News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
I'm in Spokane, WA this weekend for a conference at Whitworth on the future of Christian education. As seems to be my wont these days, I'm talking about AI and how we might encourage students (and ourselves) to put in the hard effort that is necessary for formative learning.
- Speaking of students, FPR is sponsoring a student essay contest this year. Please spread the word and, if you're a student, consider submitting an essay.
- In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about ducks, Hitler, and gridlock.
- Jason Peters introduces the fall issue of Local Culture. Subscribe in the next week if you want this issue to land in your mailbox: "I would also say that if the explanatory metaphor of the theater (“all the world’s a stage … ”) cannot mean for us what it meant for an earlier age and for its great bard, then we might at least keep in mind the importance of proximity and presence and real encounters of flesh and blood. For the messy business of politics let us have Chesterton’s quip: 'It is hard to make government representative when it is also remote.'"
- Isaac Wood looks to Wendell Berry's story "Fidelity" for insight into the limits of organizing or planning community: "Organized community events bring people together and are an integral part of forging strong communal bonds in a place. Like the law, they serve a purpose in a community’s ecosystem of relationships. So join the community boards. Attend the community events. But all these things serve what is above them."
- Adam Smith suggests therapy talk may be damaging: "I’m not saying people today don’t need therapy. Some people do; maybe a lot of people do. I’m saying a lot of people today need therapy because we live in a therapy culture, where everything is valid but none of it matters, where all the professional sturm und drang goes into normalizing what’s weird, and there’s no passion left for participating in what’s good, regardless of whether it plays in Peoria."
- LuElla D'Amico commends the gossip portrayed in Louise May Alcott's Little Women: "To love and learn from each other in our communities is what good gossiping accomplishes."
A book group I'm in recently read Neil King's American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal. The timing was fitting as King passed away last month after a long battle with cancer. His book is a beautiful account of a saunter from his Washington, D.C. home to Manhattan, and in many ways, it's an ode to the power and value of place:
I had gone out and walked a decent slice of the country through much of a spring and had come away greatly enriched, only to find that the single block I lived on contained depths and mysteries I would never plumb. People have lived lives in my own house that I know nothing about. I could devote a lifetime of study to my lone block and then perhaps, just maybe, do it partial justice. What the land had looked like before the plows and shovels came. The story of each house's origin. What if you sat in the front garden for days on end just watching the neighbors come and go? Or invited each to dinner, week after week?
My one solid conclusion was we should approach our own certitudes with caution. The more you look, the more you think and study, the more you open other doors and the more you understand how little you know. "If you should ask me about the ways of God," St. Augustine [of Canterbury] wrote, "I would tell you that the first is humility, the second is humility, and the third is humility. Not that there are no other precepts to give, but if humility does not precede all that we do, our efforts are fruitless."
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro