Articles

Searching for a Usable Past

JEFFERSON COUNTY, KANSAS.  My review of Richard Quinney's Of Time and Place, originally published in the University Bookman: The American experience has always existed in...

Descartes, Algebra, and Alienation

Democratizing eighth-grade algebra promotes social justice. (Brookings Institution) Money, mechanization, algebra. The three monsters of contemporary civilization. Complete analogy. (Simone Weil) Mt. Airy, Philadelphia. ...

Play Ball! Tell Stories!

BURNED-OVER DISTRICT, NY---The Muckdogs open tonight against the cursed Auburn Doubledays. It's seventy years now that we've had a professional baseball team in Batavia,...

Is the Devil From Paris?

Irving, Texas. Is the devil from Paris? Many people seem to think so. And if not the devil himself, then at least a particular...

So: Are We Hypocrites?

Claremont, CA. A student has confronted me about Front Porch Republic. So now  I'm writing the post that I've known I would have to...

Cultivating Gratitude

Blairsville, GA. Recently I was with a friend whose oldest son, having just completed his junior year, is home from college. The young man...

Notes from the Congress for the New Urbanism

DENVER, COLORADO. It seems like only yesterday that the New Urbanism was really new. But this weekend, with its annual meeting here in Denver,...

Brave New World Reconsidered: A Tale of Two Gnosticisms

Many who are alarmed at the prospect of the “abolition of man” have found in Huxley’s Brave New World a dark and salutary warning...

Hospitality in a World Immune to Grace

Media, PA. Ladies and gentlemen, Ivan Illich is dead. Long may he live. I don’t mean Tolstoy’s famous fictional decedent, Ivan Ilyich, although he...

Communitarianism, Conservatism, Populism and Localism: An Updated Survey

Wichita, KS Michael Sandel's giving of the prestigious Reith Lectures for the BBC (hat tip: the ever-watchful Harry Brighouse at Crooked Timber) has prompted me...