News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
This week we announced the keynote speaker for our fall conference and opened up registration. Please make plans to join us in Murfreesboro, TN!
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In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays about loneliness, superweeds, and the anxieties of college students.
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Emily G. Wenneborg calls us to "pursue technological innovations that work alongside our bodies, remedying our physical limitations not for the purpose of forgetting that we are creatures, but in order to enable us to more readily fulfill our callings and serve one another."
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Amanda Patchin reviews Suzanne Simard's book on trees and forest interconnections. She concludes, "Simard’s book is less folksy and yet more personal than Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees. Its wealth of research detail and its investigative drive root it in reality while still offering the imagination room for exploration."
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Barbara Castle reflects on the new film The Green Knight and probes its counter-cultural themes.
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Alan Cornett released a new Cultural Debris podcast with Alberto Miguel Fernandez. Fernandez has led a fascinating life, and their conversation covers a lot of ground--literally and metaphorically.
This week, for obvious and tragic reasons, I've had occasion to recall Wendell Berry's 2002 essay "A Citizen's Response to the National Security Strategy." It's worth re-reading in full. I will quote here merely the concluding paragraphs:
It is useless to try to adjudicate a long-standing animosity by asking who started it or who is the most wrong. The only sufficient answer is to give up the animosity and try forgiveness, to try to love our enemies and to talk to them and (if we pray) to pray for them. If we can’t do any of that, then we must begin again by trying to imagine our enemies’ children who, like our children, are in mortal danger because of enmity that they did not cause.
We can no longer afford to confuse peaceability with passivity. Authentic peace is no more passive than war. Like war, it calls for discipline and intelligence and strength of character, though it calls also for higher principles and aims. If we are serious about peace, then we must work for it as ardently, seriously, continuously, carefully, and bravely as we now prepare for war.