Greetings from the Porch,

In our neighborhood, Halloween presents a good opportunity to see many of our neighbors, and the weather cooperated this year, which made socializing outside a more pleasant experience than it can often be in October.

• In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays about McGuane, MAHA, and DoorDash.

• Andrew Black considers the value of a literary canon and reflects on how a canon might help us teach The Great Gatsby well: "The real work of judgment makes possible stability and repair, a work worth even one’s death, or, what may prove more difficult, a lifetime of obscure fidelity."

• Matt Stewart talks with Brad Littlejohn about his new book on freedom: "'freedom' is to our moral world like 'health' is to our physical well-being, and just as one person’s health can be threatened by too little food and another’s by too much, so freedom can be threatened from many different directions, indeed sometimes completely opposite directions. Depending on where the most urgent threat lies in a given time and place, a different sense of 'freedom' comes to the fore as a priority to defend."

• Hakan Altinay argues that we need to recover a language to name our responsibilities: "Many are quick to posit that we have a wide range of rights, yet we are almost tongue-tied about our responsibilities."

• Joseph Hudson reviews a recent book on transhumanism and outlines a humane vision of technology: "Technology may assist the surgeon, illuminate the astronomer’s field, or console a mother in her sorrow. Yet it cannot give the soul the perfection it longs for."

• Raleigh Adams commends Paul Krause's new book and reflects on the importance of beauty in guiding our souls: "At its best, Krause’s writing reminds us that poetry is not a luxury but a vital mode of human knowing, one that can re-enchant our disenchanted age and direct us once again toward the Good, the True, and the Beautiful."

• Michial Farmer listens to a saturated genre this week: break-up songs.

William Temple’s succinct classic Christianity and Social Order is a fascinating effort to think through political and economic questions from the Anglican tradition. He’s writing in the 1940s, and his reflections on the underlying questions regarding what authority the church has to speak to these social issues is quite good. Here’s a snippet from his discussion of economics and, particularly, how the ancient prohibition on usury might apply today:

The Mosaic Law forbade usury. But (1) what was chiefly in mind in that primitive community was the exploitation of the needy; ‘the lending of business capital on terms offering good chances of repayment was not in question’; (2) the Mosaic prohibition of usury only affects loans to a brother-Israelite; within Israel the prohibition was absolute, but between an Israelite and a Gentile it was permitted. (Incidentally, it was this last consideration, coupled with the prohibition of usury to Christians and the exclusion of Jews from many occupations, which turned the Jews into the moneylenders of Europe.)

Now the Church was always in difficulties about this prohibition. What it was quite clear about was the sinfulness of avarice. In the conditions of any period before about 1300 A.D. a suitable rough and ready test was to ask whether the principal was safe; if it was, interest ought not to be charged. To share profits as partners in an enterprise was legitimate; to share profits where risks also had to be shared was legitimate. But to make barren money breed by merely lending it at interest without risk of its loss was not legitimate. The system of debentures is of all things the most opposed to earlier medieval teaching.

Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,

Jeff Bilbro