News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
The spring issue of Local Culture is heading to the printer this week. It’s a beautiful issue that will make for a mouth-watering read. Subscribe by Monday if you want this one in your mailbox.
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In this week’s Water Dipper I recommend essays about hospitality, exile, and mushrooms.
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Jason Peters introduces the spring issue of Local Culture: “without the home kitchen and the family that eats from it there is no hope that these rituals of local life will survive. Those who care about all this might do well to be watchful; they might wish to defend the walls around the Ilium of home kitchen.”
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Amanda Patchin reviews Paula Marantz Cohen’s Talking Cure: “One cannot really have a book about conversation alone. Conversation is so much a fruit of individual persons and their relationship to one another, that a book about that fruit must be one about how to become a deeper, better, more complex and interesting person.”
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Christine Norvell reviews Learning to Love, Alex Sosler’s new book about higher education as a pilgrimage: “I was encouraged by Sosler and all the many ways he connected love and knowledge to the journey that a rightly ordered education invites students to take. The infilling of knowledge and wisdom is a gift of God, and Sosler is a welcome guide, the best of docents, for students and educators alike.”
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Aaron Weinacht commends Eugene Vodolazkin’s new novel: “His history of the ‘island’ hilariously skewers our pretensions to originality, but even as it does so, it offers an unapologetic thesis that you know, maybe there was some stuff about the medieval world that was actually better than the rhinestones and stringy thongs on offer to us Moderns. In other words, Vodolazkin turns irony against modernity itself and then offers in its place his own refreshingly naive thesis about how to think about history.”
I’m reading The Last Battle with my daughter right now, and I’m struck by how impressively C.S. Lewis portrays the dynamics of a mendacious, self-serving elite manipulating a gullible populace. The result is embittered resentment and justified skepticism, a disbelief in any appeals to the common good or to transcendent truths. Take, for instance, the Ape’s method of convincing Puzzle the donkey to go along with his self-serving plot to disguise Shift as Aslan and use him as a puppet:
“You look wonderful, wonderful,” said the Ape. “If anyone saw you now, They’d think you were Aslan, the Great Lion, himself.”
”That would be dreadful,” said Puzzle.
“No it wouldn’t,” said Shift. “Everyone would do whatever you told them.”
”But I don’t want to tell them anything.”
”But you think of the good we could do!” said Shift. “You’d have me to advise you, you know. I’d think of sensible orders for you to give. And everyone would have to obey us, even the King himself. We would set everything right in Narnia.”
”But isn’t everything right already?” said Puzzle.
”What?” cried Shift. “Everything right?—when there are no oranges or bananas?”
”Well, you know,” said Puzzle, “there aren’t many people—in fact, I don’t think there’s anyone but yourself—who wants those sort of things.”
”There’s sugar too,” said Shift.
”H’m yes,” said the Ass. “It would be nice if there was more sugar.”
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro