News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
The University of Notre Dame Press has once again put together a virtual book table for our fall conference (including a 40% off discount coupon). So if you aren't able to join us in person next weekend (where Notre Dame's press director will be with us along with representatives and book tables from Baker Books and Plough), you can find some solace in good books at a good price.
- In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about Berry, MacIntyre, and screens.
- Geoffrey Kurtz thinks through Ryan R. Holston's arguments in Tradition and the Deliberative Turn: A Critique of Contemporary Democratic Theory and considers how we might recover the possibility of deliberating together: "If there is some truth in Holston’s claim that life in community makes meaningful democracy possible, it may also be true, especially for citizens of a polity as vast as the United States, that only when we engage in those aspects of democratic life that can still happen on a human scale will we understand our most important commonalities."
- Ben Woollard speaks a word on behalf of silence: "To find these deeper wells of silence, however, we must seek them out, whether in the woods or the deserts of our own shut doors."
- Jeffrey Howard describes his process of coming to know and inhabit a place in southern Appalachia: "I want 'Appalachian' to be as inclusive a term as possible, without losing its geographical anchor and its fructifying localism. There are many paths up the mountain, so to speak. The important part is that you are laboring up that mountain with the rest of your Appalachian neighbors."
- Tony Woodlief responds to Timothy Patitsas’s The Ethics of Beauty and considers how we might revalue beauty: "We are formed for beauty, but can our vision become so clouded that beauty no longer breaks in? Perhaps we’ll see. For now, all you and I can do is cultivate our capacity to make and receive good art."
- Kate Dalton reviews Matt Walsh's new film Am I Racist? and wrestles with the moral ambiguities of Walsh's methods: "I still say you should see this movie. If you do, you may ask yourself, as I did, will it change any minds? Maybe not. But maybe so. Maybe it is useful to anyone who has been bullied silent or shouted down by DEI to see someone laughing at arguments that continue to have a good deal of social power."
Some friends and I have been reading through Lee Gatiss's modernized edition of The First Book of Homilies: The Church of England's Official Sermons in Modern English, and the twelfth homily on strife and contention has some real wisdom regarding civility, the theme for next week's FPR conference. Interestingly, the homily makes several appeals to pagan authors and argues that if non-Christians understand the need to avoid contention, how much more should Christians exercise prudence. And the sermon writer has a pretty good rule of thumb for when and how you should engage in argument:
Is there a hope of remedying argumentativeness, by answering argumentative people with argumentativeness? If so, it would be less offensive to answer in that way, not from anger or malice but only in order to reform the one who is so argumentative or malicious. But if one cannot amend someone else's fault, or cannot amend it without a fault of your own, it is better that one should perish than two. If you cannot quiet them with gentle words, at least do not follow them in wicked and uncharitable words. If you can pacify them with suffering, then suffer; and if not, it is better to suffer evil than to do evil, to speak well than to speak evil. For to speak well against evil comes from the Spirit of God, but to render evil for evil comes from the opposite spirit.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro