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

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

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

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

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

Unaware, we can stand in a museum, in a temple of modernity that extracts life from all other temples. We can gaze into the vengeful gift of a god while that god stands right behind us, unseen, not believed in, multiplying his box of miseries into every pocket in the museum and b … | Continue reading

Activism needs to begin by fearlessly staring down our own prejudices, by rooting out the injustices we allow. Once that is accomplished, we can turn to the outer world | Continue reading

I wish environmentalists would better understand that there are no mustache-twirling billionaires drilling and digging and burning oil just for the hell and the money of it. Like money, petroleum is a very effective way to get the things we all want at the best convenience. And t … | Continue reading

Tabletop games put something in our twitchy, swipe-hungry fingers other than a digital device—a hand of cards, a pair of dice, a plastic Zeus. And since others have put down their phones too, we can look out over those cards into a human face, a present human face. | Continue reading

What this means is death. When our kids were little, parenting meant death to my independence: my time, my space, my very body, were no longer my own. Parenting meant death to sleeping in and going out on a whim. It meant death to plans carefully wrought and carelessly wrecked by … | Continue reading

The unspent beauty of nature that Hopkins saw has much to teach us even if we’re not always paying attention. But paying attention is always better. | Continue reading

The frictionless existence we were promised, one that freed us from slavish obedience to place and tradition and family bonds, turns out to be one in which we amorphously float about in a gelid atmosphere longing for the halcyon days of family farms and quaint communities. | Continue reading

On this year’s Feast of the Nativity of the Light in Our World in the Age of the Machine, my prayer is this: may our ceremonies not be one dimensional, but simple and complex constellations of God who dwells among us in so many ways, within layer upon layer of reality, not compre … | Continue reading

It is encouraging to see how some young people have embraced limits on energy consumption. But the underlying disease of rapacious desire has not been cured. No, this tradeoff only exchanges one delusion of grandeur for another. It swaps external limitlessness for internal limitl … | Continue reading

David Heddendorf’s novel, The Terra Cotta Camel, is, as the subtitle accurately puts it, about “hope, new beginnings, and Des Moines.” It is about the small, the local, and the making of community. It begins in a tiny coffeeshop owned by a blind African immigrant named Zim. From … | Continue reading

I’ll be taking the next couple of weeks off from putting together these Water Dippers. I plan to resume in the new year. “The Case for Left Conservatism.” Ashley Colby looks to Christopher Lasch and Wendell Berry for help imagining a politics that rejects the current, reigning as … | Continue reading

It almost feels heretical to say that at the center of our religion, indeed our existence, is a God that can be wounded and broken, but this is precisely the Christian claim. We live in a world that can be degraded, and God entered that very degradation in Christ. So might there … | Continue reading

He does not conflate attendance with salvation or sanctification. But empty pews can neither be saved nor sanctified. They never serve in the nursery or children’s services. They never teach Sunday school or tithe. They bring no food for potluck. They do not pray. They do not wor … | Continue reading

Like the people I grew up among, Puddleglum speaks hope sideways, hope being too sacred to speak outright. But he speaks it anyway, sideways and hedged but there, the way generations of my family might speak of maybe a better crop or a new well next year. | Continue reading

For brokenists, the new regime is not just a matter of garden-variety regulatory capture, and “the rules” are just as often a symptom of the problem as a solution to it. This “merger of state and corporate power” comes, like all regimes, with a legitimating ideology, a cultural v … | Continue reading

A skeptic’s take on such a variety of experience would chalk it up as privileged gonzo larkishness or chest-beating thrill-seeking—an understandable take, one likely partly true. But there was more to it. For I’ve not acknowledged the murders of his father and uncle; the psychic … | Continue reading

Witnessing the ascendancy of the Machine, Lewis understood what was at stake. He watched this ideology sweep across his society and take hold in its schools, and he keenly felt the loss of what was so hastily displaced and soon forgotten. The medieval worldview that Lewis cherish … | Continue reading

I’ve also been struck by the number of people in the book-producing-and-selling business who are uninterested in their product. On the retail end, there was the manager of a bookstore who admitted, without embarrassment, that she doesn’t read books and never has. She might as wel … | Continue reading

“Home Is Where One Starts From.” J.C. Scharl praises art that comes from and in turn feeds a commitment to a particular place: “Art should touch our wills; it should move us to live and act differently. But in a curious inversion, the best art pushes this change down to the lowes … | Continue reading