Rod Dreher

Sharon Astyk ponders why devotion to church and community organizations has declined so much in the last couple of generations, taking as her examples her shul and her grandmother’s experience in Eastern Star, the ladies auxiliary of the Freemasons. Sharon considers the usual explanations — e.g., that women are working more outside the home today,…

When we stopped at an Arby’s in northern Tennessee, I asked for a medium diet Coke. The worker behind the counter handed me a tub. This didn’t surprise me, actually, because I’d seen the documentary “Supersize Me,” which tells of how American soft drink sizes have ballooned in recent decades. Coincidentally, on the roadtrip I’d…

Well, we made it to our new place. I’m not going to tell you what part of Philadelphia we’re living in, because I had trouble in Dallas with a reader harrassing me and my family in a pretty sick way, so I’d like to keep the risk of that at a minimum here. Nevertheless, it’s…

I’m divided over the Supreme Court’s ruling the other day striking down campaign finance laws restricting corporate contributions to political campaigns. On the one hand, McCain-Feingold not only seems like exactly what its opponents say it is — an onerous suppression of free speech rights — but also doesn’t seem to have been particularly effective.…

Julie and I aren’t Jane and Michael Stern, so we don’t know where the good road food places are along the highways and byways of America. Nor did we have the sense to consult their Roadfood.com website while on this trip; if we had done so, we might have made some appointment dining. But you…

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the book I’ve been listening to on the long drive to PA is Niall Ferguson’s “The Ascent of Money,” a history of finance. It can be tough going for someone like me, but it’s mostly an excellent example of explanatory history — that is, of explaining how we…

I had expected to write you tonight from our apartment in Philadelphia, but it took so long to get the mechanical stuff resolved with Julie’s car today (busted air compressor, not vital to repair today) that we got a late start north out of Knoxville. We tired out in Staunton, Va., and decided to call…

For some reason, this Ford dealership from where I’m blogging won’t let me access any general news sites, so I can’t post a link to the news account of John Edwards admitting publicly that he fathered Rielle Hunter’s baby. I’m glad that’s over, I guess, and for the sake of his family, which now includes…

Good morning, a greeting I offer you without much confidence. Why? Because I’m sitting in the customer lounge at a Ford dealership, waiting on Julie’s minivan diagnosis (“Sir, we’re going to need to charge you $89 for the diagnosis. We’ll let you know in about an hour, hour and a half, what the problem is”).…

Today was the day that we moved. This explains the blog silence; I was up very late last night packing, and up early this morning to finish. We closed the doors on the moving cubes and locked them around 3:30, then went to pick the kids up at a friend’s house. Having said our goodbyes there,…

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