News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
I'm taking my summer hiatus from the Internet starting today. I need these breaks to clear my head. I'll be back at the end of July. FPR will continue publishing essays, though, under the able leadership of Matt Stewart.
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In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about reconciliation, history, and localism.
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Christopher DeMuth praises the life and work of John McClaughry in awarding him the Ethan Allen Lifetime Achievement Award: "The originality of John’s thought sometimes made him a contrarian in the results-oriented, career-obsessed world of politics on campaign staffs and in Congress and at the White House. And an occasional puzzlement to his fellow Vermont legislators in Montpelier. But he has been consistently ahead of the pack."
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Anthony Esolen describes the conditions that enable a town to celebrate its religious heritage for generation after generation: "Those people in Gubbio were made one by their devotion to God and their gratitude for the good old bishop. The people in Jessup would not have continued their now literally outlandish feast had it not been for the devotion they still felt, and still exercised in America."
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Mark Botts wonders at the humble, neighborly faithfulness of his fellow parishioner: "The very labor W. performs for D., as D. is reduced by dementia, matches what Bonhoeffer calls 'spiritual love.' ... Yet his labor will go almost unseen by the very one he serves. And if unseen, also unthanked."
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Zephram Foster recounts his intellectual journey from a doctrinaire libertarianism to one more chastened by a deep appreciation for communal goods: "What I failed to realize was that the conservatism I was shifting away from was not a historical conservatism at all--rather, it was a distinctly 2000s neoconservatism that I had assumed was the only flavor."
In the first issue of the Transcendentalist journal the Dial, Margaret Fuller writes about the form of essay she values in small magazines. Rather than breezy or confident essays, she wants to read pieces that display the author's process of thought and invite readers to participate in the work of thinking:
[This] has been the greatest mistake in the conduct of these journals. A smooth monotony has been attained, an uniformity of tone, so that from the title of a journal you can infer the tenor of all its chapters. But nature is ever various, ever new, and so should be her daughters, art and literature. We do not want merely a polite response to what we thought before, but by the fresheness of though in other minds to have new thought awakened in our own. We do not want stores of information only, but to be roused to digest these into knowledge. Able and experienced men write for us, and we would know what they think, as they think it not for us but for themselves. We would live with them, rather than be taught by them how to live; we would catch the contagion of their mental activity, rather than have them direct us how to regulate our own. . . . We would converse with him, secure that he will tell us all his thought, and speak as man to man.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro