News from the Front Porch Republic: Practicing Virtuous Forms
Greetings from the Porch,
Thanks to yesterday’s Supreme Court decision, as well as this past week’s posts at FPR, I’ve been thinking about what virtue in action means. After a ruling that honors the truth of personhood, we now must live and act virtuously, in line with the truths we hold dear. As a recent article in First Things attests, this decision marks merely “the end of the beginning of the greatest civil rights struggle of our time.” Here begins the work of virtue in action.
FPR has published a variety of moving pieces on abortion over the years, but one piece that struck me as particularly relevant is Mark Mitchell’s argument for adoption as a way to put the virtue of hospitality into action against abortion. He writes: “Hospitality is not merely the sharing of meals. Consider, for instance, how the seemingly intractable abortion debate changes when we consider it through the eyes of hospitality. Abortion is a striking instance of inhospitableness, for who could be more in need of hospitable care than an unborn child? A hospitable culture cares for the weakest and the most frail. A hospitable culture, in the context of abortion, is a culture of adoption.”
Beyond the Supreme Court, this week on the Porch saw several other considerations regarding how we might cultivate virtuous forms of living - whether those forms involve memory and history, communal values and career aspirations, or literature and ministry.
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What is the right way to go about remembering? Robert Thornett explores this very question in his essay on Nietzche and the 1619 project, which, Thornett contends, “abuses remembering to promote forgetting America’s history of reconciliation and unity on race, so as to frame the nation’s identity as irredeemably stained and systemically, irreparably flawed.”
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Plagued by peers who seem to prioritize future LinkedIn connections over future families, I ask what might motivate dwindling desires for home and community among college students, especially Christian and/or conservative students. I argue, too, that our goals require “active participation in the communal and familial life we strive to conserve.”
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Cole Hartin surveys Austin Carty’s book The Pastor’s Bookshelf, asking, in the process, why those in ministry ought cultivate skills in and tastes for literature. He concludes: “I hope pastors read this book. But more than that, I hope it finds its way into the hands of examining chaplains and board elders, of district superintendents and seminary principals. They can do much to shape a culture where pastor-readers become more common.”