News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
It's been a busy week at FPR, so without further ado, here's what new:
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In this week's Water Dipper I recommend pieces on Shakespeare, Maus, and mushrooms.
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Andrew Figueiredo tries to make sense of the NFT craze by drawing from Wendell Berry's extensive writings on what constitutes a healthy economy.
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Elias Crim reviews Breaking Ground and concludes that it's a good party: "With 52 contributors filling almost 500 pages, we’re speaking of something close to a block party, one at which we run into some familiar faces, meet a number of wonderful new people, and even glimpse a few Almost Famous People."
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Ross Douthat responds to the three reviews of his recent book that we ran last week: "To whatever extent I imposed a narrative on experience, it was only because experience first imposed it upon me."
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In the latest episode of Cultural Debris, Alan Cornett talks with Father Harrison Ayre about the idea of sacramentality, the dangers of modernity and acedia, and the benefits of the Marian stance.
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Casie Dodd reviews a new novel about urban motherhood: "Sinha’s writing should appeal to multiple audiences, from those disillusioned with modern urbanity to young mothers to thoughtful people concerned with the persistent presence of evil in our times."
It is a real blessing to have occasion this semester to reread many of my favorite Berry essays. I had forgotten how timely "Discipline and Hope" remains. Writing in the early 1970s, Berry begins by critiquing America's political discourse in an age of polarization and TV showmanship. While some of the details have changed, the general political terrain is still--unfortunately--quite similar. For instance, here he is explaining why his search for common sense has led him to critique all sides of the political establishment:
They have all abandoned discourse as a means of clarifying and explaining and defending and implementing their ideas. They have taken almost exclusively to the use of the rhetoric of ad-writers: catch phrases, slogans, cliches, euphemisms, flatteries, falsehoods, and various forms of cheap wit. This has led them--as such rhetoric must--to the use of power and the use of violence against each other. But however their ideological differences might be graphed, they are, in effect, all on the same side. They are on the side of their quarrel, and are against all other, including all better, possibilities. There is a political and social despair in this that is the greatest peril a country can come to, short of the inevitable results of such despair should ti continue very long. . . . The political condition in this country now is one in which the means or the disciplines necessary to the achievement of professed ends have been devalued or corrupted or abandoned altogether.
Of course, Berry doesn't end in despair. The essay, after all, is titled "Discipline and Hope."