News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
On Friday afternoon we had the opportunity to gather with a group of Grove City students in a local orchard for cider, baked goods, and autumn poems. That's a good way to wrap up a fall week in my book.
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In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays about biopolitics, cosmopolitanism, and good work.
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Henry George wades into the debates around postliberalism via a thoughtful review of Matthew Rose's A World After Liberalism. George concludes that "if we wish to make a world worth living in, one for people to live decent lives, then we should avoid the paths laid down by the philosophers Rose considers. He has done us a service in reminding us where such ideas can lead if not restrained by the reality of man’s inherent brokenness. Tragedy results when the moral realism rooted in Christianity is rejected and when we attempt to make the world over within history itself."
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Education in the age of COVID is an opportunity for teachers and students to investigate the role of language in an intense real-world situation. Rachel Griffis considers the prevalence of analogies and the troubling ways that irresponsible and unethical language is destroying civic life and communal bonds.
I'm teaching Dante's Comedy right now, and I'm struck again by the rich array of art in Purgatory. Interestingly, there doesn't seem to be art in either Hell or Heaven. But as Dante climbs through the seven terraces of Mount Purgatory, he encounters songs and images (and moving, smelling images--Dante predicts Smell-O-Vision) that condemn viscous people and honor virtuous ones. These works of art direct the pilgrims' attention and help to order their loves. But right attention is needed for the art to accomplish its intended formation. Hence in Canto five of Purgatory, Virgil upbraids Dante for being distracted and delayed by the souls pressing around him. And his injunction to fend off distractions and set his mind on his proper goal seems particularly apt today:
Come, follow me, and let these people talk:
stand like a sturdy tower that does not shake
its summit though the winds may blast; always
the man in whom thought thrusts ahead of thought
allows the goal he's set to move far off--
the force of one thought saps the others force.