Brendan LaFave grew up in a big Catholic family—the second-eldest of eight siblings living in a large house in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He’s tall, with shaggy hair and an earnest manner, the kind of preternaturally thoughtful kid that adults love. He excelled at his Catholic high school, navigating calculus with ease, building sets for student theatre productions, and playing a box drum at worship events. But he also felt as if he had been born in the wrong era. His generation’s reliance on screens was making him miserable. After getting an iPhone in middle school, he spent several years “terminally on Snapchat and Instagram,” he said, which made his friendships with other kids feel shallow. “It just did a number on me,” he explained. “It caused a subtle depression.” COVID hit when he was a freshman, and his classes went online. “It was just horrid,” he told me. “I’d be on my computer for, like, eight hours a day.”

He had plenty of options for after graduation; he’d earned a nearly perfect score on the A.C.T. He thought about applying to the University of Michigan, an élite state school in his home town, but was turned off by stories about partying and the larger campus culture. Monastic life seemed appealing; he was drawn to the Rule of St. Benedict, a sixth-century guidebook for monks on building communities and living a life of faith. He also toyed with becoming a construction worker and just doing a lot of reading on the side. “I was very averse to the idea of college debt,” he said. “I had these ideas floating around about the spiritual life and pursuing the life of the intellect, and then working with my hands.”

As LaFave was thinking it over, he heard an episode of “New Polity,” a podcast produced by a magazine of the same name. In it, a group of Catholic intellectuals discussed a new school opening in Steubenville, Ohio. Students would take classes on subjects such as the New Testament, advanced geometry, and rhetoric, and earn a liberal-arts degree in Catholic studies. At the same time, they would specialize in one of four trades—carpentry, HVAC, electrical work, or plumbing—and work toward a certificate that signalled their expertise. The school was called the College of St. Joseph the Worker, named for Joseph, Mary’s husband and the patron saint of laborers.

“We’re totally trying to call the bluff on the great divorce between the head and the hands,” Jacob Imam, the college’s founder, said on the podcast. “We’ve told people that the blue-collar trades are no longer dignified,” he continued, “forgetting that Christ himself—God himself!—spent most of the years of his life at a workbench.” Unlike many other schools, which Imam described as keeping students contained in a “bubble,” the College of St. Joseph the Worker would expose students to the real world by having them work as apprentices, fixing up buildings and using their wages to pay their tuition and living expenses. The goal was for them to graduate debt-free. “I was, like, This just seems to tick all the boxes,” LaFave told me. He joined the first cohort of students, in the fall of 2024.

The college currently has sixty-two students, sixty of them men. Imam’s diagnosis of the generation he is trying to reach could just as easily come from the mouth of a progressive crusader as from a conservative Catholic. “The shape of their bodies is much like the shape of their souls—very much blob-like,” he said, of young men, on another podcast. “Corporate interest wants the guy to be lazy,” he said, “because then that guy needs to spend more money on stuff. . . . He can’t do his plumbing; he has to pay somebody to do that. He can’t grow his food; he has to pay somebody else to do that. He can’t educate his kids.”

For many years, young men were handed clear scripts. Marry, have children, and provide for them; attend church on Sundays, find your moral footing, and give generously to a community that shares your values. Those scripts have been eroded. After growing up online, young men seem to be more anxious and depressed than older generations, and in the worst cases they are incapacitated: nursing porn addictions, failing to launch, flirting with Holocaust denial. The College of St. Joseph the Worker was founded as a proposition that lost young men shouldn’t be condemned or written off. What if, instead of following Groypers, these young men followed God?

“We find them on the internet,” Imam told me. “We bring them here. And we say, ‘How about a life in reality instead?’ ”

“Reality,” in this case, is Steubenville, a small city in the part of Ohio that’s basically West Virginia. It was once a booming steel town, but in recent decades it has followed the trajectory of the rest of the Rust Belt: a mill closing, young adults leaving, a mall drawing shoppers away from downtown and gutting local businesses. Between 1940 and 2020, the city’s population dropped by half, and many houses and businesses fell into disrepair. Rusty Reno, the editor of First Things, a conservative religious magazine, visits regularly and compared it to “a bombed-out German city after World War II.” Mingo Junction, a village a few miles down the highway, was recently used as the backdrop for a low-budget zombie movie. Every so often, Steubenville shows up in national news, but rarely for anything good: a grisly double murder in the late nineties; a brutal case in the twenty-tens in which two high-school football players were convicted of raping a sixteen-year-old girl after a video was posted online.

