October 22, 2022

News from the Front Porch Republic

Greetings from the Porch,

If the opening editorial to the Roger Scruton issue of Local Culture whets your appetite, subscribe by the end of this weekend to get the full issue in your mailbox.

• In this week’s Water Dipper, I recommend essays on TikTok, bees, and lab-grown meat.

• Jason Peters praises Scruton as a settled person rather than as a mere academic philosopher: “This issue of Local Culture is devoted to Scruton not because he was a conservative—for by now, clearly, ‘conservative’ (like ‘liberal’) is not a reliable word—but because he was unique in this sense: he was a philosopher of no few credentials who, in the end, was not so much a philosopher as a man, a man of place and home and family and of the humanizing limitations that place and home and family impose upon the individual who, it turns out, is not ‘atomized’ or ‘loose’ but emphatically social, an I in unrelenting need of a thou—a testament to an old idea according to which it is not good that man should be alone.”

• Elizabeth Stice reviews Bonnie Kristian’s new book and commends its wisdom: “It is readable and clear. It is honest and non-partisan. It is not merely philosophical, it is practical. “

• John Murdock gives two hearty cheers for football: “If beer and football are just the modern bread and circuses of a declining empire, then these are spectacles best avoided. However, if such gridiron microcosms of the human experience can unite us with our neighbors and point us to the bigger and more real story, then football, for all its flaws, deserves a yell, maybe two.”

• Rebecca Skabelund traces the links between the medicalization of birth and the rise of rise of formula: “To acknowledge the harm that has been inflicted on uncountable human lives is to invite doubt about the underpinnings of our technologically sophisticated world. That is an uncomfortable and lonely place to be. Yet it’s necessary if humans have any hope of reclaiming their birthright at mama’s breast.”

• Alan Cornett [talks]https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2022/10/annette-kirk-from-long-island-to-mecosta/) with Annette Kirk about growing up on Long Island, her activist mother, being present in the early days of the conservative movement at William F. Buckley’s home, and later meeting Russell Kirk.

Front Porch Republic contributor David Lyle Jeffrey has a new book of poetry out, A Testament of Witnesses and Other Poems. Many of them are written in the personas of various biblical figures and probe the mysteries of prophetic speech and the demands it makes upon us. Here are two stanzas from a poem spoken by Ezekiel:

Never wish to be a prophet of the Lord. Never seek or pretend to such Appointing, for all imposters are already damned. There is no school
For prophets, just a Call. None who heed the Lord’s command much
Like what follows—sting and scorn, mocking and curses. No fool
Would choose these least of sorrows; far worse, rejection and defeat.
He who serves must truly self-efface, the words of God alone repeat

Or pantomime, as in my case, bodily contortions, awkward, long
To bear, with no response but mockery, nor respite, just the goad
Of God that if I did not bear him witness in his way I would be wrong,
Responsible for Israel’s blood and damned souls. Take another road
Than this if you wish mortal fame. God’s prophet has no choice
But following the script—no path here to ‘finding your own voice.’

Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,

Jeff Bilbro