News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
Last weekend some students from the college spent the night roasting a pig and several chickens. They then invited the community to share in the feast. It was as delicious and delightful as you would imagine.
In my weekly Water Dipper, I recommend essays on small farms, big media, and moral societies.
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K.E. Colombini takes his cue from a word in Jane Austen's Emma. He argues that "valetudinarianism" connects arguments about the pandemic and the climate, with, on the one side, a distrust of experts and politicians, and, on the other, the belief that science (however defined) is paramount and must dictate, not simply advise, policy.
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Max Longley reviews Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds by Michael Knowles. Longley concludes, "If we specifically acknowledge that there was no past Eden beyond Eden itself, it might be possible to come up with a more pragmatic response to the modern abuses Knowles identifies, opposing radical deformation of the culture at the national level while making more room for experiments at the local level."
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Matthew Loftus admires Andrew Peterson's fiction and music, but he's less impressed with his latest book. “Growing things are good” isn’t a sufficiently coherent claim for a book. While the questions and problems that Andrew Peterson raises in The God of the Garden are thorny and complex, his ideas deserve greater development.
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Alan Cornett talks with Todd Hartch in the new episode of Cultural Debris. They discuss topics from the sculptor Frederick Hart, to the Notre Dame School of Architecture, to great books programs, and saving Charleston.
Andy Crouch was visiting Grove City this week, and it was a treat to hear a bit about his forthcoming book, The Life We're Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World. Hearing him talk about his book project reminded me of one of the most insightful paragraphs C.S. Lewis wrote, in The Abolition of Man:
There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the wisdom of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious—such as digging up and mutilating the dead.