News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
It’s peak firefly season here in Pennsylvania, and it’s quite a treat to watch the neighborhood yards turn into a light show each evening at dusk. They are one of nature’s many quotidian marvels.
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In this week’s Water Dipper, I recommend essays on sympathy, weeds, and brutal friends.
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Elizabeth Stice argues that our increasing reliance on “hot mediums” and frictionless technologies hinders our ability to deal with the intractable challenges of life: “Despite their promise of ease, hot mediums are making our lives harder. They surround us at work and at home but make us less able to cope with unpredictable environments that require our critical engagement – which is most of the real world. Life is inherently unpredictable and requires engagement without certainty of outcome. It also often requires patience.”
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Douglas Fox reviews Aaron Perzanowski’s new book The Right to Repair: “For readers exhausted by the seemingly intractable erosion of society by powerful forces, Perzanowski, has, thankfully, included many tales of heroic and insurgent successes sure to inspire readers, and his treatment of cultural history related to planned obsolescence, consumerism, and repair makes for an intriguing story with plenty of sociological insights that will improve its readers’ self-understanding.”
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Daniel Bennett commends Richard Mouw’s treatment of patriotism in How to be a Patriotic Christian, and Bennett explains that “love for nation-as-people – warts, complexities, and all – is less likely to succumb to idolatry and the allure of power.”
After the Wendell Berry conference in Wales, we spent a few days in Scotland and, among other things, climbed a small mountain near Loch Katrine, which is Rob Roy country. Intrigued by the history of those lakes and mountains, I picked up Walter Scott’s classic novel Rob Roy and greatly enjoyed it. As befits its gothic strains, there is an old house that contains much history and many secrets–and a library full of ancient books. Scott gives a droll description of the dwindling size of these books, and the dwindling learning of each successive generation, but perhaps we have now distilled the wisdom of even pamphlets into Tweets:
The library at Osbaldistone Hall was a gloomy room, whose antique oaken shelves bent beneath the weight of the ponderous folios so dear to the seventeenth century, from which, under favour be it spoken, we have distilled matter for our quartos and octavos, and which, once more subjected to the alembic, may, should our sons be yet more frivolous than ourselves, be still farther reduced into duodecimos and pamphlets.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro