tradition 45
Why We Need Christmas Trees
Rituals are our allies in sorrow. They help us appreciate what brief time we had with our loved ones while acknowledging the years we will face without them.
Straw Men and the Possibility of Community in Modernity
Between these extremes, however, is free choice within reasonable limits, which I believe makes the value of community and its deliberative fruits still possible, even within the reality of the…
Familiar Revolution
Like the very young and the very old among us, we must forget the learned delusion of independence that revolution prefers and accept the radical dependence of the human condition.
A Recipe for a Festival
They know their neighbors; and their neighbors, after all, are probably their kinsmen too, though it might take a careful genealogist to trace two neighboring streams back to their originating…
An Extraordinary School for Girls: Learning the Things You Wish Grandma Taught You
It is daunting to envision running a pleasant, blessed household. This is why we're not meant to do it alone. Women are meant to flock together, with their words and…
A Dictionary of Dumb Ideas: Tradition vs. Convention
We should aim to conserve what is deepest and true, not just what happens to have immediately preceded the present. It should be the conservative’s task to reconnect the manner…
Dana Gioia’s Bright Twilight
Out on the wrinkled sea, the high notes come shimmering over the cold waves, and 72-year-old Dana Gioia says, “Meet me at the Lighthouse.”
A Christian Critique and the Neoliberal Future: A Review of Naming Neoliberalism
Clapp’s ambitious study attempts a great deal within a comparatively brief compass. Unfortunately, some topics suffer as a result...How can one best understand the tension between individual moral responsibility (rooted…
The Many Traditions of Tolkien
This Realness, a touch of authentic mythology--much like Niggle who finally saw the Real Tree he had modeled his painting after throughout his life without knowing it--comes alive when the…
Grandmother’s Wisdom
When I hear some folk wisdom that I would have previously dismissed as backwards or ridiculous, I now look for the guardrails it establishes and what they might be protecting.
Brass Spittoon: Bradley Birzer on Christian Humanism
Bradley Birzer on Christian humanism, judging the past, memory, and gratitude.
On the Front Porch with Ursula Le Guin
Those who do know her work might be a bit surprised if I suggest that Le Guin has a real porcher sensibility.
Why Do Soldiers Miss War?
Tempe, AZ. “Why do soldiers miss war?” This is the provocative question at the heart of Scott Beauchamp’s essay collection Did You Kill Anyone?: Reunderstanding My Military Experience as a…
The Meaning of Houellebecq
Houellebecq describe those aspects of our world that swarm us now, beleaguer us, pen us in. They are the products of a world suffused with technology, and of the attendant…
The Axial Age and the Sacred Community
Our disregard of tradition and community has left us alienated and estranged compared to more traditional societies that rely on a web of family, community, and religion.
The Ordinary Christian Option
Elevated figures in church history have a great deal to teach us, but we should not forget that we can also learn from the early, run-of-the-mill Christians who were as…
The Bridge and the Breach: A Review of Indigenous by Jennifer Reeser
It is a hybrid, sacramental understanding of the earth and matter and of being in the world. She seems to say that even if the earth of Chilhowee is dry…
Still Singin’
That this country boasts something called “The Great American Songbook” is one of the best jokes around. The Great American Songbook? Our songs—let alone songbooks—don’t stick around long enough to…
The Monkey in the Margin: History, Tradition, and Transgression
[T]he early scholastic notion of revelation was more dynamic than the modern one. Revelation does not occur, in the medieval understanding, once and for all in the static letters of…
Confucius–A Man for All Seasons
Confucius deserves a place of honor on the Front Porch because he was History’s keenest observer of the traditions and rituals that make life civilized. He lived in a time…
Narrating the Tradition of Liberalism’s Anti-Tradition
Criticizing the current liberal order is a popular activity. Authors such as Patrick Deneen, Rod Dreher, D.C. Schindler, Mark Lilla, Johnathan Haidt, and Jordan Peterson have generated significant conversation through…
Cultivating the Candy Roaster: An Extensive Pleasure
In the spring of this year, some students and I created a modest Heritage Garden—420 square feet of raised beds built from two-by-twelves and filled with a topsoil and compost…
Silence, Development, and the Changing Church
Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation of Silence (2016), the 1966 novel by Shusako Endo, follows the trials of a young Portuguese Jesuit, Father Rodrigues, whose mission to the Japanese in the…
Belloc on the New Year
"On New Year's Eve, at about quarter to twelve o'clock at night, the master of the house and all that are with him go about from room to room opening…