News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
We've had cold--low 20s--and snow flurries this week, but peppers and tomatoes and other vegetables are putting out their first true leaves in my basement, and I should get my peas and other early crops in the ground in the next week or two.
- In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays about dumber phones, Godric, and Hiroshima.
- David Bannon reminds us not to skip over the deep sorrow of Christ's passion in our haste to experience Easter's joy: "Today, two thousand years after that first Passion Week, we enjoy the luxury of knowing how the story of Jesus continues through Easter morning. This was not the case for Christ’s followers in those heady times."
- Rebecca Skabelund warns that our societal addition to screens is an inside job: "It’s time to give the kids a better life script, to give them something more to aspire to than slumping over a screen for the rest of their lives."
- Marvin Olasky praises well-reported, ground-level journalism, but wishes more local publications could fund such work: "Zenger House has announced its twelve 2025 awards for ground-level reporting. The winning stories are all excellent, but none emerged primarily from the ground-level reporting of local journalists."
- Reid Makowsky notes the remarkable benefits of letting life thrive in the margins: "Within five years you could have a tiny piece of managed nature, in which more birds sing than you would have thought possible."
- Dean Abbott calls for a different kind of conservatism than that on offer by Andrew Tate: "Above all, our culture needs an inward right. We need a right wing concerned with the soul and its restoration. We need a right wing capable of producing saints far more than we need one devoted to producing online influencers who, however popular they become, remain unable to discern between the power that makes men famous and the power that makes men good."
- Michael Rawl reviews John Guillory’s On Close Reading and considers the value of modeling how we read: "We may be reluctant to present ourselves as 'sages on stages,' but if Guillory is correct, it would be incumbent on teachers to provide clear models of close reading that could then be internalized and imitated by students. We should, in other words, recognize the value of being lectors at the lectern."
In our Wendell Berry class, we're slowly working our way through his Sabbath poems. No matter how many times I re-read these, new images or lines stand out to me. This week, it was these two stanzas from 2005, XVI:
A ringing in my ears from hearing
too many of the wrong things
surrounds my head some days
like a helmet, and yet I hear the birds
singing: the song sparrow by the water,
the mockingbird, whose song so beautiful
flings him into the air.
Song comes from a source unseen
as if from a stirring leaf, but I know
the note before I see the bird.
It is a Carolina wren whose good cheer
never falters all year long.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro