News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
I'm getting ready to host Paul Kingsnorth here at Grove City on Tuesday and then a few days later I'll be heading to Waco for what should be a wonderful FPR gathering at Baylor.
- In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays about books, dependence, and Mamdani.
- Ethan Mannon reviews Wendell Berry's new novel, Marce Catlett: "Berry knows that he will not live into a time when America’s rural places are again prosperous reconciliations of art and nature. But he has given us stories whose memories, if acted on in our places, might bloom in new and unforeseeable reconciliations. His Port William fiction challenges us to share in the vision that animated Marce, Wheeler, and Andy: the 'shared vision of a life permanently settled in a place chosen and beloved.'"
- Daniel Williams considers the theological debate between pro-choice and pro-life Christians and uses this disagreement to probe the possibilities for moving past polarization: "Is there any room for common ground between these competing views?"
- Josh Pendergrass commends a new film that shines a spotlight on how screens deform souls and communities: "Kudos to Ari Aster and his film Eddington for showing us the truth of what is happening to us in our social media saturated world."
- Siena Phillips traces the plot of a typical Hollywood romance and argues we need more stories about lifelong fidelity: "Deep down, humans not only want but also require enduring, stable relationships."
- Logan Lee received an education from his regular commute on a Washington, D.C. bus: "Crouched between reflective handrails and stained cloth seats holding the memories of seasons past, I encountered daily more humanity, more culture, and more reverent wisdom than perhaps ever before."
- Michial Farmer listens to songs about his favorite time of day: the morning.
Instead of teaching Scarlet Letter this semester, I had my students read several of Hawthorne’s short stories. His stories about industrialization, technology, and “science” (really, about alchemy posing as science) are remarkably perceptive and prescient. “The Celestial Railroad” is biting. Christopher Lasch, famously, took the title for True and Only Heaven from this story, and Hawthorne’s account of Vanity Fair’s “machinery” for producing knowledge and virtue eerily forecasts the promises made today about the effects of AI:
The Christian reader, if he have had no accounts of the city later than Bunyan's time, will be surprised to hear that almost every street has its church, and that the reverend clergy are nowhere held in higher respect than at Vanity Fair. And well do they deserve such honorable estimation; for the maxims of wisdom and virtue which fall from their lips come from as deep a spiritual source, and tend to as lofty a religious aim, as those of the sagest philosophers of old. In justification of this high praise I need only mention the names of the Rev. Mr. Shallow-deep, the Rev. Mr. Stumble-at-truth, that fine old clerical character the Rev. Mr. This-today, who expects shortly to resign his pulpit to the Rev. Mr. That-tomorrow; together with the Rev. Mr. Bewilderment, the Rev. Mr. Clog-the-spirit, and, last and greatest, the Rev. Dr. Wind-of-doctrine. The labors of these eminent divines are aided by those of innumerable lecturers, who diffuse such a various profundity, in all subjects of human or celestial science, that any man may acquire an omnigenous erudition without the trouble of even learning to read. Thus literature is etherealized by assuming for its medium the human voice; and knowledge, depositing all its heavier particles, except, doubtless, its gold becomes exhaled into a sound, which forthwith steals into the ever-open ear of the community. These ingenious methods constitute a sort of machinery, by which thought and study are done to every person's hand without his putting himself to the slightest inconvenience in the matter. There is another species of machine for the wholesale manufacture of individual morality. This excellent result is effected by societies for all manner of virtuous purposes, with which a man has merely to connect himself, throwing, as it were, his quota of virtue into the common stock, and the president and directors will take care that the aggregate amount be well applied. All these, and other wonderful improvements in ethics, religion, and literature, being made plain to my comprehension by the ingenious Mr. Smooth-it-away, inspired me with a vast admiration of Vanity Fair.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro