News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
We'll be posting the full schedule for the October conference shortly, and if you're hoping to join us, get your ticket now as we're very close to selling out. And we won't be changing venues again, so once we're full, we'll have to close registration.
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In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about digital community, dramatic history, and suburban sprawl.
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Mary Grace Mangano describes how she prepares her students for a semester of learning: "'A god we can understand is a god less than ourselves,' Flannery O’Connor said. I shared this quote with my students on our first day of class and then used it to frame our syllabus for the semester. In other words, I was warning the students to start getting comfortable with mystery and with what is unknown."
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Robert Moore-Jumonville reviews a new book about Fr. Vincent McNabb: "Chesterton famously said of him, 'Nobody who ever met or saw or heard Father McNabb has ever forgotten him.' And like Chesterton, Fr. McNabb’s sharp mind included a good sense of humor."
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Nadya Williams responds to some recent critiques of homeschooling and articulates the benefits that home education can bring: "Repeatedly, some of the best students I have taught have been homeschooled. What set them apart was precisely the spirit of bold curiosity that I see in my own kids: that bright light in their eyes, an interest in asking questions and in pursuing rabbit trails independently."
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Andrew Spencer reviews Chris Smaje's Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future, a careful critique of George Monbiot's futurist dream (or nightmare, depending on one's perspective): "The ecomodernist approach of Regenesis relies on a mechanistic understanding of humanity. The presumption is that humans are merely fleshy machines that can adapt to flourish in any environment as long as their basic material needs are met. That doesn’t match with most people’s experience of life." Monbiot and Smaje have added comments to Spencer's review, and Monbiot has promised a fuller response to the concerns Smaje's book outlines.
Most mornings the last couple weeks when I go out to water the garden and survey the damage done over the night by deer or rabbits or bugs, I watch large flocks of grackles fly above our yard. As their flocks bunch and swirl, I think of two Richard Wilbur poems. The first, "An Event," opens with a lovely description of such a flock:
As if a cast of grain leapt back to the hand,
A landscapeful of small black birds, intent
On the far south, convene at some command
At once in the middle of the air, at once are gone
With headlong and unanimous consent
From the pale trees and fields they settled on.
The second, "Lying," begins: "To claim, at a dead party, to have spotted a grackle, / When in fact you haven’t of late, can do no harm." Wilbur's wife wasn't initially impressed with this poem. He recounts that on first reading it, she told him, “Well, you’ve finally done it; you’ve managed to write a poem that’s incomprehensible from beginning to end.” She came to appreciate it, however, and a few years ago I wrote about it for FPR. I'll leave you with a few lines from the poem:
In the strict sense, of course,
We invent nothing, merely bearing witness
To what each morning brings again to light:
Gold crosses, cornices, astonishment
Of panes, the turbine-vent which natural law
Spins on the grill-end of the diner’s roof,
Then grass and grackles or, at the end of town
In sheen-swept pastureland, the horse’s neck
Clothed with its usual thunder, and the stones
Beginning now to tug their shadows in
And track the air with glitter. All these things
Are there before us; there before we look
Or fail to look; there to be seen or not
By us, as by the bee’s twelve thousand eyes,
According to our means and purposes.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro