Tag: place

Boarding House at the End of the World

Zoning laws, housing codes, and a culture marked by suspicion and antisociality make it difficult to revive the boarding house, a living arrangement that once applied to nearly half of the population.

Road Kill

I had to understand life and nature not as something to be mastered, but as gifts afforded to me to steward by a God abundant in goodness.

Wheeler Catlett’s Love Beyond Organization in Wendell Berry’s “Fidelity”

Organized community events bring people together and are an integral part of forging strong communal bonds in a place. Like the law, they serve a purpose in a community’s ecosystem of relationships.

What Plays in Peoria

You don’t have to be normal. You don’t have to be weird. You just have to be a person – which is a moral ideal, not a fact of nature – and let the chips fall.

Modern Architecture Erodes Community: What We Can Do About It

The future of our built environment is in our hands. We can reject the alienation of modernism and instead foster spaces that cultivate connection, celebrate history, and create a sense of belonging.

Real Communities and Democratic Theory

If we don’t experience full, unqualified “concrete, historical community,” then we won’t experience full, unqualified “genuine deliberation.”

Southern Appalachia is a Place

These questions would cause little debate or consternation without the importance of place tethering them. And, despite the erasure of communitarian mindsets and regional identity, place still matters.

Finding The Seam: How Small Farmers Can Thrive

There are much easier ways to make money than farming. The primary goal of a good farmer is to find success in caring for one’s land, community, and family.

The Uglification of Michigan Lake Towns

America is known for its English-Protestant roots, for the pilgrims who settled the Eastern seaboard and the Anglos who descended from them. But America has a French-Catholic history, too, and Northern Michigan is a central location in that history.

A Rural White American’s Reflection of White Rural Rage: Resentment is...

Despite Trump’s own divisive rhetoric, he makes rural Americans feel heard in ways neither majority party has in decades. Any politician or scholar who actually wants to address the root causes of polarization needs to reckon seriously with this reality.