Week 15 (2025)
tending our souls & hearing God, suffering & finding our Home, compassion for the sexes & humanizing medicine
Click title to open in browser. You can reply directly to this email if received in your inbox.
to read: books
Great Lent — Fr. Alexander Schmemann — A helpful, beautiful primer from the Orthodox tradition, but beneficial for any Christian. As with For The Life Of The World, was amused by his friendly but matter of fact comments toward Western Christianity - whether Catholic or Protestant.
“As we make the first step into the "bright sadness" of Lent, we see—far, far away—the destination. It is the joy of Easter, it is the entrance into the glory of the Kingdom. And it is this vision, the foretaste of Easter, that makes Lent's sadness bright and our lenten effort a "spiritual spring." The night may be dark and long, but all along the way a mysterious and radiant dawn seems to shine on the horizon.”
“Thus on Easter we celebrate Christ’s Resurrection as something that happened and still happens to us. For each one of us received the gift of that new life and the power to accept it and to live by it. It is a gift which radically alters our attitude toward everything in this world, including death. It makes it possible for us joyfully to affirm: "Death is no more!" Oh, death is still there, to be sure and we still face it and someday it will come and take us. But it is our whole faith that by His own death Christ changed the very nature of death, made it a passage—a "passover," a "Pascha"—into the Kingdom of God, transforming the tragedy of tragedies into the ultimate victory. "Trampling down death by death," He made us partakes of His Resurrection. This is why at the end of the Paschal Matins we say: "Christ is risen and life reigneth! Christ is risen and not one dead remains in the grave!”
to read: essays, articles, newsletters
To Go Forward, We Must Go Backward —
, Mere Orthodoxy — “How can we tend to the weighty matters of the world when we can’t tend to our own soul before God? Thomas À Kempis wrote in The Imitation of Christ, “Blessed are the ears that are attuned to the soft whisper of God’s voice and that ignore the buzzing of the world.” Maybe the word we need for today is simply that.”Suffering & The Melody Of Thin Places — yours truly — Was too shy to blast to email this rare long-form post, composed hastily and emotionally four days postpartum as it was. Couldn’t not write it though.
- , Planting Sycamore Trees — “I have some house rules, my love.
And they are quite simple, but most find
quite hard.In this home, we only rest in what is good,
What is noble, what is true, what is pure.
I want all of you here, you see.
Dwelling
with me.
If you make me your home.The place where dirty feet kick up to rest,
And masks come off,
and pretenses cease.”
In response to
’s The Right Has Forgotten Feeling, I found these two posts intriguing and helpful with the different angles taken. In particular, I heartily endorse Alan’s awareness of the different but equally detrimental plight of men, spurred on by so many aspects of a modern world steeped in expressive individualism… which Alan devastatingly-yet-hopefully explored in this book.The technological and social implications are many, which I briefly mused on a while back in this weekly post, spurred on by an interview Andy Crouch did on the gender divides in technology. It brought to mind the work of
and others on men and boys, and and many others when it comes to girls.As I put it in here (specifically regarding healthy family formation), which is something Freya is getting at with the awful relational landscape out there: “Whatever solutions are offered to the problem of marriages failing to form will also need to acknowledge the gender-specific yet interdependent nature of modern struggles.”
Appealing To Moral Sentiments In An Amoral Age —
, You Are Not Your Own Substack — “I suspect a non-trivial percentage of young men turn to pornography as a maladaptive coping mechanism for their feelings of anxiety, depression, and inadequacy. Everyone feels anxious. Everyone feels inadequate. It’s the contemporary condition.”- , Stuff I’m Thinking About — “As it happens, I have more than a passing familiarity with troubled young women. And one of the things I have learned - and this may seem strange to anyone without similar experience - is that people sometimes begin to love their own troubles. More, sometimes, than they love their own lives.”
Humanizing Medicine — Margaret S. Chisolm, Plough — “These courses are all grounded in Tyler VanderWeele’s model of human flourishing and taught entirely in art museums, where students use art to explore how family, religious community, education, and work are pathways to a flourishing life.”
(related: Brewer Eberly speaking at the Veritas Forum, shared previously — plus Eberly’s essays in the archives, along with physicians and )
Do You Feel Dismissed Or Dignified? —
, Fertile Faith —
”Why were these doctors unwilling to go just one step further to honor her experience (and unresolved symptoms) and get to the answers she deserved? Why are we shuffling couples along to IVF when there are major health issues — treatable health issues — that are standing in their way of pregnancy and lifelong health? As overwhelming as it was to receive so many diagnoses, she is also thrilled. She has answers. She has a plan. She has hope for her longterm health. And, ultimately, she felt heard, valued, and respected.”Treating Infertility: The New Frontier Of Reproductive Medicine — Ethics & Public Policy Center — The perfect collaborative endeavor to encompass a good chunk of what I’ve been trying to get at here (with some familiar, overlapping contributors). Our approaches to the complexities of the fertile body come with both acute and widespread physiological, social, and moral ramifications. What a gift that this collective effort was accomplished to explain as much. I’m reading through sequentially. This third week: An Overview Of Restorative Reproductive Medicine by Marguerite Duane, MD (I was introduced to her work in this episode of Managing Your Fertility a few years back… and I see she’s been back on a couple times more recently to discuss hormonal contraception and IVF alternatives)
to watch, listen to
No rhyme or reason to these, besides the fact that I had to labor from the start in the hospital, and let me tell you… I had a lot of time on my hands before things got crackin’. Who can know the mind of the Woman Trying To Take Her Mind Off The Monotony Of Hours And Hours In A Hospital Room? (Destroyer of the Gods was not the best vibe.)
This Conversation between
andThis Conversation with
on the Journey Home show
Continuing On:
The Natural Womanhood Podcast with
— Season 3, Episode 7 — You Need To Teach Your Daughter About Her Cycles: Here’s How with Christina Valenzuela, creator of Pearl & Thistle (in the now-unlocked compilation… along with some other resources for mothers and daughters, or younger girls!)Woven Well Podcast with
— Episode 54 — Practical New Year Fertility Resolutions
(more resources on female embodiment in the Big Ol' Compilation — now unlocked)
to glean from: tip, product, resource
Beautiful Books For Easter Baskets from
— Where do we click the Buy The Entire Bundle button?EveryPsalm playlist from Poor Bishop Hooper — Here’s their snazzy website for the project, including an intro video and some lovely resources to accompany the music.
So many good and thought-provoking links! Thank you for sharing my booklist :) I hope you're getting to snatch some rest here and there!
Congrats on your newest family addition!
And I enjoyed reading through Freya's piece and your accompaniments... pieces like these make me feel like my micro-generation was on the last boat out, in a way. I recognize all these problems and warning signs from my young adulthood, but the world wasn't nearly as polarized (or at least, not openly so) and situations weren't as devastating.