News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
We’re getting ready to gather today at Grove City College for our first conference since 2019, when we were in Louisville where Wendell and Mary Berry spoke. It promises to be a great day of talks, conversation, and conviviality! I look forward to seeing many of you there.
-
In this week’s Water Dipper, I recommend essays on Lippmann, property, and swamp people.
-
Will Lyon commends the publication Mortise & Tenon. Through their celebration of skilled woodworking, “they help us imagine how we can all learn a craft and gain the competence needed to pursue a more convivial life.”
-
Matt Stewart asks Carl Trueman a series of questions about prudent cultural engagement, gender, and the Metaverse: “Most people I have spoken to know that the wider cultural context is beyond their power to reshape. To focus on the local is thus both liberating, as it removes an impossibly heavy burden, and realistic.”
-
Ryan Davis reflects on what it might take to see where we are: “This world has not changed. It still endures and shines, as when I was a boy, attuned to the sheer enormity of life overflowing and flooding everywhere I stepped. I have changed — without lasting roots, the rich soil of youth erodes under pride’s relentless pull on my heart.”
-
Alan Cornett talks with Jason M. Baxter about his new book, The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis. They discuss the C.S. Lewis few ever talk about, the dangers of presentism, and how the medievals aren’t at all like the common stereotypes.
Since Chris Arnade is giving the conference keynote today, I thought I’d conclude this newsletter with one of my favorite paragraphs from Dignity:
On the streets, few can delude themselves into thinking they have it under control. You cannot ignore death there, and you cannot ignore human fallibility. It is easier to see that everyone is a sinner, everyone is fallible, and everyone is mortal. It is easier to see that there are things just too deep, too important, or too great for us to know. It is far easier to recognize that one must come to peace with the idea that we don’t and never will have this under control. It is far easier to see religion not just as useful, but as true.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro