News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
I’m taking the month of June off from email and Internet. FPR remains in good hands for my absence, however, and we have some substantive essays on tap. Managing Editor Sarah Soltis will continue sending out these weekly emails during June. Also, don’t forget to register for our fall conference, particularly if you’re a student and want to snag one of the remaining free spots sponsored by Plough.
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In this week’s Water Dipper I recommend essays on the regime, progress, and The Last Battle.
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Elizabeth Stice warns us not to focus too much on “great men”: “Historians today recognize that individuals do not make history alone. Nevertheless, our cultural attention still fixates on certain prominent individuals, and we tend to expect a handful of ‘great men’ to save us from our social or technological or ecological challenges. We shouldn’t.”
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James Clark reviews Myles Werntz’s From Isolation to Community and concludes, “The problem of isolation festering even in churches is very real, and From Isolation to Community is a worthwhile reflection that helps us to become conscious of the problem and start thinking about how we can—together—address it.”
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Zachary Michael Jack reads Tiger Woods’s career through Midwestern eyes: ” Woods may be Californian by birth, and a Floridian by residence, but I believe there’s something in his latest comeback capable of stirring the soul of even the most reticent, celebrity-wary Middle American.”
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Alan Cornett talks with Fr. Gregory Pine about his new book on prudence.
I think the reason I enjoy reading Eugene Vodolazkin’s novels so much is that they heighten my awareness of the world around me. Everything becomes more vivid while I’m immersed in his prose. Aaron Weinacht’s review or these excerpts might make you decide the book is worth picking up this summer. Here is one passage when Gleb, the protagonist, is reflecting on his conversations with a group of internationals at a German college he worked for:
He thought that with each such conversation he new less and less about Russia, which wasn’t like any other country in the world. It didn’t have the German painstakingness or the American wealth, didn’t know how to play soccer, and had no black-skinned population. When the others asked Gleb what defined contemporary Russia, he had no clear answer. He might have spoken about its natural resources, but they hadn’t made the population richer, so their very presence in the bowels of the earth had begun to raise doubts. He might have mentioned Russia’s vastness, but it was quickly shrinking–and not only due to exotic Asia but also due to his native Ukraine. Ukraine was a part of his homeland in the deepest sense of the word. Abroad, Gleb got the physical sensation that his once united country had fallen to pieces that were now separating beneath him, like in an earthquake, while he stood right over the abyss feeling he might fall in any minute.
And here are some of his reflections on polyphony, a key motif in the novel:
The topic of polyphony completed captivated Gleb, who had the vague sense that life consists of repetitions and parallel statements. . . . Polyphony had interested Gleb back in music school, but only with respect to music. Now he had discovered for himself that the whole world is polyphonic. The many-voiced sound of trees in a grove, automobiles moving down a street, conversations in a line. . . . Gleb saw polyphony not only in the parallel voices of the heroes but in counterposed plots, in the different narrative timeframes whose point of contact might be found in the text of the work or outside it–in the reader’s mind.