And yet, Steubenville has also quietly emerged as a paradise for big Catholic families. In the nineteen-seventies, Franciscan University, a small school on a hill above the downtown, became a center for charismatic Catholicism, an expressive, theologically orthodox movement that paralleled the development of the evangelical Jesus People and secular hippie culture. These days, Steubenville attracts a wide range of Catholics. At churches in and around the city, you can find packed Masses of every kind, from the ordinary form to the Byzantine Rite. There’s a large homeschooling population, and, about fifteen miles from downtown, a Catholic organization runs a property affectionately known as Catholic Familyland—a cross between a summer camp and a retreat center. Throughout the summer, Sprinter vans bearing families of ten or twelve pull up for a vacation where their kids can run around on industrial-scale playground equipment before celebrating Mass with hundreds of other people.

The college’s campus is in downtown Steubenville, a handful of blocks around one of the city’s main drags, Fourth Street. Over the years, families have made investments in the downtown. Mark and Gretchen Nelson, a couple in their fifties who met in jail after getting arrested for protesting an abortion clinic, brought some of the production for their printing and tchotchkes business, including an imprint called Catholic to the Max, to the area. They began putting up life-size, hand-painted nutcrackers around Christmastime, attracting tourists, and turned a cavernous abandoned building into several businesses, including a popcorn store and a coffee shop called Leonardo’s. (They recently started hosting an annual Regency ball in the large space upstairs, for which residents dress up in period costume.)

The college aims to give its students an education that is not just about their work but about their lives—instilling in them a sense of purpose, restoring their feeling of competence, teaching them virtue. But it also exists to help revive Steubenville. Marc Barnes, a thirty-two-year-old professor at the college, is the unofficial hype man of the downtown-revitalization effort. He first moved to Steubenville to become a student at Franciscan, in 2010. Then as now, many of the buildings were boarded up downtown. “I still remember the shock of visiting,” he said. Seeing the city’s poverty made him realize that his studies had distracted him from devoting himself to the possibility of a better world. If he died right then, he realized, “I would have faced Jesus, and he would say hello, and I would say, ‘I was preparing for something really great, Lord—I was going to be a saint after this period of preparation.’ ” He added, “I was just so struck by how lame that was, this idea of a waiting room for real life.”

With barely any money, Barnes and roughly a dozen friends set about trying to bring some life back to Steubenville. They launched a music venue, though it closed once the roof started looking like it might cave in. He staged rock operas for kids, which became popular with the homeschooling set. He also co-founded a festival on Fourth Street during the warm-weather months; organizers put a food truck or a tent in front of boarded-up buildings, as if all of the storefronts were full. “You need to see something in which to have your hope,” Barnes said. “You can’t just talk about it.”

In 2017, Barnes temporarily left Steubenville to pursue a graduate degree in theology in England. A friend introduced him to Jacob Imam, who was in Oxford doing his own graduate studies. Imam was different from the scrappy Steubenville types with whom Barnes had spent his twenties. Unlike Barnes, who was born and raised Catholic, Imam had found his way to Catholicism later, after growing up in an interfaith household, with a Palestinian Muslim father and an evangelical mother. He was a consummate high achiever, a collector of mentors who quickly clocked him as a kid destined for great things. When he was in his first month of college, at Baylor University, a professor suggested that he apply for the Marshall and the Rhodes, prestigious scholarships for postgraduate study in the U.K. Imam would go on to win the Marshall, breezily pitching a program of study on how to bring peace in the Middle East.

Barnes met Imam in a moment of soul-searching. Imam was headed toward a career in academia, but he felt queasy about participating in a debt-driven higher-ed system that can sometimes be more of a prison than a launching pad. “I really, really like high culture,” Imam told me. “But I’m not inclined toward élite culture.” Barnes persuaded Imam and his new wife, Alice, to join the project in Steubenville, and the couple bought a house there in 2019. Barnes and Imam had been trading ideas with a scholar named Andrew Willard Jones, whose work focussed on the model of Christendom found in, say, High Middle Ages France, where society was organized around its relationship with the Church. The three called themselves “post-liberals,” taking a stand against the idea that it’s possible to separate Christianity from any aspect of public life. This would be the basis for their new magazine, New Polity.

The trio, and others in their intellectual circle, share a few radical views. The first is that the élite obsession with shaping national politics, and with getting candidates elected, is a distraction. “It’s not actually possible to seize control of the levers of global economic order,” Michael Hanby, one of New Polity’s contributors, told me, “but it is possible to do something about the place that you live.” In 2022, J. D. Vance visited Steubenville while he was running for the Senate; he ran into Imam, and they chatted over beers. Jones told me that he finds Vance compelling. Still, Jones said, “I’m not very optimistic about significant change happening within systems of power and governance.”

Barnes and Imam also used New Polity to promote a sweeping vision of economic reform. They have argued that all Christians should take their money out of the stock market and invest in their communities—not as a form of philanthropy but to create fully Christian economies. They don’t believe in putting money into 401(k)s, for example, even for retirement. “You invest in Google, Amazon, all the rest, and then you get it at the end, when you’re, like, sixty,” Barnes told me. “It takes people who are in their youth, who are very full of civic desire, to build a city.”

For years, Imam had been nursing the idea that he might develop some of these ideas into something more concrete—a new kind of college. For a time, he had stayed with a retired F.B.I. agent named Tim Clemente, who had gained minor fame in Hollywood for working on police and terrorist dramas. One Saturday, while Clemente was doing some home repairs, Imam offered to help. Clemente tasked him with fixing some footings on a structure behind the house, and rattled off brisk instructions: “Take your hole, mix your concrete, put some rebar in it, and you’re done!” Imam had no idea what he was talking about. (“I was, like, ‘O.K., what’s rebar?’ ”) “I just felt so emasculated and impotent,” Imam told me. “I thought, it doesn’t matter how many papers I pile up, or the credentials that I have. I can’t do that.”

Imam got initial donations from a few friends at Oxford, and eventually raised enough money to purchase the building that would become the Workshop—a vast, open warehouse with timber-filled bays, many named for obscure saints. He made his first hires and began working on state approval. “I genuinely do believe that this really is St. Joseph’s college, and I’ve been just working for him,” Imam told me. “It’s not quite normal, what’s happening. I think that there’s a lot of divine help.”

The model of the college is work, study, prayer. Every morning, the students are encouraged to attend the eight o’clock Mass at the Catholic parish downtown. They have a full academic load, taking around three classes per quarter. Students in Imam’s classes on the Old and New Testaments do tutorials in his office, reading essays aloud while Imam wears full academic regalia. “It’s terrifying,” Imam said. “That’s the goal.”

On top of this, the students practice their respective trades. The standards are high: students may get nearly twice as many instructional hours as what’s required by the state of Ohio. Students also spend a significant amount of time on worksites. Often, in traditional apprenticeships, “you’re cleaning up piles of debris along the sides,” James Heal, the college’s trades dean, told me. “We put them in a more challenging situation so that their learning curve is steeper.”

Last year, the college formed its own construction company, on the logic that it could give students apprenticeship opportunities and make money from gigs. Heal took me out in his Toyota Tundra to visit a couple of jobsites. He wore dark jeans and flannel, with a newsboy cap over his bald head; Latin hymns played as we drove. Heal, who is fifty, only became a serious Catholic in his late thirties, and had spent the first part of his career as a firefighter in Arizona. Before the college had fully launched, it hosted summer sessions on subjects such as timber framing, which Heal had attended with his teen-age son. They were both struck by the unusual culture in Steubenville. “There’s an extraordinary focus on Christ here,” Heal told me. After spending time there, his son asked him, “Do you think there’s any way we could ever live somewhere like that?” Heal and his family moved to Steubenville about a year and a half ago. That son applied to the college, and will begin this fall.

We pulled up to a worksite, next to the home of a college staffer who had hired the college’s construction company to build a home for his parents. The house was partially framed, with Eastern white pine outlining the shape of the rooms. One student was up on a ladder wrapping a Tyvek moisture barrier around the exterior. Sawdust floated over our heads as another student used a chop saw to cut stick framing for doors and windows. On the side of the house, another group of students was digging the ditch where the electrical lines would lie. The Allman Brothers played on a speaker nearby.

The college has so far bought up and started renovating more than a dozen buildings downtown; the college’s students will be the ones doing this work. Just by being there, they have changed the town. Several people told me how refreshing it was to see groups of young people on the sidewalks, going to class.

Imam has attracted some powerful patrons, such as Rick Santorum, the former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania and Republican Presidential candidate, who has introduced him to donors in the Catholic world. Santorum said that he sees Imam’s project as part of the fight to revive small-town America. “There are thousands of Steubenvilles, small towns that were once bustling industrial hubs, that are now really struggling,” Santorum told me. “The very thing that made all these towns across America so successful, and knitted the communities together, was that combination of family and faith and industry—the village, if you will.”

The idea to have a college where students get a liberal-arts education, do physical labor, and pay their way is not new. Congress has awarded special funding to a handful of so-called Work Colleges for more than thirty years, and some small liberal-arts schools had work programs long before that. Berea College, in Kentucky, is probably the most well known of these institutions. Founded by a Christian abolitionist in 1855, Berea charges no tuition, and every student works a minimum of ten hours per week on campus, doing jobs such as tending the school’s farm, repairing bicycles at the bike shop, or making brooms in the college’s historic craft workshop. This is “work as a finding of yourself, and a finding of your place in the world—what we might say is a calling,” Cheryl L. Nixon, Berea’s president, told me. But that calling isn’t necessarily physical labor, which is treated like more of a learning experience: Nixon estimated that most graduates end up joining the professional class after graduation.

The College of St. Joseph the Worker is distinct from colleges like Berea. It does not accept federal funding, including student financial aid; like many other conservatives, Imam believes that the federal government is too involved with education, and he wants the college to retain full control over its policies and curricula. The college also views skilled labor not just as an enriching experience on the way to a white-collar job but as a vocation. A core goal is to cultivate leaders on worksites, to be “the Harvard of this sort of thing,” Imam said.

In the world of higher ed, there’s long been an insistence that college is for everyone, but this has resulted in many graduates unable to find suitable jobs; the employment prospects of English majors—or even computer-science grads—are looking increasingly grim. Meanwhile, there’s an acute shortage of skilled tradesmen around the country. Young people with these skills will likely be able to find well-paid work anywhere they want, long after many laptop jobs are made obsolete by A.I.

Still, the College of St. Joseph the Worker’s focus on physical labor isn’t just about employment prospects. “Building has this instrumental good about it,” Imam said. A slogan on the back of a popular piece of college merch reads “The Word became flesh and picked up a hammer.” Imam believes that students should get a liberal-arts education, less for the job it will bring them than for the gift of a life of the mind. It’s an idealistic vision of education—great texts and big ideas shouldn’t just belong to professionals and élites but to everyone. As Hanby, the New Polity adviser, put it, “I love the idea that my plumber might have insights into the neoclassicism of the American founding.”

These days, intellectuals of all kinds have embraced this ethos of making things—not just building houses but tending the land, baking bread, and slaughtering their own meat. This is also true in the Christian world, where the impulse to use your hands has a distinct theological flavor to it. Joshua Klein, a Reformed Protestant who edits Mortise & Tenon, a magazine dedicated to traditional woodworking, told me that “there is a palpable movement” of Christians “hungering for real, sweaty involvement in the stuff of life. They’re so tired of consumerism, and being passive. We are not only spirit. We are also body.” For parents, that also means imagining a different life for their kids. “I think there would be a lot of pride that parents of my generation would feel in seeing their son or daughter become excellent at a craft,” Brandon McGinley, a Catholic writer who serves as the editorial-page editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, told me. “There’s a sense that the bourgeois expectations of modern America haven’t really worked out well for Catholics, and a more grounded existence, specifically in the work of the hands, is good and needed.” The college’s gift shop displays copies of “Shop Class as Soulcraft,” a 2009 book by the writer Matthew B. Crawford, which argues that the skilled trades require a level of mental and intellectual sophistication that often goes underacknowledged. “Because the work is dirty, people tend to assume it’s stupid,” Crawford told me. Trade school is often talked about as an alternative to a four-year degree, but the discourse can be patronizing, with jobs in construction framed as an off-ramp for the kids who can’t cut it in real college. Crawford thinks that narrative is precisely backward: “There’s a burnout, and a sense of worthlessness, that hovers in the background of the laptop class—a kind of spiritual malaise.”

