News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
I'm easing my way back into email after being off for a few weeks. It was a needed and quite refreshing time away. I'll resume Water Dipper posts in August.
A lot was published at the Porch in the last three weeks! Jason Peters confirms that Jonathan Swift was a proto-Porcher. Tessa Carmen reviews and praises Love What Lasts. Ben Christenson clarifies the dangers of AI. Elizabeth Stice reflects on the TV show Unicorn Town and its portrayal of community sports. Antoine E. Davis describes the experience of mentoring school children from prison. Roberta Bayer reviews a new book on Canadian conservatism. Paul Krause reminds Christians to learn from the classics. Anthony Esolen considers the nature of a community that is free to play. And Teddy Macker ponders the appeal of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Then this past week...
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Nadya Williams cautions us about frittering away our days: "That with which we fill our time, after all, is what ends up filling our minds, hearts, and souls. More than simply responsible scheduling, our very character is on the line, and that has consequences far beyond the present."
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Carter Johnson returns to a family homestead with his grandfather and ponders the significance of family history: "We soaked in the morning and our coffee, aware that we were technically trespassing. But, at the moment, we felt the weight of heritage, a complicated term that outmatched the real-estate deeds housed in Pulaski county courthouse."
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Ben Christenson reviews Jesse Russell's The Political Christopher Nolan and considers its reading of Nolan's work: "the political conclusion of the [film] is consistent with his past work: facing critiques of race and class, he concludes that the liberal order is worth improving upon rather than upending."
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Benjamin Myers grapples with the gift of living most of his life in one Oklahoma town and the history and obligations that staying put entails: "Rootlessness and the constant search for new opportunity are part of the American story, but, if starting over is the only story, we lose more than a physical inheritance. We lose the spiritual, moral, and cultural inheritance that gives our lives meaningful shape and purpose. I believe we see the fruits of rootlessness in the cultural disintegration evident in our popular culture, politics, and academic discourse. For the common good and for their own good, I pray that my people will finally stick."
I've been reading a lot this summer, and I always make sure to carve out space to read books that I don't need to read for some research or teaching project. I also try to do some re-reading. In that vein, I re-read Annie Dillard’s rhapsodic Pilgrim at Tinker Creek this summer. I admire her invigorating prose and her unflinching look at the beauties and horrors of life. Grace Olmstead has been leading subscribers to her newsletter through Dillard’s book, so if you’re looking for some good reflections and questions to help guide you through it, that’s a good place to look. In this passage, Dillard explores the links between naming and seeing the forms that creation takes:
What I aim to do is not so much learn the names of the shreds of creation that flourish in this valley, but to keep myself open to their meanings, which is to try to impress myself at all times with the fullest possible force of their very reality. I want to have things as muliply and intricately as possible present and visible in my mind. Then I might be able to sit on the hill by the burnt brooks where the starlings fly over, and see not only the starlings, the grass field, the quarried rock, the viney woods, Hollins Pond, and the mountains beyond, but also, and simultaneously, feathers’ barbs, springtails in the soil, crystal in rock, chloroplasts streaming, rotifers pulsing, and the shape of the air in the pines. And, if I try to keep my eye on quantum physics, if I try to keep up with astronomy and cosmology, and really believe it all, I might ultimately be able to make out the landscape of the universe. Why not?
Landscape consists in the multiple, overlapping intricacies and forms that exist in a given space at a moment in time. Landscape is the texture of intricacy, and texture is my present subject. Intricacies of detail and varieties of form build up into textures. A bird’s feather is an intricacy; the bird is a form; the bird in space in relation to air, forest, continent, and so on, is a thread in a texture. The moon has its texture too, its pitted and carved landscapes in even its flattest seas. The planets are more than smooth spheres; the galaxy itself is a fleck of texture, binding and bound. But here on earth texture interests us supremely. Wherever there is life, there is a twist and mess: the frizz of an arctic lichen, the tangle of brush along a bank, the dogleg of a dog’s leg, the way a line has got to curve, split, or knob. The planet is characterized by its very jaggedness, its random heaps of mountains, its frayed fringes of shore.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro