News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
This fall's conference in Madison is proving quite popular, and we've already filled all the seats we have available in our venue there. We're looking into the possibility of getting a larger room, but in the meantime, there are no more tickets available for the gathering. Stay tuned, though, for the possibility that we'll be able to find a bigger room.
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In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about facts, bears, and democracy.
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Sophia M. Feingold reviews Amazon's new documentary Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets and tries to offer a more accurate view of homeschooling: "in presenting the documentary’s survivors as victims primarily of a religious ideology, it does a disservice to homeschoolers whose difficulties stem from more mundane human problems."
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In a lovely ode to camping's peculiar pleasures, Amir Zaki describes why we go camping, and who the "we" who camps tends to be: "I find that if the topic of camping arises, there is very little ambiguity in people’s opinions on the matter. Camping appears to be binary. You are either a camper or you are not. Like religious affiliation, you are often born into camping, but conversion is possible, just much less likely."
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Christina Baker weighs the benefits and costs of organized playdates: " In a perfect world, our children would romp out the door after completing their chores and their schoolwork (we homeschool) and knock politely at their best friend’s door, who lived just around the corner in our quiet, speeding-car-free neighborhood, and spend a couple of hours engaged in free creative play, or a massive self-directed building project, or an epic game of Scrabble. How I sometimes wish we lived in that world!"
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Frank DeVito draws wise lessons about living--and dying--well from his wife's grandfather: "We are not meant to die alone in nursing homes and hospitals, with gray faces, morphine drips, and flickering television screens. We are meant to live, die, and live eternally surrounded by a community of love. Creating that community of love, especially within one’s family, takes hard work and sacrifice."
I recently read Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr., and I found it a moving narrative exploring the proper cultural and religious conditions for rightly valuing knowledge. The novel follows a monastic order that forms in the wake of a nuclear holocaust, and they carefully preserve remnants of the former industrial civilization through generations of warfare until human civilization is ready to rediscover natural science and its applications. Can such knowledge ever be used wisely, or does increased technical know-how inevitably lead cultures to abandon religious and moral wisdom? Miller offers no easy answers. In this passage, an abbot of this monastic order reflects on the significance of the rising interest in their archives:
Now a Dark Age seemed to be passing. For twelve centuries, a small flame of knowledge had been kept smoldering in the monasteries; only now were their minds ready to be kindled. Long ago, during the last age of reason, certain proud thinkers had claimed that valid knowledge was indestructible—that ideas were deathless and truth immortal. But that was true only in the subtlest sense, the abbot thought, and not superficially true at all. There was objective meaning in the world, to be sure: the nonmoral logos or design of the Creator; but such meanings were God’s and not Man’s, until they found an imperfect incarnation, a dark reflection, within the mind and speech and culture of a given human society, which might ascribe values to the meanings so that they become valid in a human sense within the culture. For Man was a culture-bearer as well as a soul-bearer, but his cultures were not immortal and they could die with a race or an age, and then human reflections of meaning and human portrayals of truth receded, and truth and meaning resided, unseen, only in the objective logos of Nature and the ineffable Logos of God. Truth could be crucified; but soon, perhaps, a resurrection.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro