News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
We’re in the grip of a cold spell right now, but my seed order came this week (which made me think of Matt Miller’s delightful essay on reading seed catalogs), so I’m dreaming of a summer garden.
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In this week’s Water Dipper I recommend essays on livestreams, motherhood, and education.
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Austin Hoffman reviews a new collection of essays on classical education and defends keeping authors such as Plato, authors with whom we might have some disagreements, in the curriculum: “To change Redemer’s analogy, perhaps we should liken Plato not to an unruly uncle to be ignored, but a great grandfather to be respected. His views are from an age not our own, and he may say disagreeable things, but no one would be gathered around the family table without him, and he is wiser than younger generations believe.”
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Joel Kurtz reflects on the connections between an odd pair of people–Carry Nation and Dale Carnegie: “I guess that paradox is what intrigues me about Carry and Dale’s differing personal constitutions and methodologies. I see them appealing to all of us in different ways—whether we have many friends or few, whether our influence is recognized or not—to embark upon the truly influential gift of friendship.”
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In a haunting essay, Nick Russo asks where he is from: “I am not now lamenting my station, which is a kind of existential loneliness, though at times I do. I’m putting it down in writing because I know for certain that in this loneliness I’m far from alone.”
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Kenton Sena reviews Kristen Page’s The Wonders of Creation: Learning Stewardship from Narnia and Middle-Earth and concludes with some good advice about what we can learn from Tolkien and Lewis: “How else does their work inspire you to think differently about your own relationship to your own places? Take action in your own property, if you have it, and in your local community.”
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John Murdock releases the audio recording from the Civic Life panel at FPR’s last conference. The panel features Mark Mitchell, Rachel Ferguson, and Bill Kauffman
I’ve been revisiting the opening paragraphs of Wendell Berry’s Life is a Miracle as I prepare a talk for an upcoming conference at Westmont. The theme is “Educating for the Unknown,” and it promises to be an interesting conversation about why a liberal arts education is valuable today. Berry here names the vital importance of recovering past wisdom to rightly orient contemporary thought and work:
The expressed dissatisfaction of some scientists with the dangerous oversimplifications of commercialized science has encouraged me to hope that this dissatisfaction will run its full course. These scientists, I hope, will not stop with some attempt at a merely theoretical or technical “correction,” but will press on toward a new, or a renewed, propriety in the study and the use of the living world.
No such change is foreseeable in the terms of the presently dominant mechanical explanations of things. Such a change is imaginable only if we are willing to risk an unfashionable recourse to our cultural tradition. Human hope may always have resided in our ability, in time of need, to return to our cultural landmarks and reorient ourselves.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro