News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
The semester is underway now, and the first week has gone well. We’re also at work on the final details for next month’s conference. It’s shaping up to be a great day, so do make plans to join us! I got to talk about Jonathan Edwards and Ralph Waldo Emerson with my American Literature students, though we didn’t have nearly enough time to talk about Edwards’s observations of flying spiders.
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In this week’s Water Dipper, I recommend essays on expertise, Facebook, and friendship.
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Joshua Pauling cautions that despite its difficulties and challenges, we shouldn’t seek to escape reality for virtual life: “constructing digital realities and identities in accord with our own will and desire will not make life categorically better. Such a fond belief is a rejection of the givenness of the real.”
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Lucas Nossaman reviews Norman Wirzba’s new book Agrarian Spirit and praises its vision while questioning whether it will reach at least part of its intended audience: “I am not faulting Wirzba for failing to include these examples of more conservative Christians who practice agrarianism. But I would ask whether his theology of agrarianism, written in an academic context, can speak to and challenge the church at large.”
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Lee Trepanier faces the prospect of a new semester by comparing the work of a teacher with that of Sisyphus: “As we approach the new academic year, we, like Sisyphus, are condemned to roll the rock up the hill only for it to roll back down. However, this does not have to be a meaningless task – we can escape the absurdity of our condition. We give ourselves meaning by following either the dogmatist, the activist, or the healer.”
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John Murdock talks with Matt Stewart about Wallace Stegner and what it takes to make a place a place.
In his essay “Magic and Fantasy in Fiction,” G.K. Chesterton makes a distinction between good miracles and bad magic that strikes me as apropos of today’s discussions regarding transhumanism and technologically enhanced bodies:
The good miracles, the acts of the saints and heroes, are always acts of restoration. They give the victim back his personality; and it is a normal and not a super-normal personality. The miracle gives back his legs to the lame man; but it does not turn him into a large centipede. It gives eyes to the blind; but only a regular and respectable number of eyes. The paralytic is told to stretch forth his hands, which is the gesture of liberation from fetters; but not to spread himself as a sort of Briarean octopus radiating in all directions and losing the human form. There runs through the whole tradition the idea that black magic is that which blots out or disguises the true form of a thing; while white magic, in the good sense, restores it to its own form and not another. St. Nicholas brings two children alive out of a pot when they have already been boiled down into soup; which may be said the mark the extreme assertion of form against formlessness. But Medea, being a witch, puts an old man into a pot and promises to bring out a young man; that is, another man. Also, Medea, being a witch, does not keep her word.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro