News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
The sandhill cranes are arriving in southern Michigan in greater numbers now. Their calls are otherworldly, and I particularly enjoy witnessing them rise from the marshes or shallows at dawn to fly in search of breakfast.
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In my weekly Water Dipper, I recommend essays about American associational life, rural broadband, and Pacific explorers.
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Art Hunt III contributes a generous and insightful review of my new book Reading the Times: “How we attend to the news is often haphazard and without discernment. . . [Bilbro] claims we need to connect our habits of the heart to a firmer foundation than the evanescent media infosphere.”
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Jesse Tumblin focuses on the most recent of Kingsnorth’s novels: Alexandria. In particular, he traces the religious themes in this novel and puts them in the context of Kingsnorth’s recent conversion to Orthodoxy.
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Aaron Weinacht considers how Paul Kingsnorth’s trilogy of novels answers a set of fraught questions: “How do we deal with the fact that we are limited beings, and that denial of those limits results in little that is good? How do we respond to losses we can’t do much to change? How do we conserve what we can and should, and yet stop short of ruining our lives and the lives of those around us through commitment to Revolution, Change, The Cause, and so on?”
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In the newest episode of the Cultural Debris podcast, Alan Cornett talks with Erik Bootsma about classical and ecclesiastical architecture.
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Laurie M. Johnson is hosting an online seminar this summer on distributism.
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Josh Williams looks to historical precedent to recommend gathering together and feasting to celebrate the ending of a difficult season of life.
What’s on the docket for next week? A review of Andrew J. Graff’s Raft of Stars, a defense of small quests, an essay on how the liberal arts prepare students to endure loss, and an account of cancel culture fracturing neighborly online forums. Also, a new episode of the Brass Spittoon podcast will drop Monday, featuring a conversation with a “Chinese-born, English-educated, Irish-rooted scholar who lives in America.”
Earlier this year, Hannah and Nathan Anderson created a beautiful book titled Turning of Days: Lessons from Nature, Season, and Spirit.” It’s full of attentive wisdom. As I wrote in my blurb for it: “This series of rich meditations teaches us how we might see God’s hand in his bewildering, beautiful, marvelous, tragic creation. Hannah Anderson’s reflections exemplify how someone steeped in the biblical revelation learns to read the natural revelation, finding these two books to be mutually illuminating. Her well-wrought prose and Nathan Anderson’s delicate illustrations invite us follow Christ’s command to consider the lilies—and the spring peepers, the dirt, the fern, the cicadas, the hawk, the roadkill, the seed. This book is a trustworthy guide to the vital work of attending to God’s presence in our places.” Here’s a taste from her reflections on those late spring frosts that threaten the early-budding plants:
If I’m honest, it’s far too easy to become a cynic in the name of realism; too easy to give up hope because this is the way it is and what will be will be and the sooner you make peace with reality, the better. But then I think, if we were actually realists, we’d acknowledge that sometimes our justified fears don’t materialize. If we were actually realists, we’d know that some years, the blooms come and the killing frosts don’t. We’d know that some nights you go to sleep in the certain knowledge that all is lost only to awaken to trees that make it safely through.