News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
I've spent the past couple of days in Texas, seeing some old friends and giving talks at Baylor and Dallas Baptist University. Texas is quite lovely in the spring time, and the bluebonnets are in their full glory.
- In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays about Luddite pedagogy, Robert Moses, and Blue Labour.
- Andrew Skabelund reviews Beth Linker's Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America and finds her non-judgmental attitude about posture to be problematic: "The point of invoking this oppositional evidence and exploring the complexity is not to prove beyond a shadow of doubt the importance of posture but to demonstrate that Linker’s dismissal of posture combined with her failure to engage with a whole host of countervailing evidence undermines her work. Linker ends up normalizing the wreckage of modernity rather than wrestling with it. Particularly, when informing the public on something regarding human health, it is critical to plumb the depths of the topic. To do otherwise makes the book and public engagement feel, well, a bit slouchy."
- David Bannon describes the power of sharing one's grief with another: "Many who grieve have discovered that we are not weaker but stronger in our newfound awareness of what matters to us."
- Lawrence G. Gale reviews The Black Intellectual Tradition by Angel Adams Parham and Anika Prather and commends its invitation "for those already immersed in classical education and its tradition to further expand their knowledge and praxis by becoming conversant with American black intellectual tradition, as well as an appeal to American black culture to recognize the blessings classical education has given to all peoples who have joined to it."
- Dixie Dillon Lane urges us to stop ghosting people or groups whom we've agreed to meet: "Perhaps most importantly, however, we need to return to encouraging each other to keep commitments."
- Steve Soldi Jr. revisits Booth Tarkington's great novel The Turmoil: "Tarkington hopes that more Americans will choose to trek that path of fruitful tension in this fragmented world, however difficult it may prove."
- Jesse Russell talks with Paul Krause about the classics, beauty, love, and more: "As a Literature teacher at a preparatory academy, I emphasize to all my students the joy found in reading, creative writing, and thinking. Discovering joy in reading is something we must recover in the twenty-first century. We recently held a poetry night at the school, and it was very touching—as a teacher—to hear some student testimonies about their experiences in Literature, especially a freshman student remark how she owned zero poetry books at the start of the year but now has six thanks to, according to her, my encouragement and support."
While in Waco this week, I enjoyed lunch with the professor from whom I took a Bible as literature class, David Lyle Jeffrey. Dr. Jeffrey modeled a way of taking all books and ideas with the utmost seriousness, including, of course, the Bible. And in recalling the posture he taught me, I was reminded of a great section in Wendell Berry's essay “The Loss of the University” where he warns that, understood in the pejorative sense, we should teach neither the Bible nor any other book as "literature":
Obviously this issue of the Bible in public schools cannot be resolved by federal court decisions that prescribe teaching methods. It can only be settled in terms of the freedom of teachers to teach as they believe and in terms of the relation of teachers and schools to their local communities. It may be that in this controversy we are seeing the breakdown of the public school system, as an inevitable consequence of the breakdown of local communities. It is hard to believe that this can be remedied in courts of law.
My point, anyhow, is that we could not consider teaching the Bible “as literature” if we were not already teaching literature “as literature”—as if we do not care, as if it does not matter, whether or not it is true.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro