News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
We had a great conference in Grand Rapids last weekend. Thanks to all who made the effort to join us. I reflected briefly on the gathering, and if you want to weigh in on future conferences, we'd welcome your ideas.
- In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays on children, pawpaws, and ticks.
- Alisa Ruddell draws on Ivan Illich to imagine how we might begin healing our culture's gender confusion: "Belonging to one another in a gendered way will necessarily involve belonging to a particular place and to the people nearby, because gender is a homespun cloth cut to suit, not a one-size-fits-all abstraction."
- Michial Farmer ponders the value of a home library as he unpacks his books in a new home: "Maybe, in the end, a home library does what a long-inhabited home does: charts a middle ground between the chaos of the world and the hyper-rationality of modernity."
- Nadya Williams responds to recent stories about the decline in reading by recommending one simple fix--home libraries: "It is a reality not frequently enough acknowledged: like so many other things in life, the love of reading is caught, not taught."
- Aaron Weinacht reviews Musa al-Gharbi's new book that is making quite the splash: "The core of We Have Never Been Woke is persuasive, and it's hard not to see his thesis in operation in all kinds of fields, once you look at the world his way."
- Joshua Hren offers a taste of his new novel, Blue Walls Falling Down: "The gaining of leaves was also a loss. Always celebrated as the end of cabin fever, spring put a stop to the art of survival—the little rituals she and Dad developed—and demanded more than distant waves to neighbors jutting from cars to doors."
I always enjoy reading Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie with my students. It's not a brilliant novel, but it is quite good, and it's unjustly neglected. If you're interested in nineteenth-century American efforts to imagine the Puritans as the forerunners to American democracy and culture, give it a read:
Never was a name more befitting the condition of a people, than 'Pilgrim' that of our forefathers. It should be redeemed from the puritanical and ludicrous associations which have degraded it, in most men's minds, and be hallowed by the sacrifices made by these voluntary exiles. They were pilgrims, for they had resigned, for ever, what the good hold most dear—their homes. Home can never be transferred; never repeated in the experience of an individual. The place consecrated by parental love, by the innocence and sports of childhood, by the first acquaintance with nature; by the linking of the heart to the visible creation, is the only home. There there is a living and breathing spirit infused into nature: every familiar object has a history—the trees have tongues, and the very air is vocal. There the vesture of decay doth not close in and control the noble functions of the soul. It sees and hears and enjoys without the ministry of gross material substance.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro