News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
This week we took a field trip to the Hurry Hill Maple Farm Museum, a museum inspired by the Newbery-Award-winning book Miracles on Maple Hill. (We even got to hold the Newbery Medal.) The museum is well organized, and it’s heartening to see a local community celebrating its own economic and literary history this way. If you haven’t read the book, it’s well worth doing so.
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In this week’s Water Dipper I recommend a summer course on Christian Anarchism and essays on Sigrid Undset, third places, and more.
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Josh Pauling reviews Doug Stowe’s The Wisdom of Our Hands: Crafting, A Life. Pauling concludes that Stowe’s book “is both timeless and timely. Our physical embodiment as human creatures is always essential, but it is especially so amid increasing digitality.”
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Addison Del Mastro takes on the fraught subject of student loan forgiveness: “We should certainly turn our attention to making the credentials necessary for economic participation affordable. But so many of those losing the prime years of their life to debt and stress did nothing wrong. I don’t need any other argument to be in favor of student loan forgiveness.”
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Aaron Weinacht praises Eugene Vodolazkin’s new novel Brisbane. In a comparison that should make sense for Porchers, Weinacht claims that “Vodolazkin’s novels do for Time what Wendell Berry does for Space: We can’t just live where we are, we have to live when we are, too.”
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Alan Cornett talks with Anthony Amore about stealing–and recovering–art.
If you haven’t read Jayber Crow, what are you waiting for? It’s a novel that, like all good novels, rewards re-reading. A fair warning, though, reading it might prove disruptive to your life (Andrew Peterson attests to its disruptive power in his essay here). This is one of those paragraphs I recollect often:
Maybe love fails here, I thought, because it cannot be fulfilled here. And then I saw something that a normal life with a normal marriage might never have allowed me to see. I saw that Mattie was not merely desirable, but desirable beyond the power of time to show. Even if she had been my wife, even if I had been in the usual way her husband, she would have remained beyond me. I could not have desired her enough. She was a living soul and could be loved forever. Like every living creature, she carried in her the presence of eternity. . . . That is why, in marrying one another, we mortals say “till death.” We must take love to the limit of time, because time cannot limit it. A life cannot limit it. Maybe to have it in your heart all your live in this world, even while it fails here, is to succeed. Maybe that is enough.