News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
We’ve got a date, location, and keynote speaker lined up for our 2023 conference. Make plans to join us. And if you’re interested in hosting a local gathering with other FPR readers in the meantime, let me know.
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In this week’s Water Dipper, I recommend essays on scale, science, and polarization.
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Joseph Wiebe retraces Andy Catlett’s steps through San Francisco as recorded in Wendell Berry’s Remembering. Wiebe’s moving account of his journey toward wholeness interweaves with Andy’s journey toward membership: “The story is about Andy’s integration. Not just how he learns to meaningfully participate in his agricultural community after the loss of his dominant hand but how he learns to accept his fears, anger, and insecurities.”
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Robb Greene celebrates camaraderie among drivers who exchange signals and warnings: “Driving a car is, paradoxically, one of the few acts where autonomy and unchosen obligation are held in some degree of harmony. The complete agency one has in being the sole CPU of two tons of steel requires something of us—attention, accountability, connection, grace. We exercise those virtues to our passengers, our community, pedestrians, the road, and our fellow drivers.”
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David Eisenberg weighs the role of the judicial branch in maintaining a healthy democracy: “A court decision that returns to the people the power to decide the pressing questions of the day could be considered fatal to democracy only in an age as Orwellian as this one, when doublethink routinely masquerades as rational thought.”
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Douglas R. Fox commends Halloween’s possibilities for fostering the common good: “The spirit of community that arises from festivals such as Halloween is a common good. I suggest that it is also a great time to practice the virtues of shared deliberation at all levels—from organizing in the residence hall floor and the classroom, to planning activities at the town’s community center. Doing so we will grow in the virtues on a personal level.”
Josef Pieper’s slim book Abuse of Language—Abuse of Power contains many insightful gems. There’s much to ponder here, not least of which is his account of how the ideal of the university or academy should function to remind a society of how to practice truth-seeking and truth-telling:
The term academic expresses something that remained unchanged throughout the centuries, something that can be identified quite accurately. It means that in the midst of society there is expressly reserved an area of truth, a sheltered space for the autonomous study of reality, where it is possible, without restrictions, to examine, investigate, discuss, and express what is true about any thing—a space, then, explicitly protected against all potential special interests and invading influences, where hidden agendas have no place, be they collective or private, political, economic, or ideological. At this time in history we have been made aware amply, and forcefully as well, what consequences ensue when a society does or does not provide such a “refuge.” Clearly, this is indeed a matter of freedom—not the whole of freedom, to be sure, yet an essential and indispensable dimension of freedom. Limitations and restrictions imposed from the outside are intolerable enough; it is even more depressing for the human spirit when it is made impossible to express and share, that is, to declare publicly, what according to one’s best knowledge and clear conscience is the truth about things.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro