News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
Our radishes and snow peas got delayed by some cold nights, but they are making up for lost time now. I’m looking forward to the first fruits from our garden in the coming weeks.
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In this week’s Water Dipper I recommend essays about conversion, Catan, and vinyl.
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Max Heine profiles Ralph Vaughn, a Georgia farmer, artist, and prophet who works from his rural home: “Vaughn’s 82 years accommodated lots of jobs, lots of ministry, long before art broke into his life. He’s quick to talk about salvation, fulfillment of his visions, his art’s symbolism, miraculous healings (including his own), growing vegetables to provide for his family and the needy, his long battle with a drug operation next door, his counseling and donations to aid addicts and others, and his visits to sing at churches, some of them serpent-handling.”
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Nadya Williams has some tongue-in-cheek suggestions for cleaning up Homer’s offensive epics: “The Greco-Roman classics … have been allowed to skate by with nary an update for two and a half millennia. How long will Homer keep getting a free pass on all the trigger-warning worthy content?”
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Jacob Sims reflects on the nature of true community and the challenges of building a community among fellow sojourners: “It was in my search for freedom and dislocation from my past that I stumbled into the presence of this community of people who shared certain things in common.”
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Jack Kubinec recommends skipping the March Madness bracket pools: “I’ve been thinking about Chesterton’s croquet essay a lot during March Madness. Watching games without the specter of a ruined bracket to kill my vibe, I find myself drawn more to basketball itself than to who wins and loses.”
On this Easter weekend, I’ll leave you with Rowan Williams’s poem “Resurrection: Borgo San Sepolcro” (readers of Wendell Berry may remember his ekphrastic poem on this same fresco):
Today it is time. Warm enough, finally
to ease the lids apart, the wax lips of a breaking bud
defeated by the steady push, hour after hour,
opening to show wet and dark, a tongue exploring,
an eye shrinking against the dawn. Light
like a fishing line draws its catch straight up,
then slackens for a second. The flat foot drops,
the shoulders sags. Here is the world again, well-known,
the dawn greeted in snoring dreams of a familiar
winter everyone prefers. So the black eyes
fixed half-open, start to search, ravenous,
imperative, they look for pits, for hollows where
their flood can be decanted, look
for rooms ready for commandeering, ready
to be defeated by the push, the green implacable
rising. So he pauses, gathering the strength
in his flat foot, as the perspective buckles under him,
and the dreamers lean dangerously inwards. Contained, exhausted, hungry, death running off his limbs like drops
from a shower, gathering himself. We wait,
paralysed as if in dreams, for his spring.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro