News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
We found time this week to spend an hour or two in a local strawberry field. The results are delicious. To my palate, it is strawberry shortcake that signals the commencement of summer.
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Rebekah Curtis reviews Rory Groves’s book Durable Trades through the lens of the 1920’s novel Growth of the Soil. While they may look different in modern-day life, the trades are not only occupations, but reasons and ways to come back home.
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Ed Hagenstein reflects on Makoto Fujimura’s metaphor for cultural engagement and suggests that cultural renewal starts with the essential resources all around us.
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Taking a page from Wallace Stegner, Doug Sikkema writes a letter to his mother that articulates the timeless blessings of his childhood.
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Russell Arben Fox reviews two recent books on mutualism and considers the prospects for this set of economic and social arrangements. Popular discourse in the United States today—as well as in many places around the world—hasn’t been so open to alternatives to the liberal capitalist mainstream for close to a century.
What’s on the docket for next week? A rumination on Pope’s Rape of the Lock, a review of Sebastian Junger’s Freedom, and a review essay on how to be neighborly in a high-rise condo.