It’s possible to read a certain reverse snobbishness in this kind of advocacy for physical labor above other kinds of work. Michael Sorrell, the president of Paul Quinn College, the only historically Black school among the federally recognized Work Colleges, told me that the school is “unapologetically . . . far more likely to send students to work at JPMorgan Chase than to the trades.” Sorrell was skeptical of sorting jobs into categories of good versus bad, or noble versus corrupt. “Our students are coming from poverty. It would be irresponsible of us to pretend that we shouldn’t steer them to high-paying opportunities,” he told me. “People like to talk about education as the cure for poverty. No, money is the cure for poverty.”

Perhaps it’s more generous to see the College of St. Joseph the Worker—along with the handful of other nascent Catholic trade schools that have recently popped up, in Michigan and Illinois and California—as a manifestation of America’s populist moment. “When you know how things work, how to repair them, how to build them in the first place, I think it gives you a little bit more of an independent ground to stand on against claims of expertise,” Crawford said. Tradesmen don’t earn their status by “passing through the gates of some institution and being conferred with titles and credentials,” he continued. “It’s based on knowing how to do your shit.”

One evening, I visited Jubilee House, one of the men’s dorms on North Fourth Street. Twelve students, including Brendan LaFave, the high-achieving kid from Ann Arbor, live in the three-story brown-brick house, which has white columns along its wide front porch. As I pulled up, one of the students, Anthony Skinner, was climbing a column toward the roof. These guys weren’t scrolling on their phones to kill time. They were just being normal idiots.

The college’s leaders intentionally decided not to open a dining hall, so that the students would learn to cook and host others in their home. Inside the house, the table was already set; there were bottles of sparkling water and Martinelli’s out, alongside candles made by a pair of local Catholic women. Most of the students wore collared shirts and slacks; the one female student who joined, Theresa Boyle, who lives in an apartment building across the street, wore a light-blue dress and a small cross necklace.

The Jubilee guys live a shockingly wholesome life. The house has an Xbox, but it rarely gets used. There is an ambient skepticism toward tech: a handful of the students have traded in their smartphones for flip phones. Four of the students said they smoke cigarettes, but they claimed there was no alcohol in the house, because they’re almost all under twenty-one. LaFave told me that some of the guys like to have herbal tea in the evenings and discuss issues such as the problems with contemporary masculinity. It was all almost too much to believe, except that the students seemed so earnest about their faith. “Everybody here is Catholic,” Skinner said. “This isn’t a Catholic school where it’s parents sending their kids, trying desperately to keep them Catholic.”

Many of the students were homeschooled, and many have a strong musical background. There are guys in Jubilee who play mandolin, piano, banjo, and ukulele, and one of the other men’s houses, Bonaventure, has a folk band in the mold of the Hillbilly Thomists, a Catholic cult favorite. One of the freshmen, named Oliver, planned to start a men’s group in which they’d lift weights, read Scripture, and pray for one another. With their busy schedules, the students don’t always eat together, but they help one another out; one student from Wisconsin, named Phil, said he mostly ate tortillas dipped in Chick-fil-A sauce before Skinner taught him how to cook. The greatest source of division in the house is over the kind of Mass they each prefer. Some gravitate toward the traditional Latin Mass, while others lean toward the Novus Ordo, the format for Mass widely adopted after Vatican II. Skinner referred to this, jokingly, as “the bogus ordo.”

The college appealed to the students for different reasons. Many of them were averse to debt; at least two of them said they wanted to go into business with their dads. “I was tired of not being able to do things,” Boyle told me. She said she didn’t mind being one of only two women at the school. “You get sixty brothers,” she said. “It’s great.”

