News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
Large swaths of the US, including here in Michigan, got an April snow this week. It’s always a bit odd to stoke the wood stove after biking to work in 70-degree sunshine, but the dusting of snow on the eastern redbud’s bright blossoms was spectacular.
-
In my weekly Water Dipper, I recommend essays about Augusto Del Noce, hog farms, and Friday Night Lights.
-
Benjamin Myers narrates how he gradually fell out of love with the American bard: “Whitman’s antagonism to tradition and his easy spiritually are rooted in the impulse to make the self the locus of all meaning.”
-
Hans Zeiger draws on the work of political scientist Daniel Elazar and Gracy Olmstead’s new book to reflect on one of the paradoxes regaring American communities: “we Americans move around a lot, but somehow or other we manage to form and sustain decent, livable, and influential communities.”
-
Steve Willis considers how our culture’s obsession with system-level thinking can obscure the complexity of real people: “I had to confess that, yes, I was a rural pastor immersed in the lowly work of interpersonal ministry. That is, I was pastoring a church where the mission is accomplished through individual face-to-face interaction with human beings in a very particular, very small community in rural Virginia—namely Tabor. There was an awkward silence. In order to fill it another young pastor inquired, ‘Well, yes, but are you able to do anything on a systems level?’“
-
Elizabeth Stice reviews the new PBS documentary on Ernest Hemingway. This portrayal of Hemingway’s life tells us much both about his own struggles and tensions but also about the obsessions of today’s culture.
What’s on the docket for next week? An encouragement to mark the waning of Covidtide with feasting, two substantial considerations of Paul Kingsnorth’s novels, and a review of my forthcoming book (one of the many reasons it’s handy to have an editorial team for the website is that a book’s author doesn’t have to commission or edit a review of his own book!).
FPR contributor Dan Rattelle has published a new book of poems: The Commonwealth. The title poem appeared this week in National Review. In the brief foreword I wrote for this fine volume, I commented on this poem in particular:
The volume’s title poem recounts the story of a family who left this place. They burned their house before leaving so they could scavenge its nails to take west with them on their journey toward a new life. Yet even this site, pillaged and abandoned, has a community dedicated to preserving and increasing its wealth: “Here, the trees, / Like bankers, took the farm and left no trace.” Indeed, even the house’s old foundation stone receives and treasures the sun’s light, “Storing up the heat for when it fails.” Rattelle’s poems call us likewise to value even those places and people whose wealth has been profligately squandered in the hopes that our commonwealth might be, as Eliot writes, “redeemed from fire by fire.”