What Plays in Peoria

You don’t have to be normal. You don’t have to be weird. You just have to be a person – which is a moral ideal, not a fact of nature – and let the chips fall.

The Art of Good Gossip: Unexpected Lessons about Virtue and Community from Little Women

To love and learn from each other in our communities is what good gossiping accomplishes.

Gendered Worlds: Our Need for Belonging and Usefulness

If we choose to befriend our many obligations—to connect with other people, to love, to serve, to create, to borrow, to lend, to repair, to celebrate, to support—instead of buying a product or a service—then we are cultivating fertile ground for a healthy form of gendered cooperation to (perhaps) re-emerge.

Unpacking My Library (Again)

Maybe, in the end, a home library does what a long-inhabited home does: charts a middle ground between the chaos of the world and the hyper-rationality of modernity.

Home Libraries Will Save Civilization

It is a reality not frequently enough acknowledged: like so many other things in life, the love of reading is caught, not taught.

The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite: A Review of Musa al-Gharbi’s We Have...

So the core of We Have Never Been Woke is persuasive, and it's hard not to see his thesis in operation in all kinds of fields, once you look at the world his way.

Blue Walls Falling Down: A Novel

Joshua Hren’s new novel, Blue Walls Falling Down, releases today. We’re happy to share the following excerpt with FPR readers.

Living in Language (a Reply)

I heard it then, followed by a man’s agonizing cry. I hear it now in every Franco-Norman word we unknowingly pronounce: that arrow piercing King Harold’s eye.

Modern Architecture Erodes Community: What We Can Do About It

The future of our built environment is in our hands. We can reject the alienation of modernism and instead foster spaces that cultivate connection, celebrate history, and create a sense of belonging.

Large Language Models and the Final Paragraph

Like the sonnet, the five-paragraph essay traps investment in truth felt in the heart and forged in the mind by means of its life-respecting limitations.

An Invitation to a Different Story: A Review of Letters to a Future Saint

Christianity is not merely a doctrine to believe but a life to live and embody. East understands this and invites Future Saints into a different imagination and way of life.

Slange Var!

When we toast we celebrate our fight against the forces of darkness and evil.

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From the Archives

Narrating Sickness, Land, and Hope

To whatever extent I imposed a narrative on experience, it was only because experience first imposed it upon me.

Braver Angels and Civil Conversation across Partisan Divides

If you resonate with the conversation below and the aims of Braver Angels, consider signing their new letter: What We Will Do to Hold...

Presidential Politics: Pseudo Choices and a Third Party Worth Considering

The 2020 presidential election cycle has been in full swing for months now, and we are still almost a year away from casting our...