place 200

One of the novel’s achievements is the way that it unfolds this centuries-long story with both clarity and subtlety, establishing a clear feel for right and wrong while casting no…

When Christ died on the cross, the disciples did not know he was going to rise again. But for Christians today, we see the full picture, and these are not…

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…

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.

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…

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…

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…

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

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.

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.

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…

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…

Without God, a spiraling fertility rate seems certain. But on spiritual grounds, there’s always room for hope and renewal. When the seed is sown on the good soil, it bears…

Civil society relies on common spaces where people of all backgrounds can meet, but states and cities have been pursuing semi-privatization of public spaces.

Culture is the ever-evolving play that takes place on that stage, as new props come and old props are replaced, even as the theater remains the same. Of course, the…

Perhaps in the coming decades we shall have, so to speak, not a straightforward demographic slope downward, but more of a dip and a levelling off in the next century.

But even a novice like me—hobbled by an ignorance of veterinarian science and perennially pulled toward too many projects—found the book interesting and useful.

The way of the puzzler is not about reaching a certain goal. If it were, the perfectly fine image would never have been broken up to begin with. The way…

This rural mountain church continues to be good because it continues to do what is necessary.

Knowing your family’s past fugitives and pretty boys is the kind of localism anyone can aspire toward and practice.

In this way, “idleness as such is by no means a root of evil; quite the contrary, it is a truly divine way of life so long as one is…

And this progression from the raw, unabated natural Florida to the ever-more artificial Florida, has grave consequences for both the geographical locale and the people who inhabit it.

“They see us as deeply lonely people,” Barry told Fred, “and one of the reasons we’re lonely is that we’ve cut ourselves off from the nonhuman world and have called…

And so the shotgun sits in our home like a quiet benediction. It dreams—as I do—of long walks in the valleys of my youth and whispers of future pastures that…