News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
We won the first game in our church softball league playoffs this week on a walk-off hit. High drama indeed.
- In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays about Vonnegut, Jennings, and road trips.
- Jon Schaff encourages us to take advantage of America's 250th anniversary to take up the work of cultural memory and repair: "Such education seems necessary. People have often noted that in the late-stage Soviet Union, and perhaps in North Korea and China today, the appeal of actual Marxism had essentially died. The leadership mouthed the Marxist pieties but had ceased to believe in them. Advocacy of the reigning ideology was simply a cynical tool used by those seeking access to power. Is America in 2025 all that different? Do our political, financial, and cultural elite really believe in essential American principles, or are they merely saying the words while lacking the conviction? As Orwell put it, their larynxes are working but their brains are not involved."
- David Bannon imagines that Heaven will be populated with our friends and community members: "If Augustine is right, perhaps our dead can do great things not only in the corporeal world, but the incorporeal one as well. I have this idea that when we die, even the worst of us, we will have advocates on the other side. Jesus, the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, to be sure. And more."
- Dixie Dillon Lane meditates on lessons she learned walking the Camino de Santiago: "So often, we move too fast. What happens when we are blistered and swollen and yet the pilgrimage is still there, its yellow arrows pointing us left, right, and beyond? We can stop—and sometimes we must—or we can limp forward."
- Colin Gillette takes a hard look at declining places and how they might be renewed: "Rockford made things that lasted. Spoken of now almost like mythology, this was the land of the monkey sock, the screw capital of the world, a manufacturing goliath built with many hands. It was a place of quarried limestone, used to build roads and homes with local stone and labor. Then the quarries closed. The factories shuttered. The fields gave way to monocrops, and the people were left to wander inside the skeleton of something that once provided. And now I see it happening again—this time in the sanctuary. Congregations are being mined for tithe, for clout, for spectacle. Rock bands and prosperity gospels work the crowd while the till stands open, not to offer, but to receive."
- Raleigh Adams draws on Wuthering Heights for wisdom about strangers and community: "In Heathcliff, we confront the terrifying specter of a soul severed from the common good—a man who forsakes reconciliation and stewardship for the consuming fire of his own wounded will. Through Heathcliff’s alienation, Wuthering Heights serves as a dark meditation on what happens when personal grievance overtakes the common good, echoing contemporary concerns about atomization and social fragmentation."
Last week, I mentioned reading Ancient Futures. I read another book this summer about the interchanges between Western cultures and indigenous ones: Hampton Sides’s The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook. Sides presents Cook, with all his ambiguities, evenhandedly, and it is a remarkable story. I was particularly struck by Cook’s increasing worries that by making contact with various Polynesian peoples, he was causing irreparable harm rather than bringing them the benefits of interacting with a wider world:
In reading his journals, one detects that he was slowly losing faith in the supposed benefits of cross-cultural contact. He was starting to realize that visiting these islanders wasn’t good for them. More and more, he doubted whether Native ways of viewing property and trade could really mesh with European ways. The two worlds, the two organizational regimes, were so fundamentally different, he thought, they could never come into true alignment.
On this stop in New Zealand, Cook had sensed an evolution among the Māori, a restiveness and a discontent he had caught only a faint whiff of during his second voyage. It was not the same place it had been when he first set eyes on it in 1769, aboard the Endeavour. In less than a decade, through forces of disruption and dislocation that his own visits here had set in motion, the Māori were changed. Cook discerned this—not only the change, but the direct role his voyages had played in it.
“We debauch their morals,” Cook wrote, “and we introduce among them wants and diseases which they never before knew.”
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro