News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
I had a re-creational time away from the Internet and my normal responsibilities the past few weeks. We got to spend some time with family, and I had a rich week teaching a course up in Vancouver, BC at Regent College. I also had the chance to meet a couple of Porchers in person, which is always a delight. Registrations have been coming in for our fall conference in October, and that weekend is shaping up to be a good one. Thanks to Matt Stewart, Adam Smith, and Grant Bonnett for keeping the FPR ship afloat while I was away. I'll only highlight the essays published this week, but they published plenty of good essays over the past month too.
In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about Wendell Berry, the Pioneer Fire, and Idols.
Cory Stockwell reviews Damian Ference’s Understanding the Hillbilly Thomist: The Philosophical Foundations of Flannery O’Connor’s Narrative Art: "The real artist, for both O’Connor and Ference, is one who sees and expresses gratitude for what is already there, and deals with it in such a way as to reveal aspects of it that may not be visible at first glance."
Jon D. Schaff applies Yuval Levin's American Covenant to the present political turmoil: "We cannot give into the temptation of thinking that our times are so different that basic civility must be cast aside. Once we have done that, we are lost."
David Bannon sits by his daughter's grave and reflects on the nature of a soul: "As the sun rises over the Nile or my daughter’s grave, it occurs to me that the ancient Egyptians may have been onto something. Jess lives on, her soul soars to heaven, yet she returns each day, as close as a whispered web or a patient beetle on my boots."
Russell Arben Fox remembers the life and intellectual work of political theorist Fred Dallmayr and considers how he might help us understand today's various postliberalisms and J.D. Vance: "The main reason I’m not too enthused by the prospect of hearing much about Vance’s own postliberal potentiality is simply that I think that what he says is bound to be tied up with the wrong sort of postliberalism. . . . The postliberal concerns relevant to my way of understanding of the world are rooted in philosophical arguments, rather than partisan ones."
One of the books I read, or rather re-read, this past month is Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. When I re-read a classic like this, particularly one I haven't read in fifteen or twenty years, it's interesting to see what threads stand out to me now that I completely missed on my first read. This is certainly a book that can reward many re-readings. Here's one bit of conversation from Ivan that struck me:
"I must make an admission," Ivan began. "I never could understand how it's possible to love one's neighbors. In my opinion, it is precisely one's neighbors that one cannot possibly love. Perhaps if they weren't so nigh. . . I read sometime, somewhere about 'John the Merciful' (a saint) that when a hungry and frozen passerby came to him and asked to be made warm, he lay down with him in bed, embraced him, and began breathing into his mouth, which was foul and festering with some terrible disease. I'm convinced that he did it with the strain of a lie, out of love enforced by duty, out of self-imposed penance. If we're to come to love a man, the man himself should stay hidden, because as soon as he shows his face--love vanishes."
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro