News from the Front Porch Republic: Tending and Attending
Greetings from the Porch,
As June wanes, the raspberry bushes in our garden are prospering. A friend unexpectedly gifted me with a jar of black raspberry jam last week, too, so I am abundant in raspberries in variety of forms. What more can I ask for?
The abundance of raspberries recalls to my mind various family stories about my grandfather waking early to weed and “whisper to” the raspberries in his backyard garden patch. Whether or not he verifiably conversed with the plants, I’m not sure - but such stories give an image of patient tending not unlike the varieties of tending discussed on the Porch this week.
-
Jeremy Larson considers the cultivation and stewardship of young minds in his review of Phillip Donnelly’s book on classical Christian education, The Lost Seeds of Learning, which seeks to centralize language of cultivation instead of manipulation, of words as “seeds” instead of as “tools.” What does a well-tended landscape of Christian education look like?
-
Christian MacNamara foregrounds a film that focuses on a small and struggling but essential and enlivening neighborhood bookstore in Massachusetts. Tending such places - where community may be fostered “in the context of a shared love of the written word” - is taxing but, as the film reveals, rewarding.
-
Austin Jepsky asks us to attend to Irving Petite, a “largely forgotten” writer who himself attended to the “local scale of life” in his small place of Issaquah, Washington. Petite’s and Jepsky’s examples of attention to local places and histories encourage consideration and imitation.
-
Finally, in collaboration with Plough Magazine, Dr. Katherine Hayhoe converses with John Murdock about tending to the climate and to our culture. Hayhoe invites us to consider: “How can we help others today and let the future take care of itself? We are very much called to focus not on the past, not on the future, but on what we can do today as the body of Christ in the world.”
The other day I caught a line of Seamus Heaney’s Glanmore Sonnets and have been since thinking over the sequence’s questions of cultivation, art, and the good life, etc. These few lines from the first sonnet especially stick out to me:
Now the good life could be to cross a field
And art a paradigm of earth new from the lathe
Of ploughs. My lea is deeply tilled.
Old ploughsocks gorge the subsoil of each sense
And I am quickened with a redolence
Of farmland as a dark unblown rose.
Wait then…