News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
We’re back in snowy Pennsylvania after a few days of hiking around Joshua Tree National Park. The plants and rock formations in the Mojave desert are bizarre and beautiful.
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In this week’s Water Dipper I recommend essays about AP classes, vertical farming, and surf localism.
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T. David Gordon draws on the insights of media ecologists to consider the differences between word and image: “The God of the Bible (and his servants) prized language above other available media, and we would do well to respect that choice even as we are awash in image-based media.”
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Ethan Mannon shares some of the history behind his culinary convictions: “At all hours of the day and night in the Mannon house, you’ll find butter in its designated dish on the dinner table and cornmeal in the fridge. I hold strong beliefs about these two points of culinary geography.”
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Elizabeth Stice responds to the recent controversies over education in Florida and advocates a consistent decentralized approach to such decisions: “We do not need crusades for or against ‘wokeness’—we need people to read actual legislation and weigh in on it. We do not need centralized authorities to make sweeping, political decisions about classrooms and curriculum. We need engaged communities and parents and subject matter experts.”
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Matthew Chominski reviews Wright Thompson’s Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things that Last and ponders its lessons: “While we can’t forever capture in amber all that passes through time, what we can do is hope for the Resurrection and leave mementos of ourselves for those that follow.”
I recently read Iris Murdoch’s fascinating novel The Nice and the Good. Among other things, Murdoch suggests that a desire to appear good to ourselves may be just as, if not more, important a motive as our desire to actually be good. And this egotistical orientation toward goodness can warp our lives and relations in all manner of ways. Despite such conflicted and self-interested motives, flickers of genuine love run through the novel:.
It seemed now to Ducane that his thoughts had been, already for a long time, turning to Mary, running to her instinctively like animals, like children. The moment had been important when he had thought about her, We are under the same orders. But he had known, long before he had formulated it clearly, that she was like him, morally like in some way that was important. Her mode of being gave him a moral, even a metaphysical, confidence in the world, in the reality of goodness. No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base. But it is in the nature of love to discern good, and the best love is, in some part at any rate, a love of what is good.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro