News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
We've posted the schedule for the October conference in Grand Rapids. In recent years, attendees have asked us to build in a bit more time for conversation, so we've tried to create some more elbow room this year for people to chat between sessions. And on Sunday afternoon, some Porchers will be heading to Mecosta to visit the Kirk Center, so you could enjoy three days of Porchy conversations!
- In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about volunteering, urban farms, and grocery stores.
- Tessa Carman reviews Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation and considers ways we might invite others to experience the delights of analog life: "Enacting the policy changes Haidt advocates doesn’t only matter for me and my children; it doesn’t only make it more possible for them to have a flourishing life less encumbered by technocratic tentacles, and for them to find real friends. It also matters for my students, and for the children in my neighborhood, my town, my county, my state, and beyond."
- Ben Christenson talks with Catherine Pakaluk about her new book, Hannah's Children, that profiles women choosing to have large families: "If what separates these women is not a fluke but a spiritual conviction, then there’s no reason to say this couldn’t spill over. Pakaluk is saying we need a revival, a Great Awakening—something America has seen before and could again."
- Randy Aust proposes ways that schools might cultivate a sacramental imagination in their students: "Christian schools and Christian educators would be wise to shift toward a more integrated and holistic approach by focusing attention in four primary areas: metaphor, memory, liturgy, and creation."
- Elizabeth Stice defends the goods provided by accessible public parks. As it happens, her essay seems to have convinced Florida to reverse course and preserve these parks: "Civil society relies on common spaces where people of all backgrounds can meet, but states and cities have been pursuing semi-privatization of public spaces."
- David Bannon delves into Sigmund Freud's response to the loss of his daughter: "In expressing his love through epistolary lament, it may be that Freud discovered the precise meaning he felt he had lost."
This summer, we had a chance to visit some of the iconic National Parks—Yellowstone, Grand Tetons, and Crater Lake. Along the way, I read Alfred Runte’s history of American parks, National Parks: The American Experience. Overall, Runte does a nice job laying out the tensions and controversies that have always accompanied the effort to set aside land, under government control, for various levels of preservation. This history also gave me the chance to revisit the religious arguments for human respect for wilderness that I wrote about in my first book, almost a decade ago now. Near the end of the book, Runte encapsulates his conclusions:
Although emotionally he wished it otherwise, Muir had honestly read the history. Civilization is the problem parks solve. The point they clarify—the point of having them—is that civilization is here to stay. It makes no difference what might have happened had civilization not evolved. It did evolve—and today with a population of 7 billion people reaching into every corner of the earth. That every country is still exploiting wilderness disproves what might have been. No doubt, the establishment of parks is artificial when the greater landscape is ignored. The people directly affected by the loss of lands and opportunities also become casualties of the process. The point is that the world has lost the luxury of preserving nature as if 7 billion people did not exist. No highway, dam, or airport indulges individuals, and the enormity of those displacements the world accepts. Without reserving a similar claim for nature, little in nature would be secure.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro