News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
I’m grateful to Sarah Soltis, Doug Sikkema, and Matt Stewart for keeping the lights on at FPR while I enjoyed a month offline. Lots of good essays came out while I was away, and I particularly enjoyed listening to John Murdock’s podcast conversation with Katharine Hayhoe. On Monday, I’ll publish an essay reflecting a bit on the Wendell Berry conference we attended in Wales last month, so I’ll let that suffice for a window into how my time away went.
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In this week’s Water Dipper, I recommend essays on seeds, reality, and eucatastrophe.
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Joshua May reflects on the cemetery in Cheektowaga, NY where his immigrant grandparents are buried, and he compares his ancestors’ journey to America with his own migrations since leaving home for college: “A cemetery says this place means something. This place, and no other, is where we will lay Uncle John and Grandma Dorothy. To tend a cemetery is to affirm the value of place and the wisdom of stability.”
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Jeremy Johnston reviews C.R. Wiley’s book on the mysterious Tom Bombadil. Whatever else he is, Bombadil is the means of effecting at least two eucatastrophes: “His appearance is unexpected yet timely; what could have been a tragic ending–the death of the hobbits and the failure of the quest–is not only avoided but happily and joyfully thwarted by Tom Bombadil.”
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Brad East commends St. Ignatius as a guide to Christians weighing how to wisely engage political debates: “Imagine if, beneath and behind Christian arguments about the common good, stood the Ignatius Option. Following St. Ignatius, following St. Paul, following Jesus, churches would know that while winning is worthwhile, it isn’t everything.”
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Alan Cornett talks with Greg Hillis about Thomas Merton. Among other things, they discuss Merton’s connections with the broader network of Kentucky authors.
During our travels, I had the opportunity to read Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers. Trollope is a delightful narrator, and he weaves a good story full of social, psychological, and religious insight. One of the central conflicts in the novel is between new and old liturgical fashions, and Trollope voices the views of these reformers with wry commentary:
A man is sufficiently condemned if it can only be shown that either in politics or religion he does not belong to some new school established within the last score of years. He may then regard himself as rubbish and expect to be carted away. A man is nothing now unless he has within him a full appreciation of the new era, an era in which it would seem that neither honesty nor truth is very desirable, but in which success is the only touchstone of merit. We must laugh at everything that is established. Let the joke be ever so bad, ever so untrue to the real principles of joking; nevertheless we must laugh—or else beware the cart. We must talk, think, and live up to the spirit of the times, and write up to it too, if that cacoethes be upon us, or else we are nought. New men and new measures, long credit and few scruples, great success or wonderful ruin, such are now the tastes of Englishmen who know how to live.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch, Jeff Bilbro