News from the Front Porch Republic (copy)
Greetings from the Porch,
I got a good report this week from Jay Wright about the local porch in the Dallas area:
The Dallas Area Porch had its second quarterly gathering and discovered a whole new population of Porchers from neighboring Tarrant County (Ft. Worth). Delighted in the Other, we enjoyed our mutual company and engaged in an earnest and lively discussion focused on place, recovering multi-generational communities, subsidiarity, ambiguous complementarianism and Christian spirituality of the Eastern Orthodox character. St. Gregory the Theologian, Dorothy Day, and de Tocqueville were all voices referenced. We look forward to our next gathering after Pascha / Easter.
- In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays about matter, gurus, and lambing.
- Ethan Jones responds to AI and the increasing pressure to outsource human activities to machines with a set of commitments: "this year, I want to live a cheerful life that embodies praise for the inefficient. I choose to celebrate what’s not streamlined and commoditized. I hope to revel in something that’s not urgent, not immediately profitable. What follows is not a system, a plan, or a strategy. It’s a litany of the goods I want to praise."
- K.E. Colombini considers cartography and homecoming: "Older and wiser, I have long learned that for all the times I wanted to visit far-away places, there is no place like home, even if it is only here, in the state next-door to Dorothy’s Kansas. Thinking about this Tolkien map above my desk, I remember that, for all their adventures, the hobbits always longed for the Shire—even though those who returned then had to scour it from the evil that befell it."
- Mark Botts reflects on someone who built a team of employees based on his desire to work with people of character: "the President requested each member be part of his team because they not only met a need the company had but gave him the impression that they were people of character."
- Paul Krause argues that Virgil has much to teach about Christian love: "One of the most common Virgilian themes aligns with this theological conviction: love is the most powerful force in the world."
- Doug Stowe urges schools to form students who can attend to the world and work with their hands: "I’d noticed teaching woodworking K-12 for 20 years (I retired in 2021) that when students are deeply engaged in doing real things, the phones were put away, not by my insistence, but because they are in the way and offer less appeal than what my students discover in doing real things."
This fall, I read Alan Jacobs’s The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography with a small reading group. It is a fascinating little book that prompted some good conversations. Jacobs begins his narrative by highlighting just how dramatic was the change that Cranmer orchestrated in shifting public prayer and the communion service to English given that “Christian worship in England had been conducted in Latin for a thousand years or more.”
It had for centuries been customary for laypersons to receive Communion rarely, perhaps once a year, and in “one kind,” but Cranmer was determined to make Communion much more frequent, to have it administered “in both kinds,” and to create an English liturgy that would explain to laypersons what precisely they were and were not doing when they consumed the elements. On Easter Sunday 1548, by order of the Archbishop of Canterbury, this English order for Communion became mandatory throughout England. The Latin Mass that had, in its various farms, been the only Mass in England for nearly a millennium was at that one stroke abolished.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro