News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
For those of you thinking of coming to Grand Rapids this October for the FPR conference, I have two quick notes. First, the block of discounted hotel rooms we've set aside will expire on Monday, so you should book a room this weekend if you want one. Second, the Ford Presidential Foundation is hosting our Friday evening conversation with Ross Douthat, and seating there may fill up. To claim your seat, register soon for the FPR conference and fill out the additional form to set aside your seat for the Friday evening event. It's shaping up to be a great weekend!
- In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about contaminated farms, individualism, and art.
- Michial Farmer unpacks the view of human-animal relations in Kipling's imagination: "Rudyard Kipling’s 1902 Just So Stories are a delightful anomaly—they feel like folk tales but were largely invented by Kipling himself as bedtime stories for his eldest daughter, Josephine."
- Nora Kenney defends the distinctive, local character of a small Michigan town against the threat of new zoning laws: "America is known for its English-Protestant roots, for the pilgrims who settled the Eastern seaboard and the Anglos who descended from them. But America has a French-Catholic history, too, and Northern Michigan is a central location in that history."
- Rachel Griffis reviews Sabrina Little's new book on how the discipline of running relates to the formation of virtues: "As she engages ultimate questions about human life, Little models the pursuit of virtue and the concomitant wrestling with vice involved in this pursuit."
- Bradyn Strawser responds to White Rural Rage and recommends that Americans of all stripes reject the politics of resentment: "Despite Trump’s own divisive rhetoric, he makes rural Americans feel heard in ways neither majority party has in decades. Any politician or scholar who actually wants to address the root causes of polarization needs to reckon seriously with this reality."
- Barbara Castle posits Johnny Cash as a modern-day scop: "Cash may as well be situated in an Anglo-Saxon mead hall, a broken ring-giver, a pagan, who for all his good intentions, cannot heal that which infects his people and himself."
I recently read John Lukacs’s Short History of the Twentieth Century, which is a delightful, incisive, and sweeping history of the events between the outbreak of World War I and the end of the Cold War. Lukacs states his principles and approach to history in the opening paragraphs, and he compresses much wisdom into these few sentences:
I have devoted much of my life to asserting, teaching, and writing that “objective” and “scientific” history are inadequate desiderata; but so, too, is “subjective” history. Our historical knowledge, like nearly every kind of human knowledge, is personal and participatory, since the knower and the known, while not identical, are not and cannot be entirely separate. We do not possess truth completely. Yet pursue truth we must. So many seemingly endless and incomplete truths about the history of the twentieth century are still worth pursuing, and perhaps forever.
Now, enough of this philosophic premise. Historical knowledge, nay, understanding, depends on description rather than on definition. It consists of words and sentences that are inseparable form “facts”; they are more than the wrapping of facts. “In the beginning was the word,” and so it will be at the end of the world.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro