News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
A couple quick FPR updates. First, we're excited to welcome Anna Bailey as our new editorial intern. Anna is a recent graduate of Redeemer University and will be helping us over the next year or so. Second, we have a date and location for our conference this year. Stay tuned for further details in the coming weeks, but we hope you'll make plans to join us.
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In my weekly Water Dipper, I recommend essays about the corruption of science, farm pollution, and the academy.
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Lisa McCabe reviews Aaron Poochigian’s new collection of poetry, American Divine, and commends its "pursuit of the divine (or at least divine experience), the search for meaning and immortality, the hard ironic look at the spiritual, political, and ecological wasteland which is America."
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Matt Miller attempts to define the illusive Midwest with the help of two recent books: "The potential of meaninglessness haunts us all, and perhaps the task of Midwestern Gothic literature is to call us to attend to this truth, to wake us to the possibility of making meaning here despite the haunted quality of our homes."
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James Clark reviews a new edition of the Book of Common Prayer and considers the way such a book might guide personal and communal liturgical life.
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Scott Pearce looks to physical watersheds to understand the importance of our attitudes: "Our reactions to the streams of today’s circumstances feed the rivers of our everyday attitudes."
What's on the docket for next week? A review of Nick Ripatrazone's Wild Belief, a behind-the-scenes look at Pete Davis's Dedicated, an essay on whether organized communal associations are a sign of healthy community life, and a review essay considering the value of teaching students practical arts alongside the liberal arts.
I recently came across a reference to the Latin phrase solivutur ambulando. Here is how the theologian Thomas G. Long describes it:
Solvitur ambulando is a delightful Latin phrase, often associated with Augustine but older in origin, meaning “it is solved by walking.” Some speculate that the first time the phrase was used was in a debate between two ancient philosophers, Zeno and Diogenes. Zeno was arguing one of his famous paradoxes—namely, that all motion is really only an illusion. When an arrow’s flight is divided into discrete instants in time, in each one of those instants the arrow is only in one place. So, Zeno claimed, if the arrow is always at rest in one instant, it is at rest in all instants. Thus, there is no such thing as motion. Instead of making a counterargument, Diogenes simply got up and walked across the room, saying as he strolled, “Solivut ambulando.”
In regard to other qeustions, solvitur ambulando, “it is solved by walking,” means more than the fact that many abstract philosophical problems have practical, down-to-earth solutions. It describes instead a completely different way of knowing, a knowing that comes only to those who are actively engaged in the questions they are asking.
I am reminded of one of Elton Penn’s favorite phrases, which he in turn learned from Old Jack Beecham: “If you’re going to talk to me, you’ll have to walk.”