News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
We had an ice cream social this week for our neighborhood, and it was great to spend an evening hanging out with the people who live on our block. I was reminded of the essay that Christian McNamara wrote a few years ago on the importance of these sorts of gatherings, as well as the need to not stop here in our efforts to foster genuine community.
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In this week’s Water Dipper, I recommend essays on property, work, and hillbilly Thomists.
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Scot Martin invites us to step out of our front doors and stroll through our neighborhoods with an eye toward getting acquainted with our many plant neighbors.
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Douglas Fox meditates on how we might act in accordance with the truth: “Do I know by pruning the tree, picking the apples, and eating them? Perhaps, Pickstock proposes, truth is what we find when we act in the world. Our true condition is that we are beings who pick apples and prune trees.”
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Elizabeth Stice celebrates the central role that family and relationships have played in Serena Williams’s remarkable career: “Venus’s love for her sister, and Serena’s recognition of it, has also shown us the transcendent power of family, the possibility of forgetting the accolades and the worldly recognition and the desire for advantage and finding instead deeper connections and possibilities of love.”
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Michial Farmer honors the life and writing of Frederick Buechner, a man who strove to bear faithful witness to a fraught world: “This is not an easy faith that Buechner describes; it is a faith forged in the blast-furnace crucible of Ivan Karamazov. One of the most appealing parts of reading Buechner is the clear respect he has for skeptics and doubters and other unbelievers. At times he seems to wish he could not believe—but the quiet, insistent cough of grace in his life draws him back. In the one or two major crises of faith I’ve been through in my adult life, Buechner was always there to comfort me; no doubt he has also been there to comfort those who never heard the gutturals and sibilants of faith again.”
I had a great conversation with some students in an independent study this week about the delightful G.K. Chesterton. We spent some time on his essay “On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family,” which makes a very Porchy argument:
There is one advantage, however, in the small state, the city, or the village, which only the wilfully blind can overlook. The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive and highly civilized societies groups come into existence founded upon what is called sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing which is really narrow is the clique. The men of the clan live together because they all wear the same tartan or are all descended from the same sacred cow; but in their souls, by the divine luck of things, there will always be more colours than in any tartan. But the men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment, like that which exists in hell. A big society exists in order to form cliques. A big society is a society for the promotion of narrowness. It is a machinery for the purpose of guarding the solitary and sensitive individual from all experience of the bitter and bracing human compromises. It is, in the most literal sense of the words, a society for the prevention of Christian knowledge.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro