News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
Winter weather has arrived in western Pennsylvania, just in time for Thanksgiving. I’m grateful that we’re just south of the snow belt, so we aren’t getting the accumulations that folks up in Buffalo are.
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In this week’s Water Dipper I recommend essays and talks on Dorothy Day, humility, and Ed McClanahan.
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Joshua P. Hochschild puts Wendell Berry’s new book in conversation with Willie Jennings, Eddie Glaude Jr., and Augustine to articulate the quest at the heart of Berry’s book: “What to call the problem is itself part of the problem. That impulse which instrumentalizes and exploits, dehumanizes and oppresses, alienates and effaces. Is it the technocratic mentality? The Enlightenment legacy? Is it rationalism or nominalism or gnosticism? Is it capitalism or liberalism or colonialism? The will to power? Is it ‘whiteness’?”
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Nadya Williams reflects on what chasing a toddler might teach us about human aspirations: “It is a terrifying responsibility every single day, for a preschooler’s capacity to find ever creative ways to put herself in danger does not always match up with the parent’s ability to foresee said dangers. And yet, without the wonder of exploration, how could anyone ever truly learn about the world?”
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Tessa Carman celebrates the kinds of community we can enjoy when we make common cause with others intent on living well in a technological age: “Of course, it was not a shared passion for near-vintage technology, like typewriters or cream separators, that had brought us together. No—this woman was a kindred spirit because she and I had both made a similar decision contra the zeitgeist: we’d chosen the limits of a dumb phone, and we’d chosen the discipline of dancing with our family.”
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Elizabeth Stice pieces together some of the factors contributing to the anxiety and depression that weigh heavily on today’s young people: “Why are so many of Uncle Sam’s children so miserable? What is going on? The reasons are one part mystery and one part well-known. It is worth reflecting on them.”
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John Murdock introduces the audio recording of the first session from our fall conference. Carl Trueman, Gregory Hogg, and Charlie Cotherman discuss the state of the church “after virtual.”
I always enjoy reading and teaching Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Twain’s narrator inadvertently manages to reveal some of the deep-seated assumptions and flaws of nineteenth-century American imperialism and techno-optimism, assumptions which of course persist in different forms today. But he’s also a riot. For instance, he rightly notes that Raphael’s painting of the miracle of the fishes has a rather unseaworthy pair of boats:
Here, even in my grand room of state, there wasn’t anything in the nature of a picture except a thing the size of a bedquilt, which was either woven or knitted (it had darned places in it), and nothing in it was the right color or the right shape; and as for proportions, even Raphael himself couldn’t have botched them more formidably, after all his practice on those nightmares they call his “celebrated Hampton Court cartoons.” Raphael was a bird. We had several of his chromos; one was his “Miraculous Draught of Fishes,” where he puts in a miracle of his own—puts three men into a canoe which wouldn’t have held a dog without upsetting. I always admired to study R.’s art, it was so fresh and unconventional.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro