News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
My first seed catalogue of the season arrived in the mail this week. It’s a peculiar kind of pleasure to thumb through it and dream about next summer on a blustery winter evening.
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Casie Dodd ponders the advent poetry of Dunstan Thompson: “we … need the ordering principle of a season like Advent to help us reflect on the frequent disorder—the problems we cannot seem to wrestle our way out of or the solutions that may continually appear elusive—to guide our preparations for celebration.”
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J.D. Graham reviews Paul Pastor’s new volume of poetry: “The collection prizes the body and its presence in a place. Poems embrace mortality, frailty, weakness—everything that our present age rejects. To many, the idea that a local community, much less a locality itself, could be their primary good seems astounding. Pastor’s commitment to and love of place is not novel; but these days, it is revolutionary.”
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Sarah Soltis traveled to Washington D.C. for the Dobbs hearings, and she reflects on grace, membership, and life: “‘The way we are, we are members of each other,’ Burley Coulter voices in one of Wendell Berry’s short stories. Membership involves all: ‘The difference ain’t in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don’t.’ Grace includes just and unjust, viable and unviable, those who embrace the fact of membership and those who deny it.”
Last week a hefty volume showed up in my mail. Anne Snyder and Susannah Black have published in print form the fruits of their labors in the past year or so over at Breaking Ground. Here’s how they describe the project: “The publishing project was created by Comment in the spring of 2020 to use the resources of the Christian humanist tradition to respond collaboratively and imaginatively to the year’s significant crises—a public health and economic crisis provoked by COVID-19, a social crisis cracked open by the filmed murder of George Floyd, and a leadership crisis laid bare as the gravity of a global pandemic met the epistemological fracture of a country suffocating in political polarization and idolatry.” The result is a rich collection of essays. One of the early ones is by Gracy Olmstead reflecting on Wendell Berry’s “Health is Membership,” but there are many that may be of interest to Porchers.
