Week 19 (2025)

small magazines & ecumenism, Joseph & our physical selves, human education & pushing back extinction

Click title to open in browser. You can reply directly to this email if received in your inbox.

Enjoy this collection of digitally scrapbooked resonances… this attempt to weave unexpected connections… this Imaginary, Weekly Magazine I’d Like To (Or Need To) Read gleaned from other magazines, journals, writers, creators of good things. Perhaps it is many things. I can’t guarantee a niche (my life story, amiright) but I can guarantee the equivalent of a satisfying charcuterie board. Comments are imagined to be around a conversation table. Cheers.

to read: books

• The Enchanted April — Elizabeth Von Arnim — Thoughts and quotes.

  (Literary Life discussions parts one and two.)

• The Anglican Way — Thomas McKenzie — Thoughts.

to read: essays, articles, newsletters

• The Intellectual Virtues Of The Small Magazine — Jeff Reimer, Comment — “On the one end is academic research, which for all the good work that happens (and it does happen! I’m not here to take down the academy!) tends toward professionalization and specialization and fussiness and footnotes and bibliographies. On the other end is the reactive world of hot takes and culture-warring and mindless pleasure-seeking and ease. I was burnt out on the one and had no patience for the other. But here was this small, modest magazine navigating a middle way. I loved it.”

  (and if you’re me, or like Michael Scott when referring to inside jokes: *I love them… would love to be part of one some day* you simply create a newsletter primarily out of your favorite parts of such small and modest magazines, journals, organizations.)

• Is Ecumenism For Evangelical Squishes? — Andrew Koperski, Ad Fontes “These are all major hurdles, the kind that make a pessimist like myself shrug and say, “Ah, well. Better luck in the eschaton.” Even so, Irenaeus’ irenic approach to Easter reinforces for me that the desire for unity is not necessarily modern, evangelical, low-church, “squishy,” or for the otherwise theologically unserious. In reality, ancient churchmen “bent” important liturgical and institutional lines—lines that other contemporaries thought worthy of enforcement even by excommunication—in the interest of catholicity.”

  (This was Baumeister catnip - down to infant baptism, the dates of Easter… as my husband had recently come across Bede on the subject… as well as Carl Trueman critiquing Gavin Ortlund’s book, among other things. It made for interesting conversation fodder on the way to church — related: this conversation with Brad East and this essay from Jeff Reimer, shared previously - despite feeling of both that *I’m in this picture and I don’t like it*)

The Lock - John Constable

• The Father's Work —

  Nate Marshall
  , DiacoNate —

  "Lessons learned

  virtue earned

  within His father's trade

  Hardened hands

  from grain's demands

  stretch forth to mankind's aid”

  (related: his Blue Scholar project, but also Anglicanism: Apprenticeship To The Carpenter King, shared previously)

• An Age Of Extinction Is Coming. Here’s How To Survive. — Ross Douthat, New York Times — “Have the child. Practice the religion. Found the school. Support the local theater, the museum, the opera or concert hall, even if you can see it all on YouTube. Pick up the paintbrush, the ball, the instrument. Learn the language — even if there’s an app for it. Learn to drive, even if you think soon Waymo or Tesla will drive for you. Put up headstones, don’t just burn your dead. Sit with the child, open the book, and read. As the bottleneck tightens, all survival will depend on heeding once again the ancient admonition: I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live.”

• Con Academy — Jeffrey Bilbro, Hedgehog Review — “Why do these fancy technologies fail to improve student learning? Because the real barrier to educating students is not a lack of access to information but a lack of wise, caring mentors who can motivate them to do the hard work of thinking… Time and again in his work with Microsoft, in India and elsewhere, Toyama found that “new technology never made up for a lack of good teachers or good principals…. If anything, [existing] problems were exacerbated by the technology, which brought its own burdens.”

  (related:

  Brad Littlejohn
  ’s new book endeavor based on this previously shared essay - of which the six pillars of conservatism are a particularly helpful aid to most current tech discussions - extending to my interest in the ways in which ignoring and overriding proper limits of the body, particularly our fertility and sexuality—often through medical and internet tech—have proved destructive for body, soul, society.)

Weymouth Bay (Bowleaze Cove) - John Constable

• The Singing Tree — Christina Brown, The Anselm Society — “Our physical forms aren’t merely houses for souls any more than trees are houses for violins. Rather, our molecules, our DNA, and our corporeal composition are essential parts of who we are and will be. Would our God have come to us, given Himself our flesh and ascended to the Father with the scars of mortality if He didn’t value our bodies?”

• I Want To Lose An Eye To Heaven — Graham Varnell, Ekstasis —

  “Oh, but with my other eye,
  I become whole.
  peering past this earth-colored
  curtain—Eden’s lost gate,
  a world to come.”

• 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 seventh week: A Couple's Journey To Healing Infertility by Marie Meaney, PhD and Joseph Meaney, PhD — “Informing them of their chances of carrying a child to term if they turn to the Creighton Model and NaProTechnology and other methods of restorative reproductive medicine rather than IVF would be the honest and compassionate thing to do. The current status quo of near-total ignorance of alternatives to IVF among medical professionals is simply unacceptable.”

Cloud Study, Horizon of Trees - John Constable

to watch, listen to

Continuing On:

• The Natural Womanhood Podcast with

  Grace Emily Stark
  — Season 3, Episode 11 — What It’s Like to Lead a Fertility Awareness Support Group on a College Campus — “…how they’re experiences would have been different growing up if they’d been given this information sooner. One of the main themes coming up was the overwhelming notion that we are actually being conditioned to ignