Greetings from the Porch,

My past few days have been filled with much feasting and many good conversations. I hope you too are enjoying this season's good gifts.

• I review Ben Myers's new book on liberal arts education: "Those of us alive in the twenty-first century are the inheritors of a fabulous and precious house of wisdom. It is in need of renovation and repair, but to neglect it would be gross ingratitude. And to believe that AI can erect an infinite array of new and better houses for us would be arrogant. This accessible book can help prospective college students and their families rightly value the inheritance being offered to them."

• Russell Fox remembers the remarkable life of Becky Elder. I only met Becky once, but she gave me a tour of her school in Wichita, and her capacity to envision and realize community projects was apparent: "She was a powerful and beloved Kansas matriarch, in the tradition of many others throughout the history of our state. She was also an inspiration and a friend, one that I will deeply miss. And while she never, to my knowledge, called herself a Porcher, the perspective of Front Porch Republic—particularly the delight she took from, and the deep concern she had for, the sustaining of the folkways, food, and fellowship of her place—was manifest throughout her life and work."

• Rachel Hicks praises Sarah Reardon's debut collection of poetry: "Reardon doesn’t preach. Instead, she leads us to inhabit the hearts and minds of her poetic personae as they dream of love and acknowledge the necessity of submission, rejoice in the delights of early intimacy and acknowledge the ordinariness of working at building a home, pray for an unborn child and fear the future possibility of death and broken familial relationships."

• Andy Petro returns to Berry's perennial question, What are people for?, and probes the vapid rhetoric around AI: "The promise of liberation from drudgery quickly becomes liberation from purpose."

• Jordana Rozenman delights in the magic of Tchaikovsky's popular ballet: "Because those dancing it have worked and stretched and warmed up for three months prior to performance, breaking in shoes and bandaging toes, the dream is anchored by reality."

• Michial Farmer rings out the old year by listening to the best songs of 2025.

Every fall now I get to re-read Moby-Dick with my nineteenth-century American literature students, and it never fails to delight and edify. This semester, we talked about the Christmas motif that Melville threads through the narrative. The Pequod leaves port on Christmas day, and at this point, Ishmael's hope is fixed on some far-off pleasure; his immediate context seems bitter and hopeless. But by the end of the book, as the Christmas references recur (the three Magi, Rachel, Herod's murdered innocents), Ismael realizes that the hope of Christmas is one that intrudes unexpectedly into our bleak reality. Here is the scene where they set out:

At last the anchor was up, the sails were set, and off we glided. It was a short, cold Christmas; and as the short northern day merged into night, we found ourselves almost broad upon the wintry ocean, whose freezing spray cased us in ice, as in polished armor. The long rows of teeth on the bulwarks glistened in the moonlight; and like the white ivory tusks of some huge elephant, vast curving icicles depended from the bows.

Lank Bildad, as pilot, headed the first watch, and ever and anon, as the old craft deep dived into the green seas, and sent the shivering frost all over her, and the winds howled, and the cordage rang, his steady notes were heard,—

“Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood,  
     Stand dressed in living green.  
  So to the Jews old Canaan stood,  
     While Jordan rolled between.”

Never did those sweet words sound more sweetly to me than then. They were full of hope and fruition. Spite of this frigid winter night in the boisterous Atlantic, spite of my wet feet and wetter jacket, there was yet, it then seemed to me, many a pleasant haven in store; and meads and glades so eternally vernal, that the grass shot up by the spring, untrodden, unwilted, remains at midsummer.

Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,

Jeff Bilbro