News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
You may notice that this email is in a different format and coming from a different client. As more and more of you subscribed to these weekly emails, we hit the limit of 1,000 subscribers on the free account of our previous client, which prompted us to reimagine how these emails might work and switch to what we think will be a better email company to work with. The increased interest in this email newsletter may be partially related to a growing dissatisfaction with social media. And we'll take that dissatisfaction as a sign of hope. We'll continue posting essays to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for the time being, but as these platforms struggle to foster healthy conversation, perhaps more readers will opt to log off of them. In that case, consider this weekly newsletter an alternative method for keeping up with what's happening on the Porch. Thanks for reading along, and invite your friends to subscribe as well.
In my weekly Water Dipper, I recommend essays on Costco chicken, resilient food systems, the classics, and phosphorus.
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In his "From the Editor" for the Spring issue of Local Culture, Jason Peters asks an important question: "Is only the life of the busy and bustling place, the place of mergers and acquisitions, worthy of story and song and canvas?" As you can probably guess, he thinks the answer is a resounding no. If Jason's essay--and the cover pictured above--whets your appetite, there's still time to subscribe and get the full issue in your mailbox.
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In "Education and Democracy in Disembodied Times: Emerson and Dewey on Humane Technology" Matthew Smith turns to American educators from previous generations to consider how we might form students to use technology well: "In an age of knee-jerk innovation, the warnings articulated by Emerson and Dewey are more needed than ever. They advocated for applied knowledge, but they also insisted such technology must serve human ends."
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In "The Front Porch and the American Dream" Paul Krause wonders if perhaps, just perhaps, COVID has restored some of the beauty and desirability of the front porch.
What's on the docket for the coming week? A review essay responding to Rod Dreher's new book, a defense of teaching Petrarch to college students, and an essay commending the unjustly forgotten agrarian stories of Leo Lewis Ward, C.S.C.
And in the spirit of celebrating regional art, I leave you with this delightful poem by Maurice Manning, “The Fog Town School of Thought" (I reflected on the pedagogical implications of this poem a couple of years ago):
They should have taught us birds and trees
in school, they should have taught us beauty
and weaving bees and had a class
on listening and standing alone—
the children should have studied light
reflected from a spider web,
we should have learned the branches of streams
spread out like fingers or the veins
of a leaf—we should have learned the sky
is the tallest steeple, we should have known
a hill is a voice inside the sky—
O, we should have had our school
on top and stayed until the night
for the fog to bloom in the hollows and rise
like cotton spinning off a wheel—
we should have learned a dream—a child’s
and even still a man’s—is made
from fog and love, my word, you’d think
with the book in front of us we should
have learned how Fog Town got its name.