News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
We attended our first pig roast of the fall this past weekend. We should have at least one more coming up. This culinary experience is one of my favorite parts of Western PA culture.
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Brian Miller describes what it was like to go kayaking with a lamb. This essay is excerpted from his new book, which is now out. Pick up a copy or plan to do so at the FPR conference in Madison, where you can get it signed by Brian: "This life is not what was expected when first I took up farming. Even today it is hard to conjure the farmer I envisioned two decades ago. No doubt he was tweed-clad, leaning on a walking stick as he surveyed a vast fat and sassy flock of sheep. And, in truth, I have been that man, played that role, an East Tennessee member of an imaginary minor gentry. But more often than not I have played the fool in service to the foolish. And so it was to be on this day I shall describe."
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Aaron Weinacht reviews Anton Barba-Kay's A Web of Our Own Making: "Barba-Kay argues that we tend to resolve our cognitive dissonance by outsourcing all the choices that do matter and consoling ourselves with a plethora of choices that don't."
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Anthony Esolen considers what requirements employers should impose on prospective employees and wonders how useful the college diploma really is: "the aim is to get young people, of all backgrounds and races, on their feet with as little fuss and expense as we can, regardless of whether their families can afford the usurious colleges, and by doing so, to empower families that are richer in brains and in common moral virtues than in money or power. Subsidiary to that aim is to rethink what we do in our grade schools and high schools, but also to be humble about it, because even very good schools will often miss the brightest, precisely because a school will put premiums on habits that reward the middling and the bureaucratic."
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Paul Krause reviews Spencer Klavan's How to Save the West: "The liberty and justice which republics are erected to safeguard requires, as Milton and the Founders knew, a moral, virtuous, and religious citizenry. Without this moral and virtuous spirit, the citizenry is slothful and servile. Despotism takes hold once the bulwark of liberty and justice, moral love, has withered away. Welcome to the twenty-first century."
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John Murdock talks with Bill Kauffman in the latest episode of the Brass Spittoon podcast. They discuss the origins of FPR and Kauffman's literary adventures.
In preparation for our book launch event this week with Roosevelt Montás, I revisited his Rescuing Socrates. It's a moving account of his own intellectual journey, and he intersperses perceptive readings and commentary throughout the narrative. For instance, he describes how he responds to students and their parents who wonder about the value of liberal education:
When making the case for liberal education to low-income students and families, I often point out that there is a long tradition of steering working-class students toward an education in servitude, an education in obedience and docility, an education in not asking questions. The idea that liberal education is only for the already privileged, for the pampered elite, is a way of carrying on this odious tradition. It is a way of putting liberal education out of the reach of the people who would most benefit from it—precisely the people who have historically been denied the tools of political agency. I ask them to take a look at who sends their children to liberal arts colleges and at what liberal arts college graduates go on to do with their “useless” education.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro