Greetings from the Porch,

Thanks to all who generously gave money, sent kind emails, and left comments this week about the value of the work we do here at FPR (for a taste, see the comments here or here). It's been quite encouraging, and we're excited about the prospects for the coming year.

• In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays about plumbers, Pepsi, and the Amish.

• Joshua Pauling talks with Joe Barnard about his recent book and the challenges men face today: "What, then, might it look like to show some interest in men? I’d suggest the following. First, help men diagnose the pain they feel. Guys have a sense that modern culture is a cancer eating itself up from within. The world is not progressing; it’s decaying. We need to give men a framework for understanding what’s wrong with society around them."

• Elizabeth Stice argues that You've Got Mail is "a love letter from Kingsnorth’s Machine": "As amusing as the film might be and as good as its soundtrack is, there is something insidious about You’ve Got Mail. It represents the ways in which values we might not hold can be presented as inevitable and desirable."

• Luke Fong contemplates King Lear's approach to suffering: "There are things that we actually cannot bear—and things that cannot be borne will break us. . . . What then is to be made of unbearable suffering?"

• I reflect on what's been happening on the Front Porch this year and the work we aim to do here: "FPR aims to gather and encourage those who aspire to a creaturely life even in a machine age."

• Jason Peters thanks Mark Mitchell for his many years of faithful service to FPR: "For a few months shy of 16 years Mark has served as FPR’s president. He was at the headwaters of it all. For the most part FPR is his brainchild. (Jeremy Beer was also in on it, as was Patrick Deneen back when he was patrick deneen.) Mark tells the story in his preface to Localism in the Mass Age: A Front Porch Republic Manifesto, which he co-edited. Make sure you have a well-thumbed copy on one of your bookshelves. But now Mark is stepping down."

• Michial Farmer listens to songs about young adults this week.

I recently read Tish Harrison Warren’s Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep. It’s a wise meditation on a prayer that is part of the Anglican Compline service. I was particularly struck by her chapter on work and her reflections on the kinds of work that Jesus found worth his while:

Jesus also spent time—decades even—building stuff. Jesus was a tradesman. He is called a tektōn (Mark 6:3), a builder who used his hands. God came to earth and apparently thought it worth his while to take some wood or stone or metal and make something. What did he make? We have no idea. Apparently nothing earth-shattering enough to have kept around. But in this dark world, where men and women were dying, where the poor were suffering, where injustice raged in a vast and violent empire, God became flesh and built some furniture. During all those decades that he spent building things, he wasn’t preaching, healing, or clearing out temples. He wasn’t starting a movement or raising the dead. The light came into the darkness and did ordinary work.

All of Jesus’ work brought redemption. Not just the work that awed the crowds—the feeding of the multitude, the Sermon on the Mount, the raising of Jairus’s daughter, but also his quiet craft.

Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,

Jeff Bilbro