News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
It's been a busy week at FPR! Without further ado, here's what you may have missed.
FPR Books has just released Will Hoyt's The Seven Ranges: Ground Zero for the Staging of America. James Howard Kunstler commends it warmly: “This is deep, lyrical environmental prose on a level with Thoreau and Wendell Berry, encompassing a spiritual history of our wild sojourn in North America. In a time of epic national turmoil, Mr. Hoyt’s meditations on our homeland literally ground us as so much in culture, politics, and economy is swept away.” We'll be posting an excerpt from the book in the coming weeks, but you can order your copy now.
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In my weekly Water Dipper, I recommend essays about local news, conservative environmentalism, farmers in India, and more.
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Gretel Van Wieren describes how allowing her son to adopt two lambs taught their family about the reality of our dependence. Despite the challenges these two additions to the family brought, she now aspires "to be more lamby-like, as Carl would say---to think like a lamb."
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Barbara Castle reviews Minari, which recently won a Golden Globe award, and praises its portrayal of "hillbilly grace."
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Michael Sauter profiles--and interviews--the wide-ranging, provocative intellectual Guido Preparata. As he concludes, "Surrounded by lies, it’s high-time we started telling another story. Preparata’s work is seminal in that grand undertaking."
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A new anthology of essays on Christian Platonism prompts James Clark to reflect on the enduring value of this tradition: "Christian Platonism’s affirmation that we are spiritual beings who will outlive this current life, in one manner or another, lends us powerful impetus to reconsider what it means to spend life here and now in a worthwhile fashion."
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Jesse Russell reviews Martin Scorsese's The Irishman and shows how the Church provides a sacramental and moral framework in this film.
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Cultural Debris has a new episode out this week. Alan talked with Holly Ordway about her book Tolkien’s Modern Reading: Middle-earth Beyond the Middle Ages.
What's on the docket for the coming week? A review of a collection of letters between John Médaille and Thomas Storck, an essay reflecting on the relevance of Pier Paolo Pasolini's Lutheran Letters, a strategy for third parties, and our first review of Gracy Olmstead's new book.
A.E. Stallings published a new poem this week about walking through the Piraeus Archaeological Museum during coronatide. Its title, "Deictic," gestures toward one of the poem's central themes: so much meaning depends upon our local, temporal context. In her typically brilliant prosody, Stallings portrays the museum's exhibits and explores how these old artifacts resonate today. Here are a couple of stanzas, but do read the whole poem:
Here are the measurements of man:
The cubit, foot, the palm, the span,
Carved standards in the marketplace,
To keep those honest who would cheat;
Inscription on the price of meat,
Or offal—tripe, brain, liver, lung.All grave markers, this room. We start
With these two hoplites. Brothers? Young,
One looks just past us, one afar,
They’re eager for adventure, war,
With cloak and sandals, shield and sword.
My son, now close to their age, bored,Sinks on a bench, tired of all this—
The world’s contagious, after all.