News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
The spring issue of Local Culture is at the printer. You can peruse the table of contents here. Subscribe this weekend if you want the full issue in your mailbox.
- In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about the Midwest, Adderall, and avian flu.
- Jason Peters introduces this issue of Local Culture and gives an overview of John Lukacs's life and ideas: "Lukacs’s appeal comes in no small part from his distrust of centralization, bigness, and bureaucracies; it comes from his impatience with thought imperiled in the narrow straits of science and its applications, attended as usual with grinning assurances from both Scylla and Charybdis that we’re sailing safely in calm blue waters under the open sunshine of progress. He was at pains to expose the limitations of the specialist, limitations that perforce derive from inveterate and ineradicable human limitations, to say nothing of those imposed by nature. But he also evinced a devotion to place and to settlement, to the world of books and humane learning, which education once concerned itself with before it became mere training in the advanced arts of getting and spending."
- John Murdock reviews Nancy French's new book Ghosted: "This is the story of a bruised soul touched by grace but still frustrated by the passivity that others continue to show in response to the unspeakable."
- Jon Schaff weighs in on Bryan Garsten's provocation to consider liberalism's core characteristic as offering refuge: "Human liberty is indeed a good. But liberty is the freedom to choose well, not just freedom from restraints."
- On Shakespeare's birthday, David Bannon considers how losing a child shaped the playwright's subsequent writings: "After a pandemic took his son, the Bard would never be the same."
- Russell Arben Fox reviews a new book by Chuck Marohn and Daniel Herriges about the bizarre dysfunctions of the American housing market: "All of this only touches the surface of Escaping the Housing Trap’s arguments and only begins the many productive discussions that should—and hopefully will!—follow in its wake. Buy and read the book, and join with your neighbors in talking about how Strong Towns can help make your community a place that can house all who need it."
I've been reading through a four-volume set of books collectively titled "The Relationship Project." Counselor Steve Shores blends cultural analysis, theological reflection, and practical advice in an effort to diagnose the epidemic of loneliness and consider how we might strengthen our friendships. In Cleanup he considers human relationships from an ecological perspective before concluding with a wise reading of Wallace Stegner's brilliant Crossing to Safety. Here's a taste from the intro:
[A] limited, me-first focus flattens relationships into mere arrangements along the lines of "I do my thing, and you're free to do yours as long as you don't step on my outcomes." Relationships cannot be mutual in any real way under such conditions. For example, if I'm always shepherding my outcomes along and keeping danger away from my "flock," I won't give you the full attention that a real relationship needs. The urge for safety and control creates a situation analogous to that environmental runoff we've described. My pursuing my own outcomes always causes a bad relational impact. As that impact goes undiscussed and unresolved, these suppressed forces "flatten" arrangements between people. These arrangements pose as relationships while their toxins seep into the relational "ecosystem."
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro