News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
We had a bitter cold stretch this week that, I fear, killed all the blossoms on our peach tree. So I can relate to what Matt Miller writes about the necessity of risking catastrophe if you want to be a gardener.
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In this week's Water Dipper I recommend pieces on disinformation, friendship, and beauty.
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Willis Renuart aims to bridge some partisan divides by seeking ways to make local associations more participatory.
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Glen Sharp recalls an act of Midwestern charity and draws some lessons regarding the value of being considerate.
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Elizabeth Stice proposes that part of the reason campus debate over free speech grow so heated is that students have fewer opportunities to speak: "Reviving campus newspapers and radio stations and student-led clubs, and putting resources behind them, could create more space for speech, help foster campus community, and model a level of comfort with differing views. The classroom may still need adjustment, but antagonistic wrangling with, or under the gaze of, professors is not the path to enlightenment."
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Nick Russo wrestles with the scale by which we should understand ourselves and considers how to cultivate a kind of cosmic self-respect.
We finished reading Hannah Coulter in class this week. That novel moves me anew every time I read it. This time, given the war and suffering going on in Ukraine, I was particularly moved by Hannah's response to learning more about the battle in Okinawa:
To read of that battle when you love a man who was in it, that is hard going. I read in wonder, believing and sickened. I read weeping. Because I didn't know exactly what had happened to Nathan, it all seemed to have happened to him.
You can't give yourself over to love for somebody without giving yourself over to suffering. You can't give yourself to love for a soldier without giving yourself to his suffering in war. It is this body of our suffering that Christ was born into, to suffer it Himself and to fill it with light, so that beyond the suffering we can imagine Easter morning and the peace of God on little earthly homelands such as Port William and the farming villages of Okinawa.
But Christ's living unto death in this body of our suffering did not end the suffering. He asked us to end it, but we have not ended it. We suffer the old suffering over and over again. Eventually, in loving, you see that you have given yourself over to the knowledge of suffering in a state of war that is always going on. And you wake in the night to the thought of the hurt and the helpless, the scorned and the cheated, the burnt, the bombed, the shot, the imprisoned, the beaten, the tortured, the maimed, the spit upon, the shit upon.