News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
We've been enjoying lots of fresh garden produce--yellow squash, tomatoes, green beans, broccoli, cucumbers. Nothing beats truly fresh vegetables, and as we were moving last summer and unable to grow a garden, we are appreciating them all the more this year.
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In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays on Illich, finitude, and authority.
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Tara Ann Thieke takes stock of the possibilities Dobbs creates for dialogue: "Dobbs offers a crack in the ceiling of this technocratic hegemony and makes possible a renewal of self-determination as community-based work. It also offers a chance for people who dream of a world after liberalism, of a world based less on fear than on love, an opportunity to meet the alienated with a renewed vision."
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Deborah Bowen reviews George Willcox Brown’s book A Catechism of Nature. Brown observes that “[l]ess and less in our time and place do we hear the most primordial of God’s words—the song, one might say, of creation’s fundamental realities”; “[w]e have lost the ability to speak and understand the language of creation.” Where might we look for a remedy to this hearing loss?
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Daniel Ray invites us to ask what most amazes us: the technological marvel of the Webb telescope, or the cosmic wonders it makes visible? " For all the enhanced resolution of our universe Webb brings, for all the material analysis this new device supplies to scientists’ burgeoning cosmic databases, informing the denizens of Earth just what the universe is made of, NASA is not one whit closer to explaining what the universe actually is."
I recently had the chance to read Noah Toly’s The Gardeners’ Dirty Hands: Environmental Politics and Christian Ethics. It’s a slim volume dense with insight and sanity. Toly’s articulation of the tragic leads him to argue for a Christian approach to environmental policy. In one of the most interesting sections of the book, he draws on Dietrich Bonhoeffer to argue for a cruciform approach to these difficult decisions:
Justification by the work of Jesus Christ, alone, not only frees the Christian from the demands of self-justification, but also frees them for a pattern of vicarious representative action on behalf of others, frees them to be there for others. While the pursuit of self-justification in the face of a plurality of options for responding to the tragic is a futile search for the one best way to act in the face of a multitude of options and a bondage to the logic of necessity that turns our lives in on themselves, Christ’s work sets us free not only from that bondage but for the purpose of being for others. It sets us free to embrace being for—and being there for—others. In this way, the tragic can indeed structure a life of discipleship, as [Albino] Barrera suggests, but a life of discipleship in the face of the tragic is not merely one in which we follow after the choice and creativity of our God, but it is a life of costly discipleship in which we both fulfill our human vocations and imitate Christ by bearing burdens so that others, including nonhuman creation, may flourish.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro