News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
I'm loving my new two-mile bike commute to campus. Now that the humidity of late summer is finally gone (at least for now), it's an unmitigated delight.
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In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays about death shaming, quitting Twitter, and James Rebanks.
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John-Paul Heil sets Hassler’s novel A Green Journey and McDonagh’s film Calvary in conversation. Hassler and McDonagh conclude their stories with the hope that, in the absence of clergy, faithful everyday Christians can rebuild the lost soil of local culture through faith and forgiveness.
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Max Longley reviews a new book on the history of corporate rights. Through litigation (generally well-financed) over two centuries, various corporations won decisions by which corporations evolved from government-created artificial persons, not even mentioned by name in the Constitution, into entities possessed of many of the same constitutional rights as flesh-and-blood human beings.
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Gregory Reynolds takes readers on a journey through the beauties of Little Diamond, an island bounded by the crisp waters of Casco Bay, and praises those rare but necessary sanctuaries from the madness of modern life.
This week Plough published an essay I wrote on the fiction of Alexander McCall Smith. Many delightful quotations were lost on the cutting-room floor, but here is one from The Unbearable Lightness of Scones. Two characters, Domenica and Angus, are discussing the value of dinner parties.
“A dinner party provides the ideal opportunity to sit with people. To talk to them."
"You don’t think, then, that it’s simply a bourgeois ritual?"
Domenica smiled. "I might have thought that in the past," she said. "No more, though. I now realise, I think, how important these bourgeois rituals are. Or all rituals, for that matter, bourgeois or not. … In the Sixties we thought we could get rid of everything. Rituals were exposed as meaningless. Restraint was taken as a sign of inhibition. Personal authenticity was all. Behave as you wanted to. Liberate yourself. . . . Of course, we’re now finding out the consequences of all that," said Domenica. "Look at the way people behave in the streets at night. Look at the rudeness, the discourtesy, the ugliness and violence of our public space. … Don’t you think they [rituals] are the absolute cement of any society? Rituals and key institutions. And when you destabilize them, when you point out the emperor has no clothes, you find you’ve got a void where society used to be. Just a whole lot of individuals, all strangers to one another."
"Undoubtedly," said Agnus. He looked at her. "But what are we going to do, Domenica? What’s the solution?" "We have to recivilise society," said Domenica quietly. "The whole of Britain: England, Scotland, the works, everything has to be recivilised. We have to rebuild. We have to re-create the civilisation we have so casually destroyed."
Angus knew she was right. But the task of recivilising seems so daunting, so extensive, that he wondered if he and Domenica were up to it, especially when one had to cook dinner as well.