Greetings from the Porch,

The Russell Kirk Center is hosting a conference on September 26 in Grand Rapids, MI. Jeff Polet and several friends of the Porch will be there to, according to the official description, "explore how the principles of ordered liberty, moral imagination, and constitutional self-government can renew American public life." All the details are here.

• In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about Dickinson, Texas, and Petrarch.

• Teddy Macker voices a strident pitch for AI snake oil: "Silicon Svengali’s Artificial Intelligence Alleviates Unwanted Body Smells, Climate Change Concern, and Every Species of Pestiferous Work Attachment! Say Goodbye to the Burden of the Free Exercise of the Moral Sense!"

• Joseph Palange reports on the gritty realities--good and bad--of life on a concrete crew: "I don’t expect elite ideologues to get it, I just wish they’d stop flattening the problems of the working class into neat stories that serve their political projects."

• Stephen Adubato details the need for a local approach to political challenges in Newark: "Papal warnings about over-centralization shed light on the trajectory of the politics of Newark, New Jersey."

• Colin Gillett praises his son's efforts to enter adulthood without leaving his place behind: "In a culture that measures a young person’s success by the velocity with which they escape their hometown, I found myself questioning the script."

• Matt Morrison contemplates what is lost when we replace humans with machines: "Unlike replacement, diminishment happens in a thousand different ways."

• Michial Farmer listens to songs about anxiety this week.

I tend to avoid the public discourse around evangelicalism. Almost always it devolves into partisan polemic that trades in broad generalizations. But Bonnie Kristian’s In Defense of Evangelicalism: In Response to its Cultured Despisers clears the terrain of strawmen deftly and evinces commendable nuance, generosity, and rigor. Part of the reason for this is that she rightly refuses to make electoral politics central to this tradition:

The great bulk of ordinary evangelical life has nothing to do with politics. It’s about family, work, charity, church. . . . [So I do not] want to concede the ahistorical and ridiculous claim that evangelicalism is the worst of this country and chiefly to be blamed for its political polarization and animosity. Insofar as the hypocrisy accusation lands, the response for evangelicals is more evangelicalism. More Bible. More discipleship. More prayer. More church.

As New York Times columnist Ross Douthat presciently warned a decade ago, you don’t want a post-religious right. You don’t want this large bloc of conservatively inclined Americans to be less interested in ethics and answerability to God. That will not make for better politics by any measure. It will not make for greater pursuit of racial justice.

Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,

Jeff Bilbro