News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
We've had some logistical challenges to work through, but things are beginning to come together for our fall conference: Ross Douthat will be the keynote speaker, and we'll be gathering in Grand Rapids, MI on October 4 and 5 to discuss "civility and its limits." More details to come, but save the date and make plans to join us!
- In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about war, conversation, and regrets.
- David Bannon recounts his winding journey toward a "really real God": "My seven-year-old mind did not ponder the mysteries of theodicy—such a paltry word, like biting into a lemon—and I had no doubts about the existence of the divine. In my pre-teen years, I remained convinced that there is an invisible world that interacts with ours. There must be, I thought, but I’m not so sure they’re very nice on the other side."
- Frank DeVito confronts the existential limits that we ought to face with courage rather than avoid: "Man must face the reality of his own existence and his ultimate fate. To stare into the abyss of eternity, to examine and grasp the meaning of life, is a necessity."
- Daniel Witt delves into the history of the common phrase "a rolling stone gathers no moss" and finds that most people today imagine it means precisely the opposite of what it originally signified: "The original meaning of the proverb was that if you lacked stability in life, you wouldn’t develop social ties and responsibilities—a lack which was, self-evidently, bad. That is to say, “mossiness” was a good thing. Only in the 19th century did the idea of mossiness begin to become negative, and the proverbial 'rolling stone' begin to take on a positive connotation."
- Adam Smith considers how we might learn from the just war tradition in waging culture wars: "A cultural just warrior starts from the assumption that, contrary to the culture-war-as-distraction-from-economics school of thought, culture does matter, and it matters enough to fight about. . . . We’re not starting with a liberal idea of tolerance, or indifference, or pure “value-neutral” procedure."
- John Murdock chats with Timothy Carney, an AEI senior fellow and the author of Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be about the village it takes to raise a child and the metaphorical (and sometimes literal) rise of “No Children Allowed” signs.
For this Holy Week, I'll leave you with Sally Thomas's poem "In the Courtyard":
A coal fire thrummed and murmured on the darkness.
Its shiver lit a crowd of human faces,
Cold-pinched and dirtied by its licking shadow,
And by their hungry waiting for the something
About to happen that was bound to happen.
Behind the heavy doors, the hidden voices —
No one outside could hear what they were saying,
But only how they rose and fell. The stranger
Who warmed his hands among them tuned his hearing
For that one voice he would have recognized.
He listened, too, within himself, half-hoping
To find, again, some echo of his own voice,
Exhorting — something — in the mountain starlight,
Mere days ago. Or centuries. He’d thought, then,
That heaven would ignite its temple fire,
And all the earth would rise on wings of incense,
While prophets spoke with prophets in bright shadow,
A shuddering of glory. Tell no one.
Tonight he felt he dreamed these faces, voices.
The wrong firelight kept flickering through gardens,
This most wrong garden, filled with such wrong faces —
No one familiar, only a confusion
Of avid voices fastened on him, asking.
What could he think to say? I do not know him.
That clarity had been his. All that vision.
Now — startled, in the dark — he told no one.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro