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David Heddendorf’s novel, The Terra Cotta Camel, is, as the subtitle accurately puts it, about “hope, new beginnings, and Des Moines.” It is about the small, the local, and the…

He does not conflate attendance with salvation or sanctification. But empty pews can neither be saved nor sanctified. They never serve in the nursery or children’s services. They never teach…

We’ve recently started the annual tradition (three years going strong!) of holding a wild game dinner with our friends and church community. Each family brings a dish harvested from the…

We live in fractured days, lacking in harmony, civility, and comity. “Comity,” an old word for courtesy and kindness, is related etymologically to the Sanskrit word for “smile.” As it…

Wendell Berry's fiction shows what relationships look like with skin on—how real relationships are enacted between people. As the characters who inhabit the fictional town Port William interact, they demonstrate…

Still, Berry maintains, the particularly Amish ways of working, rejoicing, and relaxing work together to promote the “great possessions” enumerated by Kline in his essays. “The lives of fellow creatures…

For Kaplan, when comparing two countries and asking why one has succeeded where the other has failed, what matters most is not national policies but “societal dynamics—the strength of the…

I’ve been told that workers have had to step away from the register while checking out paying customers to chase away repeat shoplifters as they hurled all kinds of epithets…

My point is not to get lost in conventional debate here. But seeking to heal from the culture war, I want to uncover the bodies of my neighbors, which industrial…

Maybe we can just call it something else, like, “Living with family and friends in a neighborhood designed to encourage the building of social capital, relying on them in real…

This trend is peaking in a small rectangle, the smartphone. As Marc Barnes observes, the smartphone has replaced the TV. The smartphone is portable and personal and has enticed us…

It is, I realized, handy to have a proper template handy, ready to use, should my fears come true, and I discover that I really did forget to answer an…

The course I am teaching is part of the university’s core curriculum. Core comes from the Latin word for “heart,” I told my students. The same Latin root, cor, gives…

We were all, adults and children alike, doing things that really mattered to the whole free world, and we’d better get on with doing them, every day, all the time.…

But that love for baseball didn’t mean that we organized our lives around the sport, or that any parent with a Little Leaguer had baseball scholarships in mind. It didn’t…

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…

In a perfect world, our children would romp out the door after completing their chores and their schoolwork (we homeschool) and knock politely at their best friend’s door, who lived…

That with which we fill our time, after all, is what ends up filling our minds, hearts, and souls. More than simply responsible scheduling, our very character is on the…

In Stepford, everyone has forgotten how to do nothing, as children used to do: the blessed nothing that is full of receptivity and calm, and that is at the heart…

However, my role that day was not to frighten but inspire, as all the other mentors would do. My message was simple: I wanted these energetic students to know that…

Once upon a time, different businesses and professions in a town would have their own baseball teams and play each other. At a minimum, we could do more to bring…

They know their neighbors; and their neighbors, after all, are probably their kinsmen too, though it might take a careful genealogist to trace two neighboring streams back to their originating…

What I’ve just attempted to describe are the joys of the edge. Freedom, I believe, has a limited half-life when it’s in the heart of civilization. Anarcho-pastoralism means that there’s…

I continued to stumble on, frequently forgetting my own story, seeking evermore opportunities for dislocated, immortal, heroic freedom from the chains of that finite, particular history. It was only a…