News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
We're thrilled to welcome Adam Smith as an associate editor at Front Porch Republic. Adam is an Assistant Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Dubuque, and readers of FPR and Local Culture will be familiar with his writing. He'll be helping Matt Stewart and myself edit essays, assign book reviews, and shape a robust and collegial conversation about place, limits, and liberty.
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In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about David James Duncan, Peter Viereck, and Charlotte Mason.
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Adam Smith reviews Danielle Allen's new book, Justice by Means of Democracy, and puts it in conversation with Patrick Deneen's Regime Change. In particular, Smith seeks to articulate a distinctively localist perspective on the swirling debates about the future of liberalism: "I think that in general we localists need to enter this debate in a more sustained and systematic way. Deneen’s ties to and sympathies with localism notwithstanding, he has not communicated his postliberal arguments in especially localist language, to say the least. I am still sitting with the question I asked in my review of Trevor Latimer’s Small Isn’t Beautiful: 'to what extent are we localists, and to what extent are we postliberals, and to what extent are these positions compatible?'"
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Nadya Williams praises the humble slow cooker as a means of eating well even in a fast-paced life: "One easy solution is the crockpot. Why? You can throw in some basic ingredients in the morning before work or school, and then when you get home in the evening, you have a hot meal waiting. Bonus: the house will smell really good when you walk in. What’s not to love?"
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Natalie Symons responds to Jennifer Banks's Natality and probes the meaning of birth: "For Banks, the glory of natality is not that it is a passage into the world for something or someone else, but that birth is a tool for our own self-creation, whether that be through materializing other people in our bodies or projecting our ideas and actions onto the world."
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John Klar revisits the fable of the Country Mouse and the City Mouse while drawing on Wendell Berry's "The Work of Local Culture." What are the consequences of a less friendly exchange between urban and rural inhabitants? "Vermont dumps almost all of its own garbage into Mount Casella, though it exports some to New Hampshire and New York. Its own consumption of goods–often including unhealthy processed foods, shipped huge distances–is culturally indistinguishable from the flow of garbage trucked out of the cities."
This past week we were at the Heinz museum in Pittsburgh and came across an incredible collection of wood planes made in Pittsburgh. Some were standard bench planes, used to smooth rough-cut lumber, but others were much more sophisticated. Moulding planes cut intricate patterns into door or window mouldings, producing the effect a router might create today. Others, called plow planes, could cut precise grooves into a board and prepare it for simple joinery. These were well-made, capable tools used to produce beautiful carpentry. Charles W. Prine Jr., who collected them, has a fascinating essay about the planes and the men who made and used them:
While some may argue that history is the lives of great men, another perspective is that the "story of man" can be best understood through the development of his tools. Primitive man used his hands. Somewhere along the way what he could do with his hands was extended through the use of stones as tools. Sharp rocks became knives, and when vine ropes were used to attach wooden handles to rocks, they became axes. Improvements in tools developed over centuries. The carpenters who first came to America brought implements whose use would easily have been understood by carpenters from the time of Christ. This perspective insists that the most notable changes in human life have come from the invention of steam and electric power tools and their facility in mass-producing transportation, entertainment, and data processing instruments that could not have been imagined 200 years ago.”
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro