News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
I was in Phoenix last weekend for a high school graduation. It's a strange, sprawling city, but it definitely has some perks: I went to the Book Gallery, an incredible used bookstore, and took a hike up Camelback to enjoy the sunrise on my way to the airport. Not many cities have such dramatic rock islands set amid the seemingly endless urban grid.
- In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about lobsters, resilience, and scouting.
- I encouraged a class of graduating high school students to follow the Mad Farmer's advice: "In one of his most famous poems, Berry responds to our culture’s tendency to value people on the basis of their economic productivity or their consumer habits by offering counter-intuitive counsel: 'friends, every day do something / that won’t compute.'"
- Max Longley reviews Devery S. Anderson's recent book about Clyde Kennard, a black veteran who tried to enroll in Mississippi Southern College and was unjustly imprisoned by a Jim Crow jury: "Kennard himself, though worrying about his legacy during his last illness, seemed remarkably free of bitterness. Concerning a prison guard who had abused him, he thought that the abuse had harmed the guard more than himself."
- Alex Sosler describes the role that stability plays in forming our souls: "Often, when a conflict occurs in my life, I am quick to leave. If a leader makes a decision I don’t like, I’ll go someplace else. Or if that lady seems arrogant and rude, I’ll think that this isn’t the right church for me. Or those guys seem closed off and distant, so let’s get out of here. I can choose to live like that, but I’ll never stay any place long enough to truly know a people, and therefore, I can never really love anyone or receive love in return. Worse, I’ll never stay long enough to see the grace of God at work."
- Carter Johnson recalls hunting with his grandfather: "A decade later, I carried the old shotgun to Kentucky. My grandfather gave it to me inside an ancient leather case that could have emerged from the pages of a Louis L’Amour novel. He received it, along with a wind-up record player, from his great uncle, a Word War I veteran and secretary to the Pearisburg, VA congressman. It was a proper housing for the Appalachian totem."
I've been enjoying Anthony Trollope's The Warden, the first novel in Trollope's Barsetshire Towers series. It's a delightful story with some real wisdom about how to maintain one's integrity in the midst of messy, partisan politics. The Warden finds himself caught between his loyalties to his fellow clergy and his agreement with reformist critiques of corruption within stodgy church structures. Along the way, Trollope nails the dynamics of public opinion in the new newspaper age. Here's how one church official explains the necessity of not responding to the nineteenth-century equivalent of an online cancellation attempt:
Two hundred thousand readers then would hear this accusation against him; two hundred thousand hearts would swell with indignation at the griping injustice, the barefaced robbery of the warden of Barchester Hospital! And how was he to answer this? How was he to open his inmost heart to this multitude, to these thousands, the educated, the polished, the picked men of his own country; how show them that he was no robber, no avaricious, lazy priest scrambling for gold, but a retiring, humble-spirited man, who had innocently taken what had innocently been offered to him?
"Write to The Jupiter," suggested the bishop.
"Yes," said the archdeacon, more worldly wise than his father, "yes, and be smothered with ridicule; tossed over and over again with scorn; shaken this way and that, as a rat in the mouth of a practised terrier. You will leave out some word or letter in your answer, and the ignorance of the cathedral clergy will be harped upon; you will make some small mistake, which will be a falsehood, or some admission, which will be self-condemnation; you will find yourself to have been vulgar, ill-tempered, irreverend, and illiterate, and the chances are ten to one, but that being a clergyman, you will have been guilty of blasphemy! A man may have the best of causes, the best of talents, and the best of tempers; he may write as well as Addison, or as strongly as Junius; but even with all this he cannot successfully answer, when attacked by The Jupiter. In such matters it is omnipotent. What the Czar is in Russia, or the mob in America, that The Jupiter is in England. Answer such an article! No, warden; whatever you do, don't do that. We were to look for this sort of thing, you know; but we need not draw down on our heads more of it than is necessary."
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro