Matt Stewart

Matt Stewart
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Matt Stewart is a teacher at The Ambrose School in Meridian, Idaho. He holds a PhD in history from Syracuse University and has published essays and reviews with Current, Boom California, Fides et Historia, and High Country News. He is the author of Most Beautiful Place on Earth: Wallace Stegner in California.

Recent Essays

The Very Online Culture Wars

The Very Online Right might be riding high now, but I anticipate that the election jackpot of the moment will not last and that this victory will soon look more like Las Vegas at noon, beaten down and tawdry under the merciless exposure of the midday western sun.

Small Isn’t Beautiful? Localism and Its Critics

The promise and peril of current forms of localism, with Trevor Latimer.

Planting Our Flag in the Real World: Parents Take the Postman Pledge

Do real things together. Celebrate. Take delight in the world—together. Don’t feel compelled to broadcast your views about the dangers of technology. Let your life speak, but be prepared to give an account of why you’re living the way you are.

Focus on the Local: A Conversation with Carl Trueman

Though his recent bestselling books trace the roots of several deeply entrenched beliefs about human nature and our world that have led us into bewildering territory, Trueman concludes both books with a look back into the ancient church and a call to faithful Christian work in local churches.

Jessica Hooten Wilson, Doug Sikkema, and Christine Norvell on Rescuing Socrates

One gets the clear sense from Montás that these voices from the past are not just texts with trivial information, but real presences, real friends who have had a significant role in shaping, forming Montás’ life. And if any core program is going to work, it needs men and women like Montás who are the living, breathing embodiment of a life made richer by true fellowship with this great “democracy of the dead,” to borrow Chesterton’s phrase.

Epistemology on the Front Porch: Esther Lightcap Meek

Esther Lightcap Meek on Wendell Berry, Michael Polanyi, and covenant epistemology.

Ordered for Fruitfulness: An Interview with Michael LeFebvre

In the context of the calendars for holidays, feasts, and Sabbath observance in Leviticus, LeFebvre argues that we need to attend to the creation account in Genesis as a calendar for shaping the sacred rhythm of labor and worship.

Grace Olmstead on Uprooted, Place, Idaho, and Prairie Lupines

Fidelity to place needn’t (and shouldn’t) result in stuckness, a condemnation of ever moving at all. But we must beware falling into that second trap: rejecting roots altogether.

Brass Spittoon: Bradley Birzer on Christian Humanism

Bradley Birzer on Christian humanism, judging the past, memory, and gratitude.

Brass Spittoon: Ken Myers on Three Decades (almost) of Mars Hill Audio

Ken Myers of Mars Hill Audio on place, the evangelical mind, and classical music.

Brass Spittoon: Wall Street vs. Main Street, 2020

Chris Arnade, Jared Woodard, and Sarah Hamersma on Wall Street versus Main Street.

Brass Spittoon: Conservatism, Inc.

Patrick Deneen, Jeremy Beer, and Jeff Polet respond to J.D. Vance's recent American Mind essay "End the Globalization Gravy Train" and consider the prospects for postliberal conservatism.