News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
We've posted the schedule for the fall FPR conference at Baylor and opened registration. We only have 100 tickets available for the BBQ dinner on a nearby farm that evening, so if you want to join us for the full experience, register soon.
- In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays about seasons, steel, and profit.
- Brian Stipp wonders how we might be present with those who are lost to themselves, and he draws parallels between Berry's story "Watch with Me" and his work as a special education teacher: "From my vantage as a teacher, I have watched the ways institutions isolate kids in extreme distress. When a child’s behavior is out of adults’ control, the child is often removed from their homes for several days for individual therapy and to regulate medications. These interventions are not without value; they have 'efficacy.' But the isolation of an individual in crisis has a cost to the individual, their families, and their communities."
- In this Good Friday meditation, Sarah Reardon considers whether there can be a Christian tragedy and turns to King Lear and Jayber Crow for guidance: "Such men of faith as Edgar and Kent take upon themselves the guise of fools and servants to save those they love, hoping for a seemingly impossible redemption. The man of faith knows that even the deepest darkness may be irradiated."
- John Murdock recounts his days on the Camino: "when asked by a friend who is a Methodist pastor to join in a trek along the Camino de Santiago, or The Way of St. James, I accepted the invitation. Our band of nine then found itself traversing Spain in the awkward space somewhere between devotion and tourism, the two poles that maintain the Camino’s continued cultural relevance."
- Raleigh Adams turns to Flannery O'Connor for hard-edged wisdom: "O’Connor’s fiction does not offer sentimental portraits of faith—it tests faith."
- Michial Farmer responds to Andrew Willard Jones’s new collection of essays, The Church Against the State: "Virtues are a matter of doing the right thing at the right time, and it’s fundamentally a fatherly action to teach someone how to do so. And the virtues are always instantiated in a set of skills, for which bricklaying is Jones’s typical example. What does it mean for a bricklayer to possess the virtue of diligence? It means that he lays bricks at a reasonable speed to maintain the quality of the wall he’s building—and of course that skill is going to vary based on all sorts of different circumstances."
- Andrew Mitchell proposes that we sow winter wheat in hopes of preparing desiccated cultural soil to bear new life: "lean into the friction of human engagement. Start there, not with an image in your mind about what is going to come forth, but with a simple question—what is the most important thing I can do now to bring forth a bit more life in this area?"
- John Murdock talks with Marvin Olasky about local journalism, having a seat at the table, and pivot points.
We finished reading Jayber Crow last week in class, and that novel also moves me deeply. If you're interested in some of my thoughts on the novel, I wrote this essay after teaching it three years ago. It was a delight to publish Sarah Reardon's essay this week on King Lear and Jayber Crow as she was part of that class three years ago. I'll leave you with the passage that she highlights from the Man in the Well parable near the end (which, depending on how deep your drawl is, might sound rather like "Man in the Whale." That's fitting given both Jayber's given name of Jonah and the "sign of Jonah" that Christ promised to an wicked generation):
Listen. There is a light that includes our darkness, a day that shines down even on the clouds. A man of faith believes that the Man in the Well is not lost. He does not believe this easily or without pain, but he believes it. His belief is a kind of knowledge beyond any way of knowing. He believes that the child in the womb is not lost, nor is the man whose work has come to nothing, nor is the old woman forsaken in a nursing home in California. He believes that those who make their bed in hell are not lost, or those who dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, or the lame man at Bethesda Pool, or Lazarus in the grave, or those who pray, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani.”
Have mercy.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro