Clarion

Turning Cows into Ideas
Roger Scruton, philosopher & farmer, tells us how to make farms profitable even if no one buys a thing:

Very few farms are profitable, and ours exists more…as a rural consultancy and ideas factory. Our neighbors turn grass into milk and make a loss; we turn grass into ideas and make a profit. We keep horses of our own, which we look after, and allow our neighbors to use the pasture for their cows: cows too, viewed from the window, can easily be made into ideas. We also keep chickens, and occasionally pigs, which we turn into sausages, after their brief time as ideas.

Aging, Individualism, and Our Middle-Class Dreams
Peter Augustine Lawler, ethicist and critic, tells us how caring for the old competes with our work-a-day society’s love of freedom and laboring:

Surely there is little worse than to have Alzheimer’s and be alone…Yet the currents of our time push us almost inescapably in this lonely direction. Lives moved by a veneration of independence threaten to leave us unprepared for depending and being depended upon, and so actually to increase the burdens of long-term care for the dependent in our society. The inability to think clearly about the basic human need of caregiving—and so the inability to provide effectively for it—may be the price paid for all the undeniable and wonderful technological success that characterizes our time.

Vigen Guroian on Flannery O’Connor’s Iconographic Fiction and Christian humanism.

Stephen Gatlin decipher’s Francis Collins’ chatter about God.

T.L. Reed’s short story “Weight on Lilies” depicts aging and things left undone.

Bart Fleuren finds the endangered species Homo Economus Christianus in some Third Ways.

Adrienne Su’s poem “Fear of Flying” reminds us of what we know we know.

Read the announcement of Clarion’s Web launch on Christian Newswire.

The Clarion Review is published by the American Orthodox Institute, a research and educational organization that engages the cultural issues of the day within the Orthodox Christian moral tradition.