News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
Somehow, even though it's still January and we had stretches of zero degree weather this past week, it seems to be time to tap my maple trees.
- In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about Taylor Swift, foreign policy, and Flannery O'Connor.
- David Bannon probes the dynamics of confession from inside a jail cell: "Suddenly I was telling my cellie everything, not out of moral propriety, but because I knew there was no getting around the facts. The movies have that part wrong. Claims of innocence do nothing for your street cred inside."
- Max Longley reviews Kevin Vallier's All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism and sifts through Integralism's prospects: "Self-government by local communities, including some tiny confessional states, would be more consistent with ideals of diverse, self-governing communities."
- Adam Smith calls for a localism that rightly weighs the costs of progress: "Let’s have a localism without nostalgia, a practical but also a faithful localism. As localists let’s be committed to an accurate accounting of the checkered past that grounds our hope."
- Alex Taylor considers how we should live humanely amid the machines we increasingly have to interact with: "It’s not perhaps that the world doesn’t need change, but that as anti-Machine author Paul Kingsnorth put it in these pages, “the first work is changing yourself.” We have to live where we’re placed, and for Eve at the Meat and Malt, right now that means continuing to serve the guests who entreat her for sustenance, despite the intrusion of the impersonal into her hospitality."
- John Murdock talks with Brian Miller about his new book, Kayaking with Lambs, and life on his farm in east Tennessee.
I recently finished George Marsden's in-depth biography of Jonathan Edwards. It was a fascinating read, and Marsden provides a lot of context for the theological, political, and economic controversies that Edwards engaged in. I appreciated Marsden's efforts to understand these eighteenth-century debates on their own terms while still critiquing the blind spots that Edward and some of his contemporaries suffered from:
If one has, as I do, theological mentors from across the ages, then it is valuable to realize that their insights on spiritual matters come framed by their particular personal and cultural circumstances. My belief is that one of the uses of being an historian, particularly if one is part of a community of faith, is to help persons of such communities better understand what they and their community might appropriate from the great mentors of the past and what is extraneous and nonessential. Everything is, of course, time-bound and there is a danger for us who are so shaped by historical consciousness to dismiss every authority from the past once we have understood the peculiarities of the historical, personal, or theoretical factors that shaped its outlook. A far more profitable approach is to employ historical consciousness for developing more discriminating assessments of the wisdom of the past. The point of historical scholarship should not be, as it so often is today, simply to take things apart, to destroy myths, or to say that what looks simple is really quite complex. It should also be to help people see how to put things back together again. We need to use history for the guidance it offers, learning from great figures in the past—both in their brilliance and in their shortcomings. Otherwise we are stuck with only the wisdom of the present.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro