News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
The ponds are freezing over, the snow is flying, and the dark comes early these days. At least I have plenty of final essays to read during the long winter evenings.
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Megan Fowler wrestles with the paradoxes surrounding fracking. She finds in Colin Jerolmack’s book Up to Heaven and Down to Hell a mostly good-faith effort to understand these tensions: "Jerolmack’s time in Williamsport led him to view local solutions as the best path forward in handling fracking, with some power and say returning to the people who will also have to shoulder the consequences. Reading about the time he took to understand the issues on the ground made me more willing to consider his recommendations, even if I don’t plan to join a fracking picket line."
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Teddy Macker, writing from his perspective as a parent and school administrator, wades into the fraught debate around masking school-age children. He recommends that we begin by looking the facts--the many conflicting facts--in the face: "Many years ago I learned the Iroquois called death 'The Being Without a Face.' Perhaps a more limber, more ambiguity-tolerant people might wonder if by seeking to protect ourselves from death at all costs, we’ve somehow inadvertently invited death in—into the longhouse, into the schoolhouse."
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C.R. Wiley reviews Tony Woodlief's new book on citizenship. If you do follow Woodlief's advice, you'll need a thick skin and a dogged commitment to first principles. Self-government takes time and effort, and too many people really do want to leave the driving to the experts.
This summer I had the opportunity to read Felicia Wu Song's new book Restless Devices: Recovering Personhood, Presence, and Place in the Digital Age. It's a wise and nuanced book about the way our use of digital devices can flatten personhood, scatter presence, and ultimately displace us. And it doesn't just provide a diagnosis; she also offers ideas for how individuals and communities can put these devices back on the margins of life. Here's the blurb I wrote for Song's book:
Felicia Wu Song begins with an all-too-plausible premise: that today's young people are best understood not as digital natives but rather as an indicator species. If this is the case, perhaps their rising levels of anxiety and loneliness point to a troubling toxicity in our digital ecosystem. Song's pastoral book also guides us toward ways that we can all begin the work of restoring a polluted social ecology so that we might enjoy healthier relationships with one another and with God.