The Nightstand

The Answer is Division

There's no place that division would not make things better. I don't say utopian, just better.

Ecological Curiosity for Faithful Feeling of Place: Mountain Nature and Strangers...

So too does my eye for the Creator veiled and present in His evidence. Without them, how could I recognize what was first and larger in what I sense of the present? I couldn’t love the Appalachians without learning the language of their cosmic and physical existence.

Is Regime Change too Radical? Or too Conservative?

What is more radical, and more conservative, than to cast the ring into the fire? That would be a real “regime change,” would it not?

Putting the Demos on a Pedestal

Why Liberalism Failed was a good book, but Regime Change is a better one, and I think will be recognized as such—as well as one that will gain notoriety in a way that the earlier, more academic book mostly did not.

Spider-Man Has Lost His Place

Spider-Man now devalues human-scale kindness and decency by questing in the multiverse, and ideological rigidity and swift judgment have replaced his former nuance and virtue-seeking.

A Local Look at the Meanings of the Founding: A Review...

After excluding less plausible interpretations like Roosevelt’s, I think the Old Testamentish version of the Founding is the most defensible: the Founders left us some good principles which later were often disregarded, but which brave men and women in later eras fought for, often with success.

Observing Limits to Re-enchant a Mute World: A Review of The...

Even Rosa the respectable sociologist entertains the possibility that if we relearned how to listen, the mountains might speak. Perhaps they too have their spirits, mute but waiting.

Antonin Scalia: A Man for All Seasons

Antonin Scalia’s judicial legacy was ratified on June 24, 2022 as the Supreme Court effectively overturned Roe v. Wade with the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision.

Get Off the Bench: Host a Cocktail Party

As someone who squirms every time I see a couple or family all quietly tapping their cell phones, a room of twenty people talking is a beautiful sight. It is easy to despair at our polarized and atomized society, but I appreciate Gray’s book for giving a clear, achievable step for building community and making friends.

Good Conversation and the Talking Cure: A Review

One cannot really have a book about conversation alone. Conversation is so much a fruit of individual persons and their relationship to one another, that a book about that fruit must be one about how to become a deeper, better, more complex and interesting person.