News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
We have fresh snow this morning, but our yard and the surrounding woods have been filled by recent arrivals. This week I watched a pair of red-bellied woodpeckers scout for food in the trees near our house.
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In this week's Water Dipper I recommend pieces on suffering, happiness, and baseball.
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Max Longley reviews Adrian Vermeule's new book and wishes his view offered a bit more space for local freedom: "Harvard Law School produces many of our future rulers, and it may be better for us if aspiring federal administrators learn from Vermeule at least the presumptive desirability of honoring local institutions. Yet Vermeule would only be teaching them a carefully-regulated localism whose contours would be subject to the decisions of the federal administrative state."
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Alex Sosler commends the teaching of artistic contemplation as one way of cultivating attention: "Contemplation of God is paying attention to what demands one’s attention—more than information discovered or expression felt. Contemplating art can be a means, a sort of preparatory practice, of contemplating the Beautiful One from which all beauty is derivative."
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Anthony Hennen draws our attention to a neglected modernist: John Dos Passos. He argues that "we have lost something of great value in forgetting the work of John Dos Passos. He was a man who knew who deserved his sympathy, and his work followed his instincts. Dos Passos didn’t follow a line; he followed reality."
In one section of Wendell Berry's Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community he addresses the issue of public education and the role that local communities should play in shaping curriculum. These questions have recently risen with new furor, and Berry's measured approach to them remains wise:
[Some] people believe ... that any community attempt to remove a book from a reading list in a public school is censorship and a violation of the freedom of speech. The situation here involves what may be a hopeless conflict of freedoms. A teacher in a public school ought to be free to exercise his or her freedom of speech in choosing what books to teach and in deciding what to say about them. (This, to my mind, would certainly include the right to teach that the Bible is the word of God or the right to teach that it is not.) But the families of a community surely must be allowed an equal freedom to determine the education of their children. How free are parents who have no choice but to turn their children over to the influence of whatever the public will prescribe or tolerate? They obviously are not free at all. The only solution is trust between a community and its teachers, who will therefore teach as members of the community--a trust that in a time of community disintegration is perhaps not possible. And so the public presses its invasion deeper and deeper into community life under the justification of a freedom far too simply understood. It is now altogether possible for a teacher who is forbidden to teach the Bible to teach some other book that is not morally acceptable to the community, perhaps in order to improve the community by shocking or offending it. It is therefore possible that the future of community life in this country may depend on private schools and home schooling.