News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
We had a good snow this week in western PA to get us in the Christmas spirit. I am taking a break from my weekly Water Dipper posts, but it's been a full week of essays at FPR.
- Joseph Orso ponders the starry sky, a sky filled by natural wonders and machine-age wonders: "On this year’s Feast of the Nativity of the Light in Our World in the Age of the Machine, my prayer is this: may our ceremonies not be one dimensional, but simple and complex constellations of God who dwells among us in so many ways, within layer upon layer of reality, not comprehensible but fully experienceable, beyond our categories of thought but within the bodies of Creation."
- LuElla D'Amico commends Christina Rossetti’s 1872 devotional poem, “A Christmas Carol" for articulating the the tensions of the Christmas season: "Usually, we associate Christmas carols with jollity, yet Rosetti’s is different. It evokes nostalgia and a truth about the Christmas story that is neither commercial nor pristine in its holy resonance."
- Sarah Silflow recalls the example of her parents and considers how a new generation might also find its identity in placed relationships rather than individual desires: "It is encouraging to see how some young people have embraced limits on energy consumption. But the underlying disease of rapacious desire has not been cured. No, this tradeoff only exchanges one delusion of grandeur for another. It swaps external limitlessness for internal limitlessness."
- Nathaniel Marshall continues his series on the renaissance of institutions providing theologically informed trade education. In this week's essay, he highlights several institutions who have recently taken up this work: "In this piece, I turn from the abstract idea of the marriage between the outer world of work and the inner world of the spirit to centers of education that are midwifing this renaissance of theologically-informed labor."
- Mel Livatino talks with David Heddendorf about his novel The Terra Cotta Camel and his efforts to publish this beautiful book by "privately circulating" it: "I had learned to see my audience as small, specific, and mostly local. Instead of 'alternative culture' I preferred the terms 'underground' or even “underdog” culture—not because I was producing art that was subversive or forbidden, but because I was bypassing the institutional gatekeepers, and embracing a small audience of readers who got what I was doing."
- Elizabeth Stice praises university presses for publishing books for regional audiences: "University presses are remarkable allies in the cause of localism. Though they publish all kinds of academic books, you’ll struggle to find a state university press that does not publish books centered on their region and their local history. It is central to their mission. Strictly academic works are certainly part of university press catalogues, but too many people have forgotten about the many other kinds of books that university presses publish."
This Christmas season, as in most or maybe even all Christmas seasons over the past centuries, wars and rumors of wars fester. I'm reminded of the Christmas poem that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote during the American Civil War, "Christmas Bells":
I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along
The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!Till ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime,
A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn
The households born
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!And in despair I bowed my head;
"There is no peace on earth," I said;
"For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!"Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
"God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men."
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro