Culture, High & Low

Sometimes a Garden is Just a Garden

To the left of our Southern California driveway is a little plot of land, 400-500 square feet. Some homeowners just pave over a space...

Slow Growth and Living Form

Everything seeks its own perfection or completion, and, moreover, seeks this perfection in a way proper to itself. Since both the end sought and...

In Praise of Mediocrity

Berwyn, PA. Everyone knows G.K. Chesterton's aphorism that, if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.  Dappled Things writer Karen Ullo...

Citizens, Traitors, Misanthropes, and Cosmopolitans

What is it about the modern world that causes us to forget that every choice comes with a cost?  The answer cannot be that...

There’s Equality, and There’s Equality

In one of my favorite movies, John Ford's How Green Was My Valley, a family of coal miners is faced with the prospect of...

McClaughry Memoir: The Thousand Points of Light

The following is the final installment of John McClaughry’s memoir, Promoting Civil Society Among the Heathen.  See the previous chapter here. 8. George H.W. Bush and the...

Auld Lame Side

This is what we all need now: a deep belly-laugh.

Real Presences

Hidden Springs Lane. What’s the deal with Smart Phones? Go to any public gathering and most of the young people (and some of the...

Possessive Individualism: Can We Really Own Ourselves?

The bedrock principle of all Liberalism, whether of the Right or the Left, is Locke’s assertion that “every man has a Property in his...

What You Need to Know about Dana Gioia

Dana Gioia has spent his career making metaphors: drawing disparate things together to reveal the breadth and depth of aesthetic experience, but doing so...