I just finished Houghton College political scientist Peter Meilaender’s essay “Crossed Lines: The Importance of Translation in an Era of Growing Political Indifference.” The piece, which appears in the Michaelmas 2019 issue of The Cresset, really resonated with me. It is...
home
Commonplace Book #124
There is no word for ‘home’ in Italian. There is casa (house), fucolaro (hearth), but no word for home (as if they had no need for it) as in English. In American English the yearning for home looms large: in American literature the...
When the Way of Improvement Can’t Lead Home: A Brief Review of Tara Westover’s *Educated*
Sometimes the way of improvement leads home. It did for Philip Vickers Fithian, the eighteenth-century son of New Jersey farmers who got an education at Princeton and spent the rest of his short life wrestling with what that meant for...
Maybe Bruce Springsteen Was Born to Run Home
Religion News Service is running my piece on Catholicism and “home” in “Springsteen on Broadway.” Needless to say, I had fun with this one. Here is a taste: Yet, as Springsteen knows all too well, escaping a Catholic past in the...
Messiah College Humanities Symposium: “Home”
I have been thinking and writing about “home” for a long time. So needless to say, I am looking forward to the Messiah College Humanities Symposium this coming week. Here are some of the sessions I hope to attend during...
Historian Richard White on “Home”
Yesterday we posted a link to a History News Network interview with Stanford historian Richard White. Today, White is back with a piece at Smithsonian.com on the idea of “home” in America’s Gilded Age. Here is a taste: When reduced to...
The Grief of Staying Home
Andrew Sullivan reflects on place and rootedness in an age of globalization: I’ve always been unusually attached to places. It’s one reason I still call myself a conservative. Travel doesn’t attract me. I’ve now lived in the same loft in...
The Democratic Malaise
This morning I picked up my copy of Christopher Lasch’s 1995 book The Revolt and the Elite and the Betrayal of Democracy and started reading it again. I am still trying to process it all from the perspective of the so-called age...
Song of the Day
This is in honor of the “home” part of “The Way of Improvement Leads Home”: [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEY3Kgfm9ec?ecver=2] ...
Song of the Day
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iywFZqtPlhU&w=560&h=315] Long Walk Home Last night I stood at your doorstep Trying to figure out what went wrong You just slipped something into my palm and you were gone I could smell the same deep green of summer ‘Bove...