News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
I’m building several raised beds for our garden, and while it’s a lot of work this first year, I’m hoping this work will establish a foundation for many years of gardening to come. Right now, though, I’m just doing my best to get them in place before it’s time to plant this spring.
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In this week’s Water Dipper I recommend pieces on local food, hope, and death.
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John Murdock reviews Adrian Vermeule’s Common Good Constitutionalism. He concludes that “while Vermeule persuasively argues that visions of the common good beyond the current liberal focus on individual autonomy are quite possible, he is less effective in demonstrating how that autonomy-centered definition might be taken off the table.”
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Stuart Busenitz reflects on the patient work of trees: “If only I had the patience of trees; if only I let time inch me, push me, stretch me ever upward, defying gravity’s pull. My demand for instant responses mocks the good work of time. Trees chasten my fleeting desires that dart hither and thither by slowly pressing, intentionally pushing, and inevitably plodding upward.”
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Paul Krause models a way of reading classic stories through Christian eyes, eyes attuned to the necessity and power of forgiveness.
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Jesse Russell argues that “Reeves’ The Batman provides a sober and indeed generous political vision to a world ravaged by reemergent extremist ideology, a seemingly never-ending overreaction to a global pandemic, and now wars and rumors of wars.”
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Alan Cornett talks with Jessica Hooten Wilson in the latest episode of Cultural Debris. They chat about “facing the reality of our own limitations, finding literary saints as exemplars, Flannery O’Connor, C.S. Lewis, and the influence of G.K. Chesterton on Sigrid Undset.”
This week our Berry class wrapped up our weeks of reading some of the novels and short stories narrated by Andy Catlett. I’ve enjoyed revisiting these stories and am ruminating a possible book project. For now, though, I’m newly grateful for this moving section in “Dismemberment”:
And so the absence of his right hand has remained with him as a reminder. His most real hand, in a way, is the missing one, signifying to him not only his continuing need for ways and devices to splice out his right arm, but also his and his country’s dependence upon the structure of industrial commodities and technologies that imposed itself upon, and contradicted in every way, the sustaining structures of the natural world and its human memberships. And so he is continually reminded of his incompleteness within himself, within the terms and demands of his time and its history, but also within the constraints and limits of his kind, his native imperfection as a human being, his failure to be as attentive, responsible, grateful, loving, and happy as he ought to be.
He has spent most of his life in opposing violence, waste, and destruction—or trying to, his opposition always fragmented and made painful by his complicity in what he opposes. He seems to himself to be “true,” most authentically himself, only when he is sitting still, in one of the places in the woods or on a height of ground that invites him to come to rest, where he goes to sit, wait, and do nothing, oppose nothing, put words to no argument. He permits no commotion then by making none. By keeping still, by doing nothing, he allows the given world to be a gift.