Front Porch Republic

Eleanore is 33.

Could a machine think?

If fiction remains Wendell Berry’s most beloved genre, the essay was his finest.

Envy and jealousy, actually.

“Why I’m Moving Back to Broken Britain.”

Below is the introductory essay to the new issue of Local Culture.

With a son-of-a-preacher eloquence; an omnivorous learning; an intelligence alive to connections; a rascally sense of humor; and undeniable soul force, few others have warned us about our nation’s challenges so compellingly as David W.

The love of one’s local place should be a foundational part of a conservative worldview.

It is a tragedy of literary proportions that most people who profess to love Anne Shirley never travel with her past Queen’s Academy and so never experience her return to become thoroughly Anne of Green Gables.

We’re listening to songs about poverty this week, trying neither to romanticize nor ignore the realities, and ending with the preferential option for the poor and a great song from Hiss Golden Messenger.

It only took three attempts to close the overstuffed trunk of our small SUV.

“The Challenge of Wendell Berry: A Personal Assessment.”

The Book of Amos begins with the prophet systematically denouncing Judah’s neighbors: Damascus, Gaza, Tyre, Edom, Ammon, and Moab.

FPR prefers to stay on the edge of electoral politics, but we do take an occasional interest in politicians with localist convictions who are trying to break into the major parties, like Washington State’s Marie Glusenkamp Perez.

“It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.”

We enjoyed a rich and encouraging Front Porch Republic gathering in Indianapolis this weekend.

We the people used to throw a mean party—but then we stopped.

We’re listening to songs about marriage this week, and limiting ourselves to songs about reasonably happy marriages, at that.

We write as two professors of public health who yearn for a better orientation to our work.

I had a neighbor who used his leaf blower, I imagine, more than any other human being in history.

The following essay is adapted from a talk given at The Festival of Friendship, in Stubenville, OH.

There’s great value in reading local histories and learning more about the place we live and the people who have made lives here.

I guess not every day of the week has a feeling to it—it’s hard to imagine doing a show on Songs About Tuesday—but Sunday certainly does.

Catholicism, Wendell Berry, and the American Conservation Movement How did a Baptist, Kentucky farmer come to sound so much like the Magisterium of the Catholic Church?

“Explaining Wendell Berry.”

The land is mostly quiet now.

Two very different crises reveal the same failure: authorities had the power to act but failed those they were meant to protect.

Last year my wife and I traveled to my step-daughter’s graduation from Lehigh University.

BROOKLYN, NY.

Samuel Moyn makes at least one cogent argument in Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth—and What to Do About It.

This week on A Symposium of Popular Songs, we’re listening to songs about New Orleans—Dixieland and rhythm and blues, of course, but also everything else I can think of.

“Hope in an Age of Enclosure.”

We are on the eve of WWIII.

Wendell Berry speaks of death in ways few of us can express “The loved ones we call the dead . . . live now in the permanent world,” Wendell Berry writes in November, 2025.

The following essay is excerpted from Christine Norvell’s recent book The Sycomore Fig Tree: Biblical Botany & Scriptural Truth.

John de Graaf’s latest film, Econoclast: Herman Daly and the Gospel of Growth, is a short, earnest, and intense tribute to a tall, soft-spoken, and rather non-confrontational man.