News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
As some of you may know, my faculty position was eliminated last summer due to enrollment declines and COVID-19. This year, I’ve been teaching out my contract while looking for jobs. I can attest that Zoom interviews are pretty terrible. This past week, though, I accepted an offer for an Associate Professor position in the Writing Program at Grove City College. Grove City is an institution I’ve long admired, and I’m honored to be serving there alongside many faculty members I greatly respect. For the past several months, we’ve been grieving the likely prospect of leaving our community here. That grief endures. It is now, however, tempered with gratitude for a good place to go and hope for the good work that lies ahead. Thanks to all those who have prayed for us in this season and encouraged us along the way.
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In my weekly Water Dipper, I recommend essays about commercial bumble bees, John R. Erickson, and American chestnuts.
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Richard Rankin Russell describes the experience of buying a neglected patch of land in Limestone County, TX and the work of begining to steward this place.
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John Murdock warns pro-life advocates that they in particular should be cautious about embracing anti-mask rhetoric.
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Russell Arben Fox reviews Gracy Olmstead’s new book and compares his experiences as an Idaho exile to Olmstead’s narrative.
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Barry Mitzman responds to the common misconception that farmers supported Daylight Saving Time. As it turns out, they had good reasons for opposing this time shift: “Farmers’ motives were partly practical, partly instinctive, as we’ll see. What’s remarkable is that their instincts about DST have been validated in recent years by discoveries in physiology and the emerging field of chronobiology. A chorus of scientific societies now says DST is unhealthy and should be abandoned, for reasons that rural folk a century ago seem to have sensed intuitively.”
What’s on the docket for the coming week? An excerpt from Will Hoyt’s new book, an essay on reading To Kill a Mockingbird during last summer’s protests, reflections on justice and cancel culture inspired by The Professor and the Madman, and a review of The Innovation Delusion.
Shortly after I found out SAU would be terminating my position, a friend sent an excerpt from Boethius’s Consolations, and I ended up re-reading this book during the Christmas break. At one point, Lady Philosophy reminds Boethius that “Favorable Fortune . . . deceives, [Adverse Fortune] instructs; [Favorable Fortune], in the guise of false goods, binds tight the minds of those who enjoy them; [Adverse Fortune] frees those minds through their realization of the fragility of their happiness.” And as Lady Philosophy goes on to argue—and as I would concur—Adverse Fortune reveals in particular the invaluable riches of good friends:
Do you think that this is to be reckoned an insignificant thing, the fact that this cruel, this bitter Fortune has revealed the minds of the friends that are still loyal to you? . . . When you were all in one piece and, as it seemed to you, a fortunate man, how much would you have paid for this? Go on, complain about the wealth and resources that you’ve lost; you have found what is the most valuable kind of riches, your friends.