News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
Plans are coming together for the fall FPR conference. We should have the conference lineup out and registration open in the next couple of weeks.
- In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about COVID, ChatGPT, and PFAS.
- David Heddendorf praises F.M. Mayor's forgotten novel on its 100th anniversary: "Perhaps this novel remains little-known because it so often rebuffs our expectations and resists our usual categories. It’s neither Victorian nor Modern, sentimental nor tough, nostalgic nor avant-garde. It doesn’t preach traditional morality, nor does it subvert it. Eloquent and nuanced, never pompous, The Rector’s Daughter sets before us the inexhaustible mystery of persons and the ways they manage to live together."
- Charles Cotherman considers how the story of Pentecost might guide our thinking about AI: "Far from pushing the Church away from embodied humanity or outsourcing the decision-making process to the efficiency of a technique, the post-Pentecost Church discovered a new way of making decisions based on God’s presence with his people through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit."
- Hans Zeiger reviews Jeffrey Rosen's The Pursuit of Happiness and commends his account of the American founders' understanding of happiness: "Rosen contends that we have lost touch with a classical understanding of happiness, in part because of a shift of cultural emphasis from 'being good to feeling good.'"
- David Bannon ponders what it might mean that so many people sense the presence of their dead loved ones: "We will always feel the absence of those we have lost, loving in separation, as philosopher Thomas Attig puts it. I often tell fellow mourners that we have a new relationship with our dead. They are with us still, their presence deeply felt."
I've read Marilynne Robinson's Gilead series, yet I hadn't gotten to Housekeeping until this spring. It's a very different novel, but Robinson's poetic prose and keen insights into the whys and wherefores of making a home made it a delightful and rewarding read. The narrator hopes, against all the evidence of her life, that one day some divine housekeeper might make an order out of her life's detritus:
Ascension seemed at such times a natural law. If one added to it a law of completion---that everything must finally be made comprehensible---then some general rescue of the sort I imagined my aunt to have undertaken would be inevitable. For why do our thoughts turn to some gesture of a hand, the fall of a sleeve, some corner of a room on a particular anonymous afternoon, even when we are asleep, and even when we are so old that our thoughts have abandoned other business? What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro