News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
Now that my improved garden fence is keeping the deer at bay, the corn and beans in our garden are shooting up in this spell of hot, sunny weather we've been having. So we have at least the prospect of a bountiful harvest.
- In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about Maurin, partisanship, and myth.
- Micah Paul Veillon goes fishing at a local pond and ponders Kierkegaard, boredom, and limits: "Like farmers attached to a place, Kierkegaard believed the principal boredom-curing method is not in a moving away, or a radical changing of the soil, but in the rotation of grains in the same soil. A faithfulness to the place one is in. Underlying this for Kierkegaard is the principle of limitation, 'the only saving one in the world.'"
- Mark Botts considers how churches might be childlike and child friendly: "a line of little children arrive from their Sunday school class. They trot, skip, and race from the back of the auditorium down the left side isle towards the front of the building to a second row of pews."
- Drew Maglio traces Florida's path toward erasing its natural and cultural realities and wonders about the costs of living in an increasingly artificial world: "This progression from the raw, unabated natural Florida to the ever-more artificial Florida, has grave consequences for both the geographical locale and the people who inhabit it."
- Adriana Watkins goes to middle school karaoke and finds wisdom in an unexpected source: "my job was to vet the requested songs and decide yea or nay. Among the nays was “Beautiful Things” by Benson Boone. Though I vetoed it for an allusion to premarital sex, the lyrics caught my interest, being partly addressed as a prayer to God."
- Paul Krause reviews Mark David Hall's Who's Afraid of Christian Nationalism? and commends its sane approach: "This driving principle of love and human flourishing, rooted in the Christian understanding of humanity being made in the image of God, has spurred the great social and political reform movements in American history like abolitionism and civil rights."
A friend recently recommended Amor Towles's A Gentleman in Moscow, and it was indeed a delightful novel. Accounts of life's simple pleasures--good food, friendship, meaningful work--pervade the novel. One interesting thread pertains to the classic movie Casablanca, and the novel's protagonist, the Count, finds the cafe owner Rick to be a model for how to live well in the midst of uncertainty and limited possibilities. One of the Count's friends makes these connections near the end of the novel:
Here was Casablanca, a far-flung outpost in a time of war. And here at the heart of the city, right under the sweep of the searchlights, was Rick's Café Américain, where the beleaguered could assemble for the moment to gamble and drink and listen to music; to conspire, console, and most importantly, hope. And at the center of this oasis was Rick. As the Count's friend had observed, the saloonkeeper's cool response to Ugarte's arrest and his instruction for the band to play on could suggest a certain indifference to the fates of men. But in setting upright the cocktail glass in the aftermath of the commotion, didn't he also exhibit an essential faith that by the smallest of one's actions one can restore some sense of order to the world?
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro