The Empire did not fall the day Front Porch Republic rose. But in 15 years FPR has done much more than simply add weight to the human scale. It has revivified the most humane and practical traditions in American social, cultural, economic, and political life and thought. | Continue reading
Friendship is, in fact, a vital key to any flourishing political order, for friendship is rooted in affection and a commitment to the good of the friend, which translates in the aggregate to a commitment to the common good. And friendship is necessarily local. | Continue reading
“Complicity and Hope in Wendell Berry’s Membership.” Next February, we’ll be hosting a conference here at Grove City College to reflect on the writings of Wendell Berry. Andrew Peterson will give a keynote address and a concert, and it should be a rich weekend of sharing ideas an … | Continue reading
Our modernist mindset too easily leads us to the comfortable notion that ‘they’–the government, the scientists, whoever–are going to save us with the latest whizz-bang techno-fix. They’re not. Nobody is coming to save us. | Continue reading
In these movements, we are but a speck of dust in the great desert. But here, where are our feet are, we hold a power forgotten. | Continue reading
The difference a pen pal can make | Continue reading
A quarter of a century ago, Wendell Berry wrote, “the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.” That division has come, and all must choose on which side of the divide to stand. | Continue reading
It is another year and that must mean another appearance by my guest Holly Ordway. Holly and I discuss her most recent book, Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography from Word on Fire. Holly and I discuss the impact of St. John Henry Newman’s Oratory on J.R.R. Tolkien, his struggle … | Continue reading
A Cain and Abel Story for Modern Man | Continue reading
“Thinking as a Human Being.” David Weinberger reviews James D. Madden’s Thinking about Thinking: Mind and Meaning in the Era of Techno-Nihilism, which probes underlying questions about the nature of human thought: “What are the necessary conditions for having a mind in the first … | Continue reading
A chief virtue of sheep is, indeed, that they are content with remarkably little, and—this is key—they are rooted and aware citizens of their locale. | Continue reading
Here, in this shed’s unremarkable pool of silence, I am reminded of other places where silence stretched like an ocean. I happened upon one of those waning shores the previous year when I resided in the mountains of the high desert. | Continue reading
Rushing to enslave themselves like animals in a cage, the animal rights and climate activists who think they are on the “right side of history” are unwittingly reinforcing their dependence on the corporations that have long damaged ecosystem and human health. | Continue reading
If I am therefore departing one field in which I hoped to do some good work in place, I hope to deepen my practice as an English professor who lives and reads in place, bringing my reading and my other work in the world closer together in the most literal, physical sense. For enc … | Continue reading
“Taking the High Road.” Nadya Williams issues a stirring call to root liberal education in a transcendent vision of what it means to be human: “what if the future of the humanities lies in Christian colleges—and colleges I would term Christian-adjacent in their mission, like St. … | Continue reading
In a world in which there are so many problems to solve, solitude plays an important role in helping us remember that life consists of more than finding and righting wrongs. Time spent resting and recharging has moral value too. | Continue reading
Theodore Roosevelt never recovered from the loss of his son in WWI | Continue reading
Do we treat the created order as if it belongs to God or exclusively to ourselves? Is dominion the same as domination? Is stewardship the same as subjugation? Such notions need to be worked through. Such notions have a profound impact on how we see and treat the world around us. … | Continue reading
Why is it that we can all say that this building works, that this room is just right, that this town is good and pleasing? Why is it that we can all imagine some beautiful and perfect home, complete with all its habits and accouterments, but we can’t say exactly what it is about … | Continue reading
“Against Human Flourishing.” Paul Griffiths gently suggests that the paradigm of “flourishing” may be inadequate to ascribe meaning to our lives and efforts: “Damage, flourishing’s apparent opposite, may have contributions of its own to make to what it appears on its face to cont … | Continue reading
If we imagine that the fate of our times hangs upon our efforts, we’ll deceive ourselves and miss out on the goods and pleasures that are at hand waiting to be enjoyed, even now. | Continue reading
As Americans, we must remember that place matters, and our founding principles are best understood when we look at how they were made real in the city of brotherly love. | Continue reading
Surviving the holiday without our loved ones | Continue reading
Matt Stewart discusses the promise and peril of current forms of localism with Trevor Latimer. | Continue reading
“Growing, Fermenting, Canning, and Why?” The Maurin Academy is hosting a slate of discussions on home food production to get you ready for the growing season: “It’s time to plan a garden, whether it’s on your patio, in your yard, or someone else’s yard! Ryan Dostal will be runnin … | Continue reading
Yet our little sister does not play the victim. She presses on, a sufferer who labors as best she can while shadows and thorns press in against her. And she prays to God like the woman persistent in her case when contending with an unjust judge; and since God is just, since He is … | Continue reading