Several students said they see themselves as countercultural, but less in defiance of the secular left than of ugly manifestations of the right. “Many of my friends, especially those my age, definitely fall more into the alt-right type,” Eli, a sophomore, said. “I find myself consciously having to distinguish myself from that.” He described the attraction to white-identity politics as a sign of being directionless. “Young men in our generation see and feel the deep problems in modern culture,” he said, but they’ve landed on a lazy solution. Students at the college, on the other hand, have a clear orientation toward Christ and family. Many of the students come from large families—five, seven, eleven kids. Among all the students, three are already married; one couple has a baby, and another has one on the way. The rest understand that this is the expectation for them as well: build a skill, raise a family, provide a life.

Greg Ulmer, a freshman from Ohio, told me that “life is about self-sacrifice.” He added, “My entire goal in life is to get myself and those around me to heaven. If it’s not that fun, that’s O.K. with me.”

The story of Steubenville might make some secular-minded people jumpy about theocracy: lots of young, super-religious people moving to a new town and buying up all the real estate in order to build what Imam’s neighbor, a missionary named Braxton Callen, called “a Christian social order.” Last winter, the college had its first major fight with people who were suspicious of its motives. In October, 2024, the West Virginia Water Development Authority awarded the college a five-million-dollar grant. In its initial application, the college said that it would purchase training facilities in Weirton, West Virginia, about a fifteen-minute drive from Steubenville, and explore building a second campus outside of Charleston. The college also proposed creating a think tank that would draft recommendations for the West Virginia legislature. The application noted that faculty have contributed to a “conservative political vision for West Virginia,” including “the abortion restriction” and “solidarity with Texas’ border”—an oblique reference to tougher immigration policy.

The A.C.L.U. of West Virginia sued. West Virginia’s state constitution has an establishment clause guaranteeing freedom of religion; the A.C.L.U. argued that the state had violated that provision by awarding taxpayer dollars to a religious organization for religious purposes. “How can the West Virginia Water Development Authority send cash to a fledgling church-based, seemingly aspirational college in Ohio, especially when the gift has nothing directly to do with water?” one op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail asked. Imam told me he saw the lawsuit as fundamentally anti-Catholic.

In the end, the college was allowed to keep the money. A lot of the case seemed to come down to disorganization and messy paperwork. It turned out that the grant agreement had only ever covered new training facilities; the other ventures weren’t part of the deal, and the college had to amend a document clarifying that. The A.C.L.U. lost the argument that the state couldn’t give money to the College of St. Joseph the Worker because of the college’s commitment to Catholicism. The whole thing was a sign that the college is still finding its footing. As of now, Imam has no plans to create a think tank or a second campus, even though those had seemed like good ideas when applying for the grant. “I’m learning how to narrow our focus,” Imam told me.

It’s easy to preach the virtues of local community-building over partisan political jockeying. But, when you’re trying to build an institution, the temptation to leverage powerful political alliances is strong. Through Santorum, Imam met Vivek Ramaswamy, the former Republican Presidential candidate who is now running for governor in Ohio. In November, Ramaswamy gave the keynote address at the college’s fall gala, near Cincinnati. It wasn’t clear whether he had fully grasped the philosophical leanings of the room; at one point, he suggested that graduates of the college would make good mechanics for A.I.-driven machines. “Who’s going to be the machine operator, who’s going to be the plumber, the pipe fitter, the electrician?” he said.

“The posture of the college has come across as more political than it is,” Imam told me later. “I’m tremendously grateful for attention from people like Vivek Ramaswamy and Rick Santorum, and yet it is kind of funny how it slots us in a political narrative.” He pointed out that he’s not even a registered Republican, although he and everyone else in leadership are solidly conservative. “Maybe it’s just getting a little bit older, and out of the more radical years of your twenties,” he said. “But I want to create something where everybody can look around, point at it, and say it’s good.”

