News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
An update on my maple syrup adventures: my jerry-rigged evaporator setup is inefficient and slow, but the results are delicious.
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In this week's Water Dipper I recommend pieces on soil, friendship, and laughter.
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Christian McNamara warns about the dangers of obsessing over Harvard and other Ivy League schools: "It is not because I bear Harvard any ill will that I wish we could all just shut up about it already. Rather, I am concerned that our national obsession with elite colleges is making many of us miserable, while at the same time distracting us from parts of the higher education landscape that are deserving of more attention."
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Matt Miller ponders the uses and abuses of nature writing and considers an exemplary instance of the genre: " Perhaps this, above all, is the work of nature writing: to bring the wild and the domestic together and to reveal the mystery at the heart of both. That Springer’s book consistently does this is enough to commend it as a constructive entry in this vexed genre."
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Matthew Milliner reflects on a visit to Athos and the nature of Orthodox iconography: " I have Orthodox friends that find our little chapel concerning, and they are certainly right that a casual use of icons for decorative enhancement is to be avoided. Still, their chief complaint should be directed to the monks of Mount Athos who, infused with God’s flagrant generosity, so recklessly gave their replica icons away."
The title essay of Wendell Berry's Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community is probably the place where he most explicitly defines the nature of community. It's an interesting essay to revisit now, some thirty years after it was written, as the dynamics of "cancel culture" bear out his warnings regarding the consequences being trapped between public and private life without the mediating layers of community:
The life of a community is more vulnerable than public life. A community cannot be made or preserved apart from the loyalty and affection of its members and the respect and goodwill of the people outside it. And for a long time, these conditions have not been met. As the technological, economic, and political means of exploitation have expanded, communities have been more and more victimized by opportunists outside themselves. And as the salesmen, saleswomen, advertisers, and propagandists of the industrial economy have become more ubiquitous and more adept at seduction, communities have lost the loyalty and affection of their members. The community, wherever you look is being destroyed by the desires and ambitions of both private and public life, which for want of the intervention of community interests are also destroying one another. Community life is by definition a life of cooperation and responsibility. Private life and public life, without the disciplines of community interest, necessarily gravitate toward competition and exploitation. As private life casts off all community restraints in the interest of economic exploitation or ambition or self-realization or whatever, the communal supports of public life also and by the same stroke are undercut, and public life becomes simply the arena of unrestrained private ambition and greed.