News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
It's finals week here at Grove City, but as I didn't have any finals the first day, I snuck up north to do some steelheading. Spending a day on the creek and landing some big trout reminded me of one of my favorite books: David James Duncan's The River Why. I just finished my review of his new novel, Sun House, which is also quite good. Stay tuned for my full review.
- In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays about prudence, sabotage, and despair.
- Garth Brown responds to a recent essay outlining a socialist vision for agriculture and wrestles with the tradeoffs involved in agricultural policy: "Say what you will about the tenets of Monsanto Socialism, at least it’s an ethos. For those of us who agree that some degree of industrialization is a necessity but disagree with the claim that more is better, and who are skeptical of both the unfettered market and a totalizing socialist alternative, articulating a vision of change can be difficult. (For a classic attempt, see how the late, great Gene Logsdon tried to explain his support for genetically modified American chestnut trees.)"
- Nathaniel Marshall begins a three-part series on the renaissance of institutions providing theologically informed trade education: "It almost feels heretical to say that at the center of our religion, indeed our existence, is a God that can be wounded and broken, but this is precisely the Christian claim. We live in a world that can be degraded, and God entered that very degradation in Christ. So might there be a connection between what we do in the world and this world's wounded God?"
- Alex Sosler reviews Harrison Scott Key's new book and ponders the nature of marriage: "You can either have a hard marriage or an unhealthy marriage. These are your options. And Key not only made me feel normal, but he made me want to live more faithfully and with more grace in the marriage that I have. For, as he says, leaving marriage will change you but perhaps maybe not in the ways you should. Staying married will also change you, perhaps in the ways that you need to change."
- Mark Botts continues his reflections from the church pew, this time focusing on the pastor: "He does not conflate attendance with salvation or sanctification. But empty pews can neither be saved nor sanctified. They never serve in the nursery or children’s services. They never teach Sunday school or tithe. They bring no food for potluck. They do not pray. They do not worship."
Since I didn't get to include all the rambunctious quotes from David James Duncan's Sun House that I'd planned to, I'll append one of the excised ones here:
The carcasses and kills make the beauty bittersweet. Which is the flavor of what’s real. Flavor of paradox, dark chocolate, good coffee, mortal life. Flavor of John of the Cross saying, ‘Moaning is connected with hope.’ I’m well aware that, while the harrier was doing its gold-medal-worthy backflip and killing its vole my car radio could’ve told me an earthquake just killed four hundred people in a fresh-shattered country, and a shooting rampage left eighteen dead in a devastated city, and a madman abducted three kids playing on a trampoline and abused and killed them and horrified millions. But there’s no doubt in my mind that we weren’t created to connect ourselves nonstop, via gizmo-pecking, to every horror suffered by the six billion of us instead of attending to what is, right here where we are. Like, today a flock of white-crowned sparrows landed in a weed patch near me, and while the rest began to feed, one intrepid fledging left them to hop right up to me. As we were studying each other—this white-crowned three-inch-tall flying person and me—we were standing inside a blue, green, gold, and at sunset crimson orb of life. And if you ask me, the endless unnatural-death-list we call ‘the news’ did not shoot that gorgeous orb full of holes or abduct, rape, and kill it. If you ask me, being in tune with trout rises, harrier grace, caddis transfigurations, white-crown friendliness, hawk kills, deer carcasses, and the ashes of those we love gives human and animal suffering the bittersweet dignity of a great old blues tune. Which was my dad’s favorite music.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro