News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
We've been getting good reports from readers who are enjoying the new issue of Local Culture, and the spring issue is shaping up nicely as well. In other news, FPR will continue running new essays during the Christmas holidays, but I'll be taking a couple of weeks off from compiling the Water Dipper.
- In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about progress, Tyson, and Messiah.
- Mark Clavier reflects on Advent in a dark time: "Until we wrap our minds around the conviction that the Light of Christ is undiminished by the world’s darkness, we won’t even begin to lift up the cross that is ours to bear. The irony that has eluded Western Christianity for too long is that the more we seek to overcome the darkness through our own efforts, the blinder we become to that light."
- Daniel Hindman describes buying an old house in Baltimore and slowly restoring it while also doing what they can to be good neighbors in fraught political climate: "The writing may still be on the wall, but a different story is being written in our block."
- David Bannon considers how grief shaped William James's life: "James does not write in detail about his grief, but his interest in the invisible world increases in the aftermath of Humster’s passing. 'It brings one closer to all mankind, this world old experience,' he writes of death. 'It makes the world seem smaller and deeper and more continuous with the next.'"
- Nadya Williams confesses her socially acceptable addiction to caffeine: "It all began innocuously, as it often does, with a paper deadline. Realizing one night that I needed to stay up later than usual to complete an assignment, I filled up my large travel mug, usually reserved for tea, with coffee from the dining hall at dinner. A splash of milk made the highly acidic brew tolerable. The results? I honestly don’t remember, but presumably the paper got done. And a habit was born."
Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee, is a remarkable novel. It’s a multi-generational saga that follows a family of Korean Christians who move to Japan in the years before World War II and, in the ensuing decades, try to make a home in the nation that colonized and oppressed theirs. Members of this family experience much kindness and joy and also unimaginable pain and suffering. In many ways, the novel is a long meditation on what it’s like to have no place or community to call home. In one scene, a young Korean boy is going through a humiliating registration process that is required for foreigners living in Japan. His father says, “This is something Solomon must understand. We can be deported. We have no motherland. Life is full of things he cannot control so he must adapt. My boy has to survive.” His friend’s response evokes the yearning that many of the characters in this novel live with:
She wanted to crawl out of the gray box and see the light of outdoors again. She longed for the white mountains of Hokkaido. And though she had never done so in her childhood, she wanted to walk in the cold, snowy forests beneath the flanks of dark, leafless trees. In life, there was so much insult and injury, and she had no choice but to collect what was hers. But now she wished to take Solomon’s shame, too, and add it to her pile, though she was already overwhelmed.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro