The Barbershop 250

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…

Maybe, in the end, a home library does what a long-inhabited home does: charts a middle ground between the chaos of the world and the hyper-rationality of modernity.

When we toast we celebrate our fight against the forces of darkness and evil.

To find these deeper wells of silence, however, we must seek them out, whether in the woods or the deserts of our own shut doors.

A machine can read books out loud to the baby. A machine can rock the baby to sleep. Smart devices and apps can do these and many other things. But…

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…

Cash may as well be situated in an Anglo-Saxon mead hall, a broken ring-giver, a pagan, who for all his good intentions, cannot heal that which infects his people and…

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.

In expressing his love through epistolary lament, it may be that Freud discovered the precise meaning he felt he had lost.

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…

Jobs in construction, health care, and manufacturing technology need not lead to dead ends...

It would be easy to dismiss my argument as a simple platitude: “Trust God.” But it is trust in the infinite that allows us to trust finite beings.

As the sun rises over the Nile or my daughter’s grave, it occurs to me that the ancient Egyptians may have been onto something. Jess lives on, her soul soars…

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…

Modern physicians use Hans Berger’s invention to save lives every day

Your presence is needed. Hush. Stay. Show your love by letting them grieve.

Behind this type of play, though, is a genuine longing for beauty—a desire not only to appreciate the beautiful things one has seen or read or heard, but also to…

Yet at times, if only for a moment, I feel the shadow over my days is transformed into pure spirit. Such thoughts give me a surprising sense of quiet joy.

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

With a clear sky above us, no one restricting our movements, we learned—sometimes flailingly, like chickens with our heads cut off—how to marvel.

Perhaps Pippin is right, but none of the friends call Fredegar Fatty anymore, and those chaps know something about heroics.

Here, on a little patch of field in a North Texas suburb, I found life being played out in simple but significant ways.

Wallie is gone; no visible scar remains. Mourning provides no lesson, no answers, no closure. The poet is not decrying grief for its lack of utility.

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…