Front Porch Republic
Make it New
Our increasingly obvious failure to make anything like “progress” is part and parcel of our failure to conserve the order from which all progress comes.
Christopher Nolan’s Endless Odyssey
The agrarian voice reveals Nolan’s most significant and disappointing departure from Homer’s epic.
I Prefer Not To: Literary Laments in the Age of AI Dead Letters
Artificial intelligence gets the best of me most days. It demands too much. It takes a profession that I love and turns it into a soul-crushing curse.
Talking to Strangers
The moment, while small and perhaps unimportant, stayed with me and was a beautiful example of the great conversation with the stranger.
News, Notes, & Podcasts
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In the Distance, Something Bright: Songs About Perseverance
I’m back from my vacation and ready to play songs about perseverance. Hot funk, cool punk--we've got it all. Send your song suggestions to symposiumofsongs@gmail.com!
Homer, Hopkins, and Humans
Eric Adler praises Patrick Deneen’s new book on how Homer’s Odyssey reveals the character of America’s tensions.
Encore Presentation: Songs of Laurel Canyon
I'm taking the month of July off from making new episodes of A Symposium of Popular Songs and taking the opportunity to replay some of my favorite episodes from last…
Lettuce, Kansas, and Burial
Luke Allen describes what it’s like to live in northern Michigan, a place that’s increasingly oriented toward tourism.
More Articles
The Second Leaving
Moms and dads know the feeling when a child first goes off to school. It’s the end of the happy chaos of raising children. But grandparents know that feeling too.
Katherine Lee Bates and the American Mythos
There’s a harmony between wilderness, city, and farm that Bates captures exquisitely. Separate any one from the other, and you have a diminished America.
Memento Vivere
If we cannot tell the difference between ourselves and machines, it may not be that the machines are “that good.” It may be that our lives are that bad.
Novels in Action: A review of Joshua Hren’s “More Than a Matter of Taste”
Hren addresses our cultural moment through the idiom of corrective: great literature can help restore things that Western societies are losing.
What-ifs and the Price of Beauty
I know that the Greenbrier represents more than potential horror—it represents what Americans hope to preserve: our beautiful nation, one worth preserving.
The Thousand Injuries: The Not Qwhite Voter and the Politics of Recognition
The system recognizes the Not Qwhite man under two conditions only: It wants a scapegoat, or it wants a soldier.
Resilient Beauty
We take beauty for granted, yet it keeps coming at us in an endless display of divine grace and power.
In Memory of David Cayley
To me, his body of work for CBC Radio’s Ideas is the most remarkable sustained achievement in public intellectual life in the last half-century.
Are We There Yet?
It’s a terrifying thing to graduate your children from high school, hoping they’ll be able to meet adulthood and be successful.
Ghosts of New Sweden
The ghosts of the Swedish colony of the Delaware still haunt placenames in the region.
From the Archive
From the Editor–Local Culture 4.1: The Civil Dissent Issue
Think not, then, of the ubiquitous screens and hideous architecture and suburban metastasis and microwave dinners. Think rather of Eric Voegelin’s famous quip—Voegelin, who said that “no one is obliged…
Spiritual Secession: A Conversation with Paul Kingsnorth
" None of your readers need me to tell them that the useful work is practical, particular, small and careful: to get away from screens as much as we can, get…
Tanya Berry’s Faithful Art
Women like Tanya bring artistry and honor to everything they touch: the homes they inhabit, the land they steward, the children they raise. These photographs are testimony to the clear,…
Can There be a National Conservatism?
Here’s the irony: a growing number of conservatives realize that it will require the assistance of the State to correct many of the problems that have been created by the…
Cheese Should Be Dangerous
The cheese crafted here came about as a byproduct of a larger whole, the natural dividend of a complete way of life, and this is the foundation of the best…