News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
I traveled to the University of Dubuque this week to talk about my new book. Air travel is a pain, but I had several opportunities for long conversations with Porchers that I've corresponded with but never met in person. Those leisurely, in-person conversations are incredibly encouraging and heartening. It was a good reminder both of the kind of community that FPR can foster but also of our need for in-the-flesh gatherings and discussions.
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In my weekly Water Dipper, I recommend essays about care, wisdom and neighborliness.
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In this deeply-moving essay, Ed Merta describes the inhuman worlds forged by industrial manufacturing of both stuff and paperwork. Merta finds profound hope in the words of writers like Gracy Olmstead and in the act of moving home.
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Christian McNamara revisits Herbert Hoover's speech where he coins the phrase "rugged individualism." This formulation risks presenting a false dichotomy between state control over an increasingly large swath of our lives on the one hand and society as comprised of individual and independent actors on the other.
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Brian Jones argues that the practice of thinking places a check upon the self. It offers us a way out of our "res idiotica." If our universities are faithful to their missions, they must foster conditions where truth is free to be heard and sought.
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John Murdock talks with Will Hoyt in a new episode of the Brass Spittoon podcast. Their conversation is rooted in the Ohio River valley, but it ranges widely.
Since moving to western Pennsylvania, I’ve been trying to read and learn about the history and culture of this region. My friend Eric Miller suggested Brian Black’s Petrolia: The Landscape of America’s First Oil Boom as one book to check out. I read it this past week and found it a gripping and illuminating account of a fascinating and tragic episode in the life of this place:
Petrolia introduced the practice of creating industrial wastelands to a nation with an economic drive for growth that could not be satiated. This ethic of wasting a place for the common good, of extracting a needed resource at the cost of all else in that locale, would power American industry into the modern era. Such development rarely necessitated planning or forethought to allow the ecological or cultural community also to thrive.