News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
On Friday evening, as I washed the dishes after wrapping up my first week of teaching at Grove City, I watched a hummingbird feed from blossom to blossom along our pink turtlehead. Quite a remarkable sight.
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In this week’s Water Dipper, I recommend essays about nationalism, memes, and repair.
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Elizabeth Stice considers what George Marsden’s The Soul of the American University Revisited: From Protestant to Postsecular might say about the task of education today. As she asks, “What is the relationship between Christianity and learning now, apart from control of cultural institutions? What should it be?”
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Benjamin Young relates the history told by Verlaine Stoner McDonald in The Red Corner: The Rise and Fall of Communism in Northeastern Montana. This book resurrects the surprising but largely forgotten episode of agrarian radicalism in Sheridan County, Montana. Over ten years after its publication, McDonald’s stellar work of microhistory continues to provide food for thought to readers interested in both the political promise and limits of agrarianism, localism, and left-wing populism.
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Max Longley offers a thought experiment in how states might rein in undesirable corporations.
I’ve been increasingly troubled by the prevelance of false dichotomies in our public discourse. One book on this subject that has helped me think about the uses and abuses of prophetic indictment and stark binaries is Cathleen Kaveny’s Prophecy Without Contempt: Religious Discourse in the Public Square. I found her work helpful in articulating why Wendell Berry often relies on stark binaries (boomers vs. stickers, the rational mind vs. the sympathetic mind, the industrial economy vs. the Kingdom of God, etc.). She argues that “the rhetoric of prophetic indictment is best understood as a sort of moral chemotherapy, a reaction to a potentially life-threatening distortion in ordinary, day-to-day moral discussion. Deliberative discourse is, in fact, that ordinary form of moral discussion. . . . In some cases, however, our ordinary form of discussion can be gravely corrupted, perhaps by the incorporation of a false major premise, perhaps because of the dependence on a mistaken minor premise. Such mistakes are made all the time in matters small and large. In some few cases, however, the mistake is about such a fundamental matter that it threatens to undermine the very possibility of moral and political reasoning within the community. . . . Prophetic indictment relentlessly — and sometimes ruthlessly — targets the corruption that, left unchecked, would undermine the possibility of sound moral deliberation more generally.” The challenge, of course, is to discern when prophetic speech is needed and when deliberative discourse is appropriate.