News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
I’m preparing to leave for Italy to spend two weeks with a group of students in Rome and Florence. We’ve been reading Virgil, Augustine, Dante, and others, and now we’ll explore the place that shaped these literary works. It should be a great trip (with plenty of delicious food), but I may or may not be able to send out emails the next two Saturdays. I’ll try, but no promises.
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In this week’s Water Dipper I recommend essays on time, pig farms, and peer review.
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Dixie Dillon Lane practices local memory in a blood-soaked land and reckons with the act of remembering a complicated past: “every time I saw a copse of trees, I would think, Who passed through there in 1863? And then I would think of the Battle of the Wilderness, and death amongst the trees and the fog. I ate Chick-Fil-A next door to battlefields.”
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John Klar advocates raising a few cows as one practical way of resisting the destructive food industry: “Small-scale farming is the antidote to industrial agriculture and confinement animal feeding operations. It is a revolutionary act in the face of planned food supply totalitarianism.”
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Barbara Castle reviews a recent book on how Anglo-Saxon culture imagined seasons and finds much that is still applicable: “Parker’s Winters in the World is an education fit for the Humanities and lay person who wishes to expand upon what it means to exist as humans in a world full of wyrd winters.”
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Robert Jensen details his own bout with cancel culture and uses the debates around transgender issues to make a case for honest, rational debate: “People often want to ignore the complexity of that process, downplay how often interests conflict, and avoid confrontation. In this essay, I suggest we throw ourselves into the mess and hash it out—respectfully, in public, based on shared intellectual standards.”
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Alan Cornett talks with Os Guinness in a wide ranging conversation for the Cultural Debris podcast. They chat about “his childhood in China, his time with Francis Schaeffer, a chance meeting with Winston Churchill, and whether or not he receives free shipments of bottles from Guinness.”
In preparation for our trip to Rome, we read Timothy Egan’s A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith. It was an interesting account of his walk across France, Switzerland, and Italy, but much of his thinking about history and theology is muddled and relies on some odd assumptions about the past. This passage is typical–his celebration of his father’s delight in life’s small pleasures is lovely, but his breezy assumption that “the everyday was mostly miserable” in the Middle Ages betrays his annoyingly condescending attitude:
I want to hold this moment, this hour, this day, like the dawn walk out of Wisques. Back when the serfs of Laon were laboring over this cathedral, the everyday was mostly miserable. Today, it can seem miraculous, something my father tried to teach me. Though my dad suffered through plenty of disappointments, though he was raised without a father of his own, living above a bar on the South Side of Chicago, he was barely bruised by life’s poundings. The smallest things could make him happy—a trait that eludes many of the wealthiest and smartest among us. He once found a pair of used shoes at a thrift store—“Rockports! Do you realize how much these would normally cost?” Already broken in, and didn’t smell. He’d lose his ass in bingo at the church gym but come home happy because he laughed all night with nuns who drank him under the table. Neil Diamond’s songs could make him weep. Watching him die, as with watching him live, I learned a lot.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro