News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
We’ve announced the date (Sept. 24) and location (Grove City College) and keynote (Chris Arnade) for our fall conference. We’ll post a full schedule, registration information, and more details in the coming weeks here. Please make plans to join us!
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In this week’s Water Dipper I recommend pieces on predictions, literature, and baseball.
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Julia Evanko reviews Christine Emba’s new book, Rethinking Sex, and commends her critique of “consent” as a sexual ethic while gently suggesting Emba doesn’t go far enough in articulating how radical our interdependence is and why it warrants a context of marriage and family.
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David Ryan argues that we need to “take a hard look at what we measure and calculate, what we optimize, what we expect from our math, and even in what regard we hold numbers.”
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Aaron Weisel compares Masanobu Fukuoka and Wendell Berry and argues their understandings of farming and poetry–as inherently formal practices–have illuminating analogs.
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Alan Cornet talks with Danielle Oteri in the latest edition of the Cultural Debris podcast. They discuss the Unicorn Tapestries and the difference between expert and amateur perspectives.
This week our class read the brief novel Andy Catlett: Early Travels. It’s a funny and poignant tale of Andy’s boyhood trip by bus to visit both sets of his grandparents. He reflects on this experience both through the eyes of his nine-year-old self and also with the benefit of hindsight:
Increasingly over the last maybe forty years, the thought has come to me that the old world in which our people lived by the work of their hands, close to the weather and earth, plants and animals, was the true world; and that the new world of cheap energy and every cheaper money, honored greed, and dreams of liberation from every restraint, is mostly theater. This new world seems a jumble of scenery and props never quite believable, an economy of fantasies and moods, in which it is hard to remember either the timely world of nature or the eternal world of the prophets and poets. And I fear, I believe I know, that the doom of the older world I knew as a boy will finally afflict the new one that replaced it.
The world I knew as a boy was flawed, surely, but it was substantial and authentic. The households of my grandparents seemed to breathe forth a sense of the real cost and worth of things. Whatever came, came by somebody’s work.