News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
I hope you all weren’t too disappointed that no fundraising email from FPR landed in your email inboxes on Giving Tuesday. I think I got at least one such email from every nonprofit I’ve ever heard of. If we were more organized, I suppose FPR could have put together a slick fundraising appeal, but we continue to be a marginal, shoestring operation. We’re at an awkward size where we’re still too small to have a real budget, but we’re also getting too big to run on all volunteer labor. We don’t know what the future of FPR holds, but we’ll keep puttering along as best we’re able, and if you want to join our other donors and help put us on a more stable footing, we would be quite grateful for your support.
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In this week’s Water Dipper I recommend essays on chickens, AI, and the conditions required to sustain legal conversation.
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Steven Knepper responds to the film Paterson and commends its portrayal of attention in ways that William Carlos Williams models in his poetry: “As a middle school student, I had no patience for the poem’s ambiguity and suggestiveness. I had no awareness of what, in college, I came to see as one of its main implications: much depends on how we see such a tableau, on seeing it poetically, on seeing the seemingly banal barnyard scene as singular: this wheelbarrow, beside these chickens, evoked and illuminated by these words. It is a poem that helps us see the aesthetic richness in the mundane.”
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David Larson encourages us to reclaim opportunities to do the work of care for those we love: “This old-fashioned idea of caring for your own—whether taking the lead on raising your own children, opening up the spare room to your aging parents, or helping a neighbor in need—seems to have been largely lost.”
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Mike Thompson Jr. remembers his childhood home and the lives it fostered: “Today, many in our society seem to want change for its own sake. I hope a different spirit continues among those neighbors and the street remains a neighborhood as it was while my family lived there.”
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Branson Parler responds to the Dobbs decision and subsequent elections by urging us to enact better stories with our bodies: “As we enter this season of Advent, we would do well to share the skepticism of Mary and her misfit Son about the powers of this age to establish an unshakeable kingdom.”
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John Murdock introduces the podcast version of the Education panel from our fall conference. Jeff Polet, Angel Adams Parham, and Jason Peters discuss the challenging educational landscape and look for continued possibilities to do good and necessary work.
This Advent I’ve been reading through Heaven and Nature Sing: 25 Advent Reflections to Bring Joy to the World by Hannah Anderson. Inspired by the Isaac Watts hymn, Anderson draws on her observations of the natural world to reflect on the dynamics of the Advent season. It’s quite good. Here’s a taste:
Scientifically speaking, it is quieter after a fresh snowfall. A snowflake’s six-sided crystalline structure creates small spaces–open pockets, you could say–that absorb sound waves. Because of this unique shape, snow dampens noise much the same way foam panels in a recording studio do. And the more accumulation you have, the greater the effect. In fact, some studies show up to a 60 percent reduction in sound with just a few inches. At least, at first.
As the snow crystals begin to melt, they change shape and lose their buffering properties; and as the cycle of “melt and refreeze” settles in, laying snow becomes dense. A thin crust of ice can develop which actually magnifies sound waves as they bounce off the hardened surface. What once absorbed the sound, giving the world an unexpected experience of calm, now amplifies it.
While it might surprise you, the dynamics of silence and sound are key to understanding the years between the Old Testament and the New Testament.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro