News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
We've been enjoying wild black raspberries in our morning oatmeal this week. As the Wendell Berry poem I quote below reminds us, picking fresh berries in the summer can be a reminder of the good and given world.
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Ethan Jones explores the harmful ways our culture relates to food and concludes that food’s purpose is not beautification of the body. Rather, food itself is beauty. Inside and outside the walls of church buildings, it draws us to God and one another.
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James Davenport reviews Little Platoons. Feeney’s book is a helpful antidote to the “go to college at any cost” mindset. But more importantly, it examines how this mindset can corrupt the forms of association that allow our communities to thrive and the humans within those communities to flourish.
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For this month's episode of the Brass Spittoon, John Murdock provides an edited version of a video interview we published earlier this year in which Michael Sauter talks with David Cayley about Ivan Illich.
What's on the docket for next week? A review essay on Josh Hawley's The Tyranny of Big Tech and a consideration of Clarkson's Farm.
And here's the Berry poem.
A STANDING GROUND
Flee fro the prees and dwelle with sothfastnesse;
Suffyce unto thy thyng, though hit be smal…However just and anxious I have been,
I will stop and step back
from the crowd of those who may agree
with what I say, and be apart.
There is no earthly promise of life or peace
but where the roots branch and weave
their patient silent passages in the dark;
uprooted, I have been furious without an aim.
I am not bound for any public place,
but for ground of my own
where I have planted vines and orchard trees,
and in the heat of the day climbed up
into the healing shadow of the woods.
Better than any argument is to rise at dawn
and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.