ever-more artificial Florida, has grave consequences for both the geographical locale and the people who inhabit it.
June 19, 2024

Stability as Spiritual Formation

“They see us as deeply lonely people,” Barry told Fred, “and one of the reasons we’re lonely is that we’ve cut ourselves off from the nonhuman world and have called…
May 28, 2024

Winter Rabbits

And so the shotgun sits in our home like a quiet benediction. It dreams—as I do—of long walks in the valleys of my youth and whispers of future pastures that…

Democracy Against Localism

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…

Wandering in Solitude

But there is something more going on. We also face a new “transcendent reality,” as Klass puts it, in which we see the spiritual world with new eyes. This may…
May 20, 2024

Toward a Politics of Beauty

This talk was delivered earlier this year at a conference on wellbeing held at the Sorbonne.
May 17, 2024

Bjartur and Berry: Contrasting Visions of Community and Affection

Seen through his most redemptive lens, Bjartur stands as a cautionary tale for those who would pursue independence as an end in itself.

Modern Architecture: Designed to Demoralize?

Arched doorways, private courtyards, personal craftsmanship, a sense of place, and almost everything else we love about buildings has been taken away by the modernist ethos intent on depriving the…

A Passage to — and a Message from — India

What We Can Learn from a Society Where Community Still Matters

Allegories of Pruning: Cutting for Growth

Pruning is difficult because we are forced to make a conscious decision to remove something that has been part of a growing plant. But these cuts are necessary and even…

What’s In Your Garage?

No home but the Garden was there originally for man, once upon a very long time ago. No garage either was part of life before expulsion from Eden.

Travels in Exotic Nebraska: A Review of American Harvest

The book is at its best when it embraces a more generous spirit. If one wishes to learn about traveling grain harvesters and to follow a literary description of the…

Gadfly Graffiti

In a funk no more, I was prepared to meet the smile of my daughters with a genuine smile of my own as they came out of practice. The graffiti…