News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
It was a delight seeing many old friends and fellow Porchers at our conference last weekend. Thanks to all who came! I share some thoughts on the gathering in the first link below, and video and audio recordings of the talks should be available in the coming weeks. But those will be but a pale substitute for the conviviality of the in-person conversations.
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In this week’s Water Dipper, I reflect a bit on the FPR conference and recommend essays on chess, the Waste Land, and dating.
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Austin Hoffman reviews Learning the Good Life, an anthology of great texts edited by Jessica Hooten Wilson and Jacob Stratman: “If treated like another academic exercise of cramming before a test, Learning the Good Life is just another textbook; if viewed as an invitation to walk alongside those who have made the journey, it promises to transform our habits as students.”
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Mark Botts offers an ode to good work: “I worked alongside Dad many times. I have also worked alongside other men and women with a disposition towards work like my father’s. They do their labor with skill, creativity, and energy. They rightly earn trust as one to call upon for help with physical jobs.”
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Ashley Colby reports from the recent NatCon conference: “What is being outlined here is fundamentally a Wendell Berry conservatism: our solutions are not global in nature. They might not even be national in nature. It asks individuals to get involved at the lowest possible scale, in church and on school boards, to be productive in the home and show up in a community as ways to build an emergent virtuous and meaningful life now.”
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Michial Farmer proposes a reading of The Great Gatsby that fits the autumnal season: “The summer, its heat and its flowers, has finally been put to death. But the dust remains. George Wilson is covered in it, alive and dead, and as Nick told us at the beginning of the novel, the empty space around Gatsby’s dream is made up of that same dust, those same ashes.”
I keep pondering this observation that Jacques Ellul makes in Propaganda:
In individualist theory the individual has eminent value, man himself is the master of his life; in individualist reality each human being is subject to innumerable forces and influences, and is not at all master of his own life. As long as solidly constituted groups exist, those who are integrated into them are subject to them. But at the same time they are protected by them against such external influences as propaganda. An individual can be influenced by forces such as propaganda only when he is cut off from membership in local groups. Because such groups are organic and have a well-structured material, spiritual, and emotional life, they are not easily penetrated by propaganda.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro