Week 13 (2024)
the Great Lion & enchanted living, Dante & infinite desire, Grilling Man at the end of history, remote work, place & living outside the box
(Click title to open in browser, on the Substack website)
to read: books
The Magician's Nephew — C.S. Lewis — “Oh, Adam’s sons, how cleverly you defend yourselves against all that might do you good!”
Cultural Christians In The Early Church — Nadya Williams — Fascinating. History matters, folks!
to read: essays, articles, newsletters
Now! Go In And See For Yourself! — Gregory Vigliotta, Dappled Things — “The beauty of the story is that one doesn’t need to comprehend all the precepts of Christian Theology to imagine what it is like to encounter the “Great Lion.” …I discovered a way into a pedagogy that invites the imagination and curiosity for a deeper learning experience.”
How To Live Like A Narnian — Brian Brown, Anselm Society (audio version available) — “Like Puddleglum said, to the Enemy, we might just look like babies playing a game. But by the grace of God, babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks the enchanted world hollow.”
A World Full Of Signs — Susannah Black Roberts, Plough — “This is what it is all pointing toward, what all those signs have been trying to tell us all along: the marriage of heaven and earth. It’s as though we, the Bride, are pulling all of it, all the snails and woods, geese and galaxies, along with us as we walk up the aisle toward the Bridegroom.”
It's Dante's Hell—We're Just Living In It — Nick Ripatrazone, National Endowment For The Humanities — “His grand vision of this world and beyond, articulated in the La Commedia, so permeates our modern lives that perhaps we are never merely introduced to Dante; we simply better understand how we have lived among his ideas.”
Innovation And Infinite Desire — Jason Peters, Ford Forum — “It is a fantasy of the industrial episode—that brief blip in human history that began with the Industrial Revolution but is now showing signs of congestive heart failure, complete with the attendant edema below the knees—that infinite desires can be satisfied indefinitely in a finite space.”
Grilling Man At The End Of History — Stephen G. Adubato, Mere Orthodoxy — “The suburban monoculture that eschews the healthy balance of self-reliance and communal dependence in favor of outsourcing solutions to distant bureaucratic entities will eventually suffocate the most human of impulses. The “horizontal” ideal of well-being is incapable of fully flattening out the yearning to reach for ideals that would have us gazing vertically toward the infinity of the cosmos, and of restraining our inner Augustinian restlessness.”
(related: What Happens When A Community Comes Together and The Intimacy Of Imbalance)
Finding A Home Field: A Review Of In Thought Word And Seed — Matt Miller, Front Porch Republic — “If I am therefore departing one field in which I hoped to do some good work in place, I hope to deepen my practice as an English professor who lives and reads in place, bringing my reading and my other work in the world closer together in the most literal, physical sense.”
The Conservative Case For Remote Work — Frank DeVito, The Public Discourse — “For many workers, remote work is not primarily about cutting out commuting time or luxuriously working in sweatpants, but about a return to a family-centered economic life. This is about much more than an equation to properly achieve “work–life balance”; it is about an opportunity to rediscover a properly ordered life.”
(related: Designing For Integrated Lives, shared previously)
Life Outside The Box: An Interview With Nadya Wiliams — Kerri Christopher, Cultivating Clarity — There’s much food for thought here from Nadya Williams, author of Cultural Christians In The Early Church… as well as many previously shared essays.
to watch, listen to
Cultural Christians In The Early Church — Nadya Williams — An into to the book and her work. I love hearing authors talk about their work!
Continuing On:
The Commonplace with Autumn Kern — How To Organize Your Library (Like A Christian) and Planning A Charlotte Mason Kindergarten Year
to glean from: tip, product, resource
Plenty of y’all may not care, but I have to share a clothing storage solution that made me happier than anticipated:
This cabinet organizer thing has magnetic doors that are easily accessible to—for instance—three little boys four and under. I didn’t like the idea of them opening and closing heavy dresser drawers, which they wouldn’t be able to see inside anyway, to find and put away clothes (we have enough injuries as it is). Why are we still putting regular dressers in tiny people’s rooms?? This is the future.
to look back on
This Week:
You can reply directly to this email if received in your inbox — I always enjoy hearing from y’all that way.
I finish all my open tabs on Sunday. You make me open them all up again on Monday. You are a master curator ; ) Thank you for sharing so much good stuff!
So much good stuff in here!! I'm excited to order a copy of Nadya's book, and I wouldn't know about things like Bookshop if it wasn't for you.
(also... we just do laundry baskets :) - the girls actually just keep all of their clothes in the same laundry basket in the closet. They can always find what they need, as long as it's been purged relatively recently. But that's a decidedly "Hinds-y" solution. I love the kid-friendly dresser!)