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What’s Wrong With Iowa? (A Transplanted Professor Knows)
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.
Agrarian Hypocrisy and the Evils of Distributism
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…
Electing Beaver: The Politics of Place in the Public Square
“The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what he saw in a plain way …” John Ruskin I do not…
There’s No Place Like Home
Absent is the self-examination of the person in the mirror and how we exchange with loved ones around the dinner table. Forgotten is how to live a life more thoughtfully,…
Sitting Inside a Mountain
Breaking free from the voices, soundtrack, machinery, and plastic of consumption and advertising gives an individual the opportunity to consider questions and ideas that the world outside St. Raymond’s continually…
The Statute of Limitations has Passed
They never quite got it when they asked me if I was “going home for Christmas” and I replied, “I live at home.”
Cabrini Dreams
“You go two blocks one way, you're in public housing. You go two blocks the other way, you're at Banana Republic."
What is American?
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…
The Ties that Stretch and Bind
Many a time, I have seen my friend doting on his little seven-year-old half brother, picking him up from school, cooking for him, and keeping his classmates’ junk food at…
Print Culture and the Fate of the Literary Quarterly
The general continued to pay for the upkeep of the LSU tiger in an airconditioned cage. The amount of money involved was almost precisely the same as the subsidy for…
Castles Built on Sand
Even for the average homeowner, ownership all too often is imagined as a way of gaming income flow and consumption over a lifetime, accumulating enough to spend down before one…
The Vast White Landscape: E.B. White’s “Great Snows” Revisited
Rock Island, IL A century ago in New England, the approach to snow was quite different. When snow began to fly, people switched to runners. Roads were not plowed out,…
Imitation and the Art of Flattery: the Cold War of the Imagination
Washington, Connecticut. At the end of his introduction to a re-publication of the Marquis de Custine’s "Empire of the Czar, A Journey Through Eternal Russia," George F. Kennan recalls a…
Sewers and Leashes: A Local Story
Hillsdale, MI. This is a true story. It happened once upon a time in a place I do not now live. After an arduous campaign I was elected to the…
… Neither Proud Nor Lonely
C.S. Lewis noted that “If you had asked Lazamon or Chaucer ‘Why do you not make up a brand-new story of your own?’ I think they might have replied (in…
Jawboning: A Tale of Two Hardware Stores
Hamilton, Ontario. The other day I was standing in a cavernous mega-chain hardware store looking for gardening supplies. This was not an easy task because the store, which we can…
The Stories We Tell…
Philadelphia, PA. If you have read just one of Wendell Berry’s novels or short stories, then you have glimpsed this Kentucky farmer’s love for family, place, and story. In a contemplative…
Waiting for the Americans…
In the late 1970s, my grandfather’s older brother, already in his nineties, was pressing his almost deaf ears to a little portable radio still hoping to hear that “the Americans…
Thoughts on the Return of College Football
Holland, MI. The beginning of the college football season is the closest thing to a state holiday in Michigan. The release of the new auto line might have at one time…
The Reluctant Southerner: Reflections on Home and History
Moorpark, CA. In October of 1997 I attended the Southern Historical Association’s convention in Atlanta because I wanted to hear Paul Conkin’s presidential address, “Hot, Humid, and Sad.” What I…
