News from the Front Porch Republic
Hello from the Porch!
If we haven't met, I'm Sarah Soltis, Managing Editor at FPR. I hope to meet or catch up with you in a few months at our fall conference amid the trees and hills of Grove City College. In the meantime, here are a few recent conversations I encourage you to join in on:
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In an excerpt from Mark Mitchell's new book on what he terms "plutocratic socialism," Mitchell urges us to cultivate thrift, neighborliness, and independence through ownership of private property, for "the ownership of property calls forth certain virtues that make self-government possible."
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John Murdock reviews the film The Last Pig and considers farming and our fellow creatures. He asks whether one can "pull the trigger not in sin but in thankfulness for a life well-lived—a life whose death will sustain the lives of others?"
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Kirk Brumels reflects on seasonal change and his childhood days: "Our expectations about each new season are not coincidental; rather, they are anticipated from past experiences and observations. Associating morel mushrooms, mosquitoes and maple syrup with spring or sweet corn and strawberries with summer illustrates an awareness of seasonal relationships based in phenology."
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Likewise, Jeffrey Whittaker discusses time through Tolkien's traditions: "The traditions of Tolkien breathe an authenticity into his mythology, and each grasps at the world in the author’s imagination: different lenses through which to see 'the Real thing.'"
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Finally, give Associate Editor Matt Stewart's new book a glance, if you have a chance. Stewart uses The Most Beautiful Place on Earth: Wallace Stegner in California to inquire into the story of Wallace Stegner and his practice of place.
Practicing place and considering seasonal change recalls to mind Willa Cather's My Antonia, which I finished re-reading last week. Cather offers a lot of food for thought in the way of nature, youth, and home, but one reflection from early on in the novel has reverberated in my thoughts as summer slowly stretches out over us.
From his garden patch, the young narrator sits still amongst the growing produce and jumping grasshoppers and recognizes that his liberty comes from contentment in his place - despite surrounding change and fear:
I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.