Silence, Development, and the Changing Church
Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation of Silence (2016), the 1966 novel by Shusako Endo, follows the trials of a young Portuguese Jesuit, Father Rodrigues, whose...
Whither Liberalism?
We live, to borrow the title from Daniel T. Rodgers’s excellent 2011 book, in an age of fracture. Whether any time in history has been...
J. Drew Lanham’s Clear-Eyed Vision of the Land
“I think of land and hope that others are thinking about it, too.” Those of us who try to think about land have much...
At Last, the FPR Manifesto
... where human affairs are conducted as if place really matters, where economic affairs are conceived as if limits really matter, and where political power is exercised as if liberty really matters.
Learning How to Think with Alan Jacobs
Last fall Alan Jacobs published a slim book with a bold title: How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds. Jacobs...
Why Anti-Liberalism Fails
The Failures of Liberalism
The intellectual critique of liberalism is coextensive with liberalism itself, going back at least as far as Giambattista Vico’s dispute with...
Telling the Stories Right
Though he may be better known as an essayist or poet, Berry calls himself a storyteller, and the best introduction to his agrarian vision is his fiction.
What Wendell Berry’s Brush Teaches Us About Capitalism, Community, and “Inevitability”
The Art of Loading Brush: New Agrarian Writings, the latest collection of writings by Wendell Berry, isn't a perfect book, nor the perfect expression...
Technology and the Virtues: Scale Matters
When an autonomous Uber vehicle struck and killed a pedestrian in Arizona, Uber suspended its fleet of self-driving cars and assured everyone that it...
Learning from The Left Behind
Robert Wuthnow's new book, The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America, is the best book I've read on the rural-urban divide in...