News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
Classes begin here at Grove City College on Monday, so I've been relishing the last days of summer: one last camping trip in the nearby state forest, canning tomato sauce and salsa from the garden, cooking on the grill and sharing meals with friends.
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In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about bees, local music, and David Jones.
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Anthony Esolen recalls the way that Little League baseball was woven into the fabric of his town's life when he was a boy: "We have better facilities now, and the Little League World Series is on television. Yet I have not seen a pickup game of baseball or even wiffle ball in thirty years. If I had to choose between one or the other, I’d bid farewell to the Little League, though it now appears to be the only thing that keeps baseball alive for boys in America—alive, perhaps, for better days."
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Casey Spinks reviews David Lyle Jeffrey's new book reflecting on the Ottawa Valley Baptist community he grew up in: "What comes out is a story of a small group of Reformed Canadian Baptists who are rural, hardworking, self-educated (largely by reading the Bible), and persistent in becoming holy, but not without earning some dry humor along the way. Jeffrey excels at the hard task of publishing the culture of his upbringing, as well as some of the best of his private life, with both charity and clarity."
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Matt Stewart talks with Jeanne Schindler about the Postman Pledge, which encourages families to commit together to minimize technology use and invest in community life: "Do real things together. Celebrate. Take delight in the world—together. Don’t feel compelled to broadcast your views about the dangers of technology. Let your life speak, but be prepared to give an account of why you’re living the way you are."
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In the latest episode of Cultural Debris, Alan Cornett talks with Broadway actor Laird Mackintosh.
Madeleine L’Engle’s Walking on Water is a bit rambling and repetitive in places, but it contains rich insight into the challenges and responsibilities of creative work. In a lovely passage on the tensions she feels between the work of writing and the work of housekeeping, she meditates on the value of work in ways that resonate with Wendell Berry’s recent argument in The Need to Be Whole:
One problem with the word work is that it has come to be equated with drudgery, and is considered degrading. Now some work is drudgery though it is not always degrading. Vacuuming the house or scrubbing out the refrigerator is drudgery for me, though I find it in no way degrading. That that it is drudgery is a lack in me. I enjoy the results and so I should enjoy producing the results. I suspect that it is not the work itself which is the problem but that it is taking me from other work, such as whatever manuscript I am currently working on. Drudgery is not what work is meant to be. Our work should be our play. If we watch a child at play for a few minutes, seriously at play, we see that all his energies are concentrated on it. He is working very hard at it. And that is how the artist works, although the artist may be conscious of discipline while the child simply experience it.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro