News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
It's been a busy year at FPR. We had a great conference in Madison with Paul Kingsnorth and many of you Porchers, and we published two more issues of Local Culture, a new book, and lots of essays online. Thanks to you all, our web traffic is up substantially again this year (over twenty percent more views and users than last year). Numbers and activity as such are irrelevant, though. As Caleb Stegall reminded us a few years ago, love is the only standard for good work. May the conversations that FPR hosts motivate and serve the quiet work of love in particular places and communities.
- Adam Whipple parses the goods of indoor education and outdoor education: "The unspent beauty of nature that Hopkins saw has much to teach us even if we’re not always paying attention. But paying attention is always better."
- Zane Mabry praises the humble, conflicted life of a hobby farm: "The true virtue of a hobby farm is that it gives us the space to confront that tension between natural and artificial."
- Nathaniel Marshall concludes his series on the renaissance of institutions providing theologically informed trade education. Why is such work vital? "The frictionless existence we were promised, one that freed us from slavish obedience to place and tradition and family bonds, turns out to be one in which we amorphously float about in a gelid atmosphere longing for the halcyon days of family farms and quaint communities."
- Joel Kurtz recalls Robert L. May, who wrote Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer for Montgomery Ward: "Was May demonstrating, knowingly or not, that even the isolated and disparaged—on the very nose of their ridicule—could be pointing the way brightly ahead through a dark and foggy future? Assuming that he was well aware of the increasing indignities and sufferings endured by his much-maligned people in the wider world, I can only think so."
Christian Wiman's new book, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair, is intense, haunting, and rich with insight. Its entries include poems, memoir, literary criticism, theological reflection, and commonplaces. I may review it for FPR, but in the meantime, here's a taste:
A whisper will be heard in the place / where the ruined / house once stood. [A set of lines from Yehuda Amichai.] By which is meant, I think, that even though our human pride might wreak havoc upon our houses, there might, if we have the proper humility, arise a living whisper out of the ashes, something resuscitating and revitalizing, something close, perhaps, to a still, small voice.
The circles through which I move, even the religious ones, constitute a pretty "safe space" for this poem. It requires no great courage for me to celebrate its spirit of productive doubt. But I must admit, I do hear the skeletal chuckle of Jonathan Edwards in my own mind, whose ambition, after all, was to be "God's trumpet." And you can make an idolatry of doubt. You can become so comfortable with God's absence and distance that eventually your own unknowingness gives you a big fat apophatic hug. One could argue that when doubt becomes the path of least resistance it becomes the very thing that a faithful person must most resist. And resistance is often a matter of language.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro