Rod Dreher

It took Sharon Astyk’s blog post about the demographic crisis in agriculture (she’s now blogging on Science Blogs, by the way) to crystallize in my mind what rubbed me the wrong way about Caitlin Flanagan’s disparaging Alice Waters for her Edible Schoolyard program. Excerpt: On Science Blogs there’s a lot of discussion (good and valuable)…

As you know, this is no longer a politically partisan blog, but I do want to call your attention to the black linguist John McWhorter’s defense of Harry Reid re: the senator’s controversial remarks about Obama and black English. I learned some interesting things about black English from a linguistic and sociological point of view.…

Good Ross Douthat column today, talking about the meaning of Brit Hume’s on-air appeal to Tiger Woods to embrace Christianity. Douthat neither endorses nor condemns Hume, but does question our culture for pushing the discussion of religion strictly to the margins of private life. This is accomplished in two ways, Ross says: one, by secular-minded…

I finally made it to “Avatar” today. Whatever else there is to say about the film, it was well worth seeing for the visual spectacle alone. I saw it in 3D, and it was great fun. It’s also fun, in a way, to see it as a Rohrshach test of one’s political and cultural orientation.…

Let’s revisit this 2008 post of mine in which I discussed the case of Raymond Zulueta, a California homeowner whose mellow was being harshed because he owed more money on his house than it was worth. So he walked away … and was surprised by how much better he felt about things. At the time,…

We said goodbye to our hens today. They’re now living in Austin, with Julie’s brother and his wife, in a good home. This got to me more than I thought it would, mostly because it upset Julie and the kids so much. I’ve seen how hard Julie worked to tend to those birds, raising them…

In the new issue of Touchstone, Ken Myers publishes a short essay (not available online) about the importance of Richard Weaver’s short but highly influential 1948 book “Ideas Have Consequences.” I have the same paperback edition Ken has, apparently; when I was packing up my books for the move, and smiled as I read the…

Finally, back in my own bed tonight, after five days of traveling. What a relief. I hugged my parents goodbye this morning and climbed into a U-Haul truck for the long ride home. As I was driving out, it occurred to me that on that very spot in June of 1992, I hugged them and…

The Edge’s 2010 World Question survey is out today. The question, and answers: How is the Internet changing the way you think? I’m about to get on the road for the long drive back to Texas, so I don’t have time to give this question the thought it deserves before answering — but I decided…

It was with automatic hostility that I came to Caitlin Flanagan’s essay in the Atlantic Monthly in which she rips Alice Waters and the state of Calfornia’s educational establishment for its school gardening program, Edible Schoolyard. What is wrong with working gardening and food consciousness into a public school curriculum? Flanagan starts out asking a…

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