“News from the Berry Center.” The Berry Center fall newsletter provides updates on their ongoing work, and Mary Berry’s opening letter serves as a good reminder of their vision for good farming, good land, and good communities: “Our dominant economy over the last century has made good farming and rural communities increasingly vulnerable. To make them anything like sustainable we must see the difference between the industrial economy of inert chemicals and economic abstractions and an authentic land economy of husbandry of the living world.”
“Wendell Berry at 90.” Jonathon Van Maren reflects on why Wendell Berry means so much to so many of his readers: “Berry’s fiction is not only a record of rural life and the slow death of agricultural America, but also a record of the interior lives of Americans before we outsourced our thinking to digital devices and absorbed our worldviews from screens. His novels lack the frantic pace of so many of his contemporaries; reading them, I had to slow my own mind and detach from the mile-a-minute culture wars to match the pace of the men and women of Port William. Always, his stories left me feeling refreshed.”
“The Contraction of History PhD Programs in the Midwest.” Jon Lauck kicks of the fall issue of Middle West Review with reflections on a shrinking profession: “In 1965, Wisconsin admitted 90 students into its PhD program. In 1970, there were 650 history graduate students at Wisconsin and the department minted 70 history PhDs that year alone. These doctoral students were overseen by 75 history faculty. In 1991, Wisconsin admitted 83 students into its doctoral program in history and in 1995 it minted 38 new PhDs in history. This year, only 15 graduate students were admitted, a long fall from the postwar golden age.” (I have an essay in this issue on the regional identity of Western PA, though my essay may be behind a paywall.)
“War and Character.” Jennifer Conner reviews The Road to the Country, a new novel by Chigozie Obioma set in the 1960s Nigerian Civil War, and weighs its vision of destruction and redemption: “Whatever good things have come through the war . . . have not been sufficient to justify it. . . . These things bring meaning, if not parity; they are ‘like mushrooms growing from the rotting corpses of youthful men.’ Though they grow out of grave circumstances, they are life.”
“Christian Institutions in a New World.” Michael Lucchese reviews Miles Smith IV’s Religion and Republic, which argues that “Christianity undergirded the early republic’s public square. Religion played a fundamentally conservative role in the American founding, to put it another way, by providing both a shared sense of a transcendent moral order and links back to an enduring Western tradition.”
“Why Christian Parents Should Resist School-Issued Screens.” Patrick Miller offers a set of arguments supported by research to help parents push back against the lure of progress. He draws from his own experience on a school board: “We were offered tens of thousands of dollars in grants to pay for one-to-one devices in our classrooms. Saying no felt like stealing something from students. It felt like resisting progress. But we said no anyway, because our pressing question wasn’t ‘How can we restructure our curriculum around new technology?’ but ‘What technologies are best suited to serve our educational mission?’ Technology wasn’t our master; it was the servant. And there wasn’t enough research to prove it was a good servant.”
“The Stay-at-Home-Intellectual Mom.” Beatrice Scudeler describes how she cultivates an intellectual life after dropping out of grad school: “As Hugh of Saint Victor teaches us, and as Harriet Vane learns from experience, growing in virtue can happen in all manners of ways, from academic study to cooking to the care of children. Though, to be sure, sometimes a quiet room wouldn’t hurt.”
“Do You Want Stronger Community? Learn to Read Well?” Benjamin Myers reviews my new book: “We’re more than autonomous, interchangeable consuming units. Human flourishing requires what Edmund Burke called ‘little platoons,’ those immediate attachments that give our lives meaning beyond our individual desires. We’re embedded in communities like families, churches, and neighborhoods. Techno-optimism threatens those bonds.”
“The Left Should Take Alasdair MacIntyre Seriously.” In a lengthy essay for Jacobin Matt McManus argues MacIntyre never fully broke with Marxism: “What is clear is that capitalism’s corrosive effects on virtue, community, and social solidarity — and the need to overcome them — is a pressing moral question of our age. Anyone who is interested in thinking through what solving this problem might look like, philosophically and practically, should read MacIntyre.”
“Life on Mars.” Grace Mackey pens a thoughtful review of Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation: “As a member of Gen Z, this was not a light read. When you spend your teens owning a smartphone, you grow used to hearing your parents and teachers blame your problems on a phone— It gets tiresome. I understand the skepticism towards Haidt and the concern that he is a grumpy old man tired of watching the online world expand into something foreign to him. I had some of that skepticism. Regardless, I picked up his book because I was genuinely curious if he offered explanations of anxiety that I hadn’t heard before. This past year, I started therapy because I needed help managing my anxiety disorder. While reading, it didn’t take long for my skepticism to fade and alarm to set in. I was struck by how deeply I resonated with what Haidt described.”
