Greetings from the Porch,

We had a marvelous and convivial gathering last weekend in Waco, TX. Thanks to all who joined us. If you missed it, here are a few photos and anecdotes to whet your appetite for next year.

• In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays about Greek, pruning, and environmentalism.

• Mel Livatino contemplates finitude and eternity while flying 30,000 feet above the earth: "But six miles above the earth, flying into the setting sun, I know so well how temporary is the money. What matters is my family and my wife who has been gone now nearly ten years and a few dear friends and my work trying to find truth and beauty in my writing. All these miracles and treasures and gifts will soon be gone from my life—or rather, I from them. We will part ways—as all eight billion of us on this planet will part ways with all we have learned and earned and witnessed and loved."

• Richard Bailey remembers the life and writings and love of Gurney Norman, one of Kentucky's Fab Five: "As Gurney’s family and friends wrestle with the loss of their friend, I hope they—or more accurately we—will lean into being lonely inside a web of love."

• Sarah Reardon contrasts two poetic responses to turmoil: "It is poetry like Berry’s that provides a tangible hope in the midst of societal or personal turmoil—poetry that recognizes human limits and divine grace, poetry that upholds faith and virtue as real and worthy of human pursuit. Give up; give thanks; the Maker is coming to his work."

• LuElla D'Amico reviews Undaunted Joy by Shemaiah Gonzalez and praises its delight in life's mundane gifts: "From the very start, then, it’s clear Undaunted Joy isn’t about ignoring pain or pretending hardships don’t exist. Gonzalez invites us into the reality of grief, loss, and anxiety, and then gently guides us toward a joy that doesn’t deny suffering but defiantly transcends it."

• Holly Stockley searches for what gives places the kind of good bones that make their rehabilitation possible: "To take note of older settlements like Port Oneida, with their more walkable centers, mutual dependence of neighbors, and surrounding supporting land is not only an exercise in nostalgia. It’s a search for what used to work. But attempts to recreate them by planning for little pockets with a few shops inside a subdivision or sidewalks that link green spaces is a bit like propping up a sagging floor with a single post in the basement. It can’t begin to replace that robust, interlocking frame."

• Michial Farmer listens to songs about bars, saloons, taverns, whoopie spots.

C.S. Lewis’s Miracles begins with a deft account of reason and human minds. In several respects, Lewis anticipates the later work of philosophers such as Thomas Nagel and Alvin Plantinga. In an appendix, Lewis makes an interesting speculation about the possibilities and dangers of setting aside unthinking adherence to tradition and democratizing religious reasoning:

The state of affairs in which ordinary people can discover the Supernatural only by abstruse reasoning is recent and, by historical standards, abnormal. All over the world, until quite modern times the direct insight of the mystics and the reasonings of the philosophers percolated to the mass of the people by authority and tradition; they could be received by those who were no great reasoners themselves in the concrete form of myth and ritual and the whole pattern of life. In the conditions produced by a century or so of Naturalism, plain men are being forced to bear burdens which plain men were never expected to bear before. We must get the truth for ourselves or go without it. There may be two explanations for this. It might be that humanity, in rebelling against tradition and authority, have made a ghastly mistake; a mistake which will not be the less fatal because the corruptions of those in authority rendered it very excusable. On the other hand, it may be that the Power which rules our species is at this moment carrying out a daring experiment. Could it be intended that the whole mass of the people should now move forward and occupy for themselves those heights which were once reserved only for the sages? Is the distinction between wise and simple to disappear because all are now expected to become wise? If so, our present blunderings would be but growing pains. But let us make no mistake about our necessities. If we are content to go back and become humble plain men obeying a tradition, well. If we are ready to climb and struggle on till we become sages ourselves, better still. But the man who will neither obey wisdom in others nor adventure for her himself is fatal. A society where the simple many obey the few seers can live: a society where all were seers could live even more fully. But a society where the mass is still simple and the seers are no longer attended to can achieve only superficiality, baseness, ugliness, and in the end extinction. On or back we must go; to stay here is death.

Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,

Jeff Bilbro