News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
This week we attended a meeting in town to hear from local organizations trying to prevent a landfill nearby from opening up and accepting fracking waste. The fracking boom in this region will leave long-lasting ecological damage, and it doesn't sound like anyone really knows what all will be harmed by this industry.
- In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about buffalo, kitchens, and control.
- I review Christian Wiman's new book, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries against Despair: "How are all these entries against despair? Insofar as metaphor is an act that creates meaning, it’s an act of hope: even intractable realities can be changed by placing them in new relationships."
- Elizabeth Stice holds up Virgil as an exemplary mentor and teacher: "Students sometimes come to us in crisis, but always they come from a world filled with challenges and are with us only for a season. We could do far worse as professors than to model our approach to education and guidance on Dante’s Virgil and walk with our students until another valley opens to them."
- Campbell Frank Scribner wrestles with the complexities of free speech and associational communities: "Preserving moral authority in schools would truly be something to cheer about."
- Nadya Williams recommends not stressing out over a dirty household: "I guess it’s time to sweep. Again. And then again. But we can embrace the gentler side of housekeeping. Besides, if you leave be those spiders in the corners, they might yet catch some other bugs for you, performing an essential service."
- John Murdock introduces the final panel from our fall conference, with Ashley Colby and Bill Kauffman discussing ways of living well along the margins of the machine.
We're a couple of weeks into our semester here, and I'm enjoying the opportunity to teach an environmental ethics course. The first part of the semester we're focusing on theological and biblical traditions that should inform our relationship with creation, and then we'll pivot to a focus on food and some of the many questions that eating and agriculture raise. We started by reading Francis Schaeffer's slim book Pollution and the Death of Man. Schaeffer served as a pastor here in Grove City for a few years, and his 1970 book makes a pretty bold claim that Christians need to be at the forefront of the at-that-time burgeoning environmental movement:
In conclusion, then, we may say that if things are treated only as autonomous machines in a decreated world, they are finally meaningless. But if that is so, then inevitably so am I—man—equally autonomous and also equally meaningless. But if individually and in the Christian community I treat the things which God has made with integrity and treat them this way lovingly, because they are His, things change.
If I love the Lover, I love what the Lover has made. Perhaps this is the reason why so many Christians feel an unreality in their Christian lives. If I don’t love what the Lover has made—in the area of man, in the area of nature—and really love it because He made it, do I really love the Lover?
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro