2025 - Front Porch Republic
On Politics, Spirituality, Walt Whitman, and the Healing of the United States| Front Porch Republic
On Politics, Spirituality, Walt Whitman, and the Healing of the United States| Front Porch Republic
On Politics, Spirituality, Walt Whitman, and the Healing of the United States| Front Porch Republic
The right kind of literature has the power to make the immediate visible to us once again.| Front Porch Republic
Insofar as "The Bee" now occupies something near the center of American Christian discourse, what’s crowded out, I think, is an articulated (not just implied-by-negation) path toward holiness . . .| Front Porch Republic
One of the most curious things about raising two boys seventeen years apart is the divide I feel in their digital generations.| Front Porch Republic
This week on A Symposium of Popular Songs, we’re listening to songs about restlessness—or, as the scholar Frederick R. Karl calls it, spatiality. I managed to do this whole episode without talking about Bruce Springsteen, whose songs about wanting to get out of New Jersey could easily fill a whole hour. Send me your song […]| Front Porch Republic
Scott was a scholar of reciprocity, collaboration, and a kind of stubborn agrarianism that is the opposite of romantic and a requisite of real, existing democracy. Let him rest in peace.| Front Porch Republic
Christine Rosen pens a biting response to Katherine Boyle’s rosy picture of techno-families.| Front Porch Republic
A weary, hungry child is walking through the forest, the emerald-green hues of the dense foliage gleaming shyly in the rays of a young summer day. From far above, the sun’s brightness struggles to reach past the lush greenery of the crowding trees. How did she get here? Where did she spend the night that […]| Front Porch Republic
Encouraged, not only by the burgeoning online-use of Oldenburg’s term "third place," but by a young person’s desire to engage with it, I decided to reach out to Madison.| Front Porch Republic
Building community doesn’t map well into the high value we place on choice at the individual level.| Front Porch Republic
Although my vision, and my neck, and my sense of balance, and certainly my sense of hope, were all impaired, I could still prune. And as I pruned, I reflected on the three trees that once grew near my childhood home ...| Front Porch Republic
Blood and violence and death are on every page; however, trace that which has fallen back to its original height, especially the moment in the barn where all the rough characters are aglow.| Front Porch Republic
Sometimes in life, silence pervades our stories. The dissonance has passed, and we wait. We wait for resolution; we wait for harmony.| Front Porch Republic
If you have ever prayed the Lord’s prayer, then you have prayed for the soil and its earthworms—even if you didn’t intend to.| Front Porch Republic
Chuck dreams of overcoming his allergy so he can reenter normal society. We reject the status quo because we want something better for our kids.| Front Porch Republic
There is something life-giving about rooting oneself in a single community—about investing ourselves in a mutual fund, so to speak.| Front Porch Republic
Matthew Crawford points out that much new technology today only adds layers of friction rather than actually solving a problem.| Front Porch Republic
Holden Caulfield, the 16-year-old “hero” of The Catcher in the Rye, goes to the park mentally or physically on seven separate occasions in the course of the relatively short novel.| Front Porch Republic
In Oklahoma, the nature many of us live so close to is a different thing from the concept of “nature” we have internalized.| Front Porch Republic
"In fact, MacIntyre’s work is extreme, but we live in extreme times."| Front Porch Republic
We live under the impression that we can do for the human community and the individual human soul what physicists have done with the atom.| Front Porch Republic
Place. Limits. Liberty.| Front Porch Republic
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] President Trump has been in office a month as of today, and the maelstrom of orders and actions which he has taken has elicited delight, horror, and/or confusion from many. In the midst of it all, I find myself still thinking about the Never Trumpers. I live in a mostly […]| Front Porch Republic
Our need for privacy has been accentuated by the way we live, in which goods and services arrive seemingly out of the ether, things we’ve bought to consume, throw away, or do with what we wish. The faces and hands behind these goods are invisible to us.| Front Porch Republic
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] The Art of Loading Brush: New Agrarian Writings, the latest collection of writings by Wendell Berry, isn’t a perfect book, nor the perfect expression of his powerful vision of what constitutes a good life or a good community. In particular the final, essentially autobiographical stories in the book don’t really […]| Front Porch Republic
