News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
Thanks to all of you who have filled out our reader survey. It’s been a treat to hear what you appreciate about FPR. We’ll close it out Monday and draw 2 names to receive a book, so there’s still time to send us your two cents.
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In my weekly Water Dipper, I recommend essays about Dante, AI, and reel mowers.
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Jon Schaff suggests that Lincoln offers a way “to promote Jeffersonian virtues by Hamiltonian means. In a Jeffersonian vein, Lincoln wants to encourage small, independent operations that free people from dependence on ‘the man.’ . . . But Lincoln, like Hamilton, recognizes that wealth comes from productivity.”
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Mark Cooprider traces Christopher McCandless’s story of escaping civilization and draws on Wendell Berry, Wallace Stegner, and Mark Twain to consider how we might reconcile the competing goods of freedom and community.
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Russell Fox reviews Jennifer Ayres Inhabitance: Ecological Religious Education, and shares what he’s learned from teaching a course on sustainability over the past ten years.
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Christian Schmidt reflects on why elite educational institutions such as Princeton do a relatively poor job of forming students to–as Princeton’s motto has it–serve “humanity”: “You have to be very smart and very powerful to save the world, but serving your community begins with empathy, which is a trait we can all cultivate.”
What’s on the docket for next week? An essay that uses an old movie to consider what kind of places might best foster creativity, a review of Enjoying the Bible, and a meditation on Nebraska through the eyes of someone who left and someone who moved in.
I’ve been relishing Trinity House Review’s Eastertide issue. It includes many fine poems, including several written by FPR contributors. For example, Lisa McCabe’s “The Arm” is marvelous. Here’s Maurice Manning’s “Eavesdropping, Early Morning, Everything Alive”:
When dew drips down from leaves
to land on other lower leaves
and shines them to reflect the sun
with such precision that the reflection
presents the brighter light, I conclude
when going into the world to see
what morning has brought to it, one may
be looking simply for something to praise
without expecting to halt in the gaze
soon so clearly going both ways,
and that will shine all of the day
and riddle anything to say,
even when sleep and darkness call,
and so when praising, praise it all.