Category: Place
In Defense of Localism
By Sean O’Hare In a recent piece for Arc Digital, Nicholas Grossman examined the viability of an alliance between left-wing identity politics and right-wing localism. Grossman ultimately concludes that common ground between localism and left-wing identity politics is an impossibility...
The Real Place for Conflict: On Keeping Controversy Close to Home
By Justin Frank Social media gives unprecedented opportunities to know about and engage in controversy. Many of these controversies are rooted in places far from us; involve people we’ve never met (and will likely never know); and grow out of...
Living Local Fiction
On first moving to Maine and seeing a line of tall ledges from a nearby road, I was enchanted, surprised. I’d never seen anything like them before: Mountains like waves of rock waiting to crash over the land. Not long...
Stop Making Hospitality Complicated
If you’ve ever watched any real estate programs on television, you’ve heard eager soon-to-be-homeowners lean toward the boom mic and say, “Oh, this space will be great for entertaining!” Everyone wants to be seen as the type of posh and...
Lessons from the Wreckage: Notes on Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria
Lessons from the Wreckage, Pt. I: A Voice from the Whirlwind He lays the beams of his chambers on the waters; he makes the clouds his chariot, he rides on the wings of the wind; he makes his messengers winds,...
On Ben Sasse, Civil Society, and Voting Records
Last week Matthew Walther went hard after one of my Senators, Ben Sasse, in a piece for The Week. The piece wandered a bit, but I basically agreed with it: It’s hard to make sense of Sasse as a politician because...
Book Review: Keeping Place by Jen Pollock Michel
When Francis and Edith Schaeffer were writing about issues like ecology, home, and place in the late 1960s and early 70s, they were to the best of my knowledge the only evangelicals doing so. While they laid great foundations with Pollution...
A Social Justice Warrior in King Roderick’s Court
Last Thursday’s “Time for the Benedict Option?” discussion hosted by Plough, First Things, and The American Conservative was a great summary of the Benedict Option debate so far and where things ought to go from here. You can watch the...
Climate change is political and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Donald Trump was sworn in as President at noon on Friday, January 20th. Within an hour, all references to climate change had been removed from the White House website. He has stacked key positions with outspoken climate change deniers, and...
The Abolition of Troy Chatham
Plough has recently published one of the better versions of a critique of Wendell Berry that is fairly common and fairly tiresome. The author, Tamara Hill Murphy, has a great many kind things to say about Berry but then says...