Our duty is to live lives that conform to what is good, true, and beautiful. Natural rights in general, and the rights enshrined in the Constitution in particular, are means for citizens to fulfill their duties, live good lives, and build up their families and communities. | Continue reading
It’s a new year, and many of us are thinking about self-improvement. This is a wonderful thing to do. We all need a bit of a tune-up now and then. But as we make our resolutions and focus on ourselves, it’s worth considering the parable of my table. | Continue reading
Might our local faith communities support such cultivation of virtue, while also restoring what might again be a hub of parish social life? | Continue reading
“Red Dragonflies.” Steven Knepper offers a deeply informed consideration of Byung-Chul Han’s intellectual and spiritual trajectory. Knepper argues that Han’s emphasis on contemplation has much to offer: “The Church’s contemplative practices are still there too, even if they are t … | Continue reading
Grove City, PA. Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair. The title of Christian Wiman’s new book is a seed that sprouts and unfurls and blooms over the course of its nearly three hundred pages of prose and poetry. I’ll begin with the subtitle: What is despair, and What do … | Continue reading
Students sometimes come to us in crisis, but always they come from a world filled with challenges and are with us only for a season. We could do far worse as professors than to model our approach to education and guidance on Dante’s Virgil and walk with our students until another … | Continue reading
Preserving moral authority in schools would truly be something to cheer about. | Continue reading
Ashley Colby, founder of the Rizoma Field School, digs up inspiring true stories of resistance and restoration (with references to donkeys, elephants, and our 49th state). Bill Kauffman, author and regular conference closer, weaves Wisconsin professors of the past and the robo- … | Continue reading
I guess it’s time to sweep. Again. And then again. But we can embrace the gentler side of housekeeping. Besides, if you leave be those spiders in the corners, they might yet catch some other bugs for you, performing an essential service. | Continue reading
“Swift Going.” It’s hard to describe this essay by Peter Bast. But you should definitely read it: “I’m still amazed that my folks allowed me to see the Grateful Dead unsupervised as a seventeen-year-old, something I’d never let my own kids do. Historians claim that ancient Greece … | Continue reading
“I don’t roll on nobody,” I said, abysmal grammar and all, but a jail cell is no place for linguistic niceties. My voice was rough, as much scared as aggressive. My bunkmate, or cellie, looked across our 7×10 room. He paused a moment. “No,” he nodded. “I don’t believe you do.” We … | Continue reading
Self-government by local communities, including some tiny confessional states, would be more consistent with ideals of diverse, self-governing communities. | Continue reading
Let’s have a localism without nostalgia, a practical but also a faithful localism. As localists let’s be committed to an accurate accounting of the checkered past that grounds our hope. | Continue reading
Brian Miller visits the porch to talk about his new book chronicling life on a Tennessee farm. Highlights 1:30 Bayou Bengal Volunteer farmer 5:45 A monastic text 11:15 Man of letters 14:00 Pesto chango 15:30 Remote control 18:00 Growing pains 23:00 Lamb … | Continue reading
It’s not perhaps that the world doesn’t need change, but that as anti-Machine author Paul Kingsnorth put it in these pages, “the first work is changing yourself.” We have to live where we’re placed, and for Eve at the Meat and Malt, right now that means continuing to serve the gu … | Continue reading
“Keep Your Money Close.” Jane Clark Scharl draws on the localist principle of subsidiarity to diagnose how online shopping leads to a scarcity of human interaction and to suggest some remedies:“I’ve talked with a number of people who admit to feeling anything from sheepish to dow … | Continue reading
It’s said that seeing is believing. And even slight-of-hand may be caught in the act if you watch closely enough. But things began to change with the use of computers to produce photoshopped images, and now with Artificial Intelligence used to develop images and videos to purpose … | Continue reading
If boarding school stories are exceptionally good at communicating certain universal themes despite the privileged setting, the lasting appeal of the setting offers some lessons, as well. The older we get, the more it is tempting to act as though the challenges faced by young peo … | Continue reading
Adam Smith, a philosopher at the University of Dubuque, counterattacks the disenchanted War on Suffering. FPR President Mark Mitchell goes biblical to bring down a heightened politics of insanity. Brass Spittoon podcaster John Murdock looks at a key architect of religious polit … | Continue reading
Not only did the worst consequences of lockdowns occur in the Global South, but lockdowns were pushed on the South from the North, through well-known strongarm tactics of neocolonialism that have consistently pushed neoliberalism, austerity, and impoverishment on the South for th … | Continue reading
After years of research, I have developed a three-stage teaching method that breaks new ground in pedagogical theory: Stage 1: Pay attention. Stage 2: Be astonished. Stage 3: Tell about it. | Continue reading
“The Resurrection of the Bawdy.” J.C. Scharl ponders the strange, grotesque wisdom of Francois Rabelais: “there must be a reciprocal relationship between our high culture and our low. High culture does not come from nothing. Rather, it alchemizes over time from a vast swamp of lo … | Continue reading