Msgr. Luigi Ligutti, an immigrant priest who served other migrants in Iowa, teaches us to look toward rural America, its old residents and new arrivals alike, with sympathetic eyes.

A snippet from some impromptu remarks caused a stir, but the pope’s point was that all religions are ways of communicating with God, not that they are all “the same.”

The “weird” meme, popularized by the Harris-Walz campaign, goes hand in hand with a longstanding ridicule of rural America, and it is punching down on some of the most disadvantaged people in our society.

A “chosen family” has its benefits, but it can also be a way of avoiding the accountability and personal growth found in long-term, committed, familial bonds.

David McPherson's new book on the importance of placing limitations on our ambitions and desires touches on existential, political, moral and economic questions.

In her new book, Uprooted, Grace Olmstead investigates the social and personal costs of shopping for a place to live the way we shop for cars.

As rural America becomes more diverse, it faces many of the problems associated with big cities, writes Nathan Beacom. The urban-rural divide in our politics does not reflect reality.

In “Laudato Si’,” Pope Francis called drinkable water a human right. But as Nathan Beacom writes, our methods of farming and raising livestock are degrading our soil and polluting our waterways.

The current opioid crisis has strong parallels to drug addiction in Victorian England, writes Nathan Beacom, and the struggles of the Catholic poet Francis Thompson.

This spring’s floods devastated farming and rural communities in the middle of the U.S. that were already struggling with economic and social decline, writes Nathan Beacom. But ”blue” America may find it difficult to sympathize.