There are some outside of the Steubenville scene who think that Imam and his allies don’t go far enough in their vision of Catholic politics. Patrick Deneen, a Notre Dame professor who has become a prominent post-liberal thinker, told The Spectator a few years ago that the New Polity guys are “hobbits” who don’t understand power. Adrian Vermeule, a Harvard law professor and ringleader for Catholic integralism, the theory that the administrative state should enforce Catholic teachings and policies, later seemed to suggest that they are nothing more than “liberalism’s good and faithful servants.” Chad Pecknold, a professor at Catholic University, told me in an e-mail that he worries that those in the New Polity crowd “seem to believe that national politics is ‘an intrinsic evil,’ and so corrupting of all who engage in it.” Catholics, he added, “have a sacred duty to elevate (rather than opt-out of) the political common good of our country.”

Barnes, the professor, told me, “There’s a love of place here. It is a real place, and that can be hard and humiliating sometimes, because you don’t get to pick what it is. You receive it, it’s a gift, and then you respond to it with all of the virtue that Christ enables in you.” A few years ago, Deneen, Vermeule, and a few of their allies organized a conference about post-liberalism in Steubenville, which served as the perfect backdrop for their argument that the American liberal order has failed once thriving Catholic communities. It felt “a little agonizing,” Barnes said. “The place is not something they know or love or would sacrifice for. It serves as a sort of springboard for a political movement.”

Toward the end of my time in Steubenville, I visited Bookmarx, a bookstore owned by John Kuhner and his wife, Catherine. (The store is named after the former owners, not the Communist.) The couple moved from New York’s Hudson Valley to Steubenville in 2022. Catherine grew up in town, and they wanted to live in a strong Catholic community, especially because they have five kids. Kuhner is a writer, and, a few months after his family arrived, neighbors started prodding him to take over the local bookstore, which was being sold. “The community wanted this to happen,” he told me, with a shrug. “I’m a better reader than I am a businessman.” The store felt like the kind of place that poet types used to move to Brooklyn for before Brooklyn became corporate and expensive: tall, tightly packed shelves crammed with retro editions of beloved literary classics; a kids’ section heavy on Greek mythology and nineteen-seventies picture books; a couple of cats asserting their dominion.

Kuhner appreciates the vision for the College of St. Joseph the Worker. “If downtown becomes a college town, that is a great reinvention for this place,” he said. He’s thinking of hiring students from the college to build a children’s storytime loft in the back of his store. Scott Dressel, a former Steubenville councilman who is restoring the Grand, an old theatre down the street from Bookmarx, told me that he was delighted, and a little bewildered, when the college’s students did a walkthrough. “They were crawling all over the scaffolding,” he said. “Made me a little nervous.” Dressel thinks the college will accelerate the change in downtown Steubenville. “The impact they’ve made in one or two years is significant,” he said. “Someone told me a long time ago, ‘You’re going to work on this forever, and you’re going to think it’s never going to get better. And then all of a sudden, one day, you’re going to wake up and you’ll have turned some corner, and everything is finally going that direction.’ ”

And yet, as much as Kuhner wants to believe in the Steubenville revival, he remains skeptical. “Where do you get the money for the grander things that make up a real, thriving city?” he said. “It’s still a bit of a dream.” He pays twelve hundred dollars a month in rent for the bookstore, but his landlord can’t afford major repairs. The boiler is broken, so Kuhner huddles by a small space heater in his office in the winter.

Bookmarx is on the ground floor of a three-story building, which used to have a ballet school upstairs. Kuhner led me up a wooden staircase, into a dark space littered with debris. The ceiling was noticeably bowed, and the floor was partly rotted. Kuhner walked me over to the majestic, thirty-square-foot windows, many broken, some left uncovered. “A place like this, I find it simultaneously depressing and inspiring,” he said. “You imagine what it could be, and what it was, which is even more haunting.” We looked out over Fourth Street. Off to the left, we could see Seraphic Hall, a formerly dilapidated courthouse and post office that the college is renovating to serve as a new academic building. But it sat across from a mostly empty lot, and on blocks all around it buildings were empty and decaying.

Kuhner believes there will be people living in Steubenville in two hundred years. “Whether or not that means this bookstore will still turn a profit in four years—something like that is a different question,” he said. For now, his parish is lively and full of young families. His kids run up and down their block with friends their age. Sometimes, “you just feel like we’re camping out in the ruins,” Kuhner told me. “But I never feel without purpose here. And I never feel alone.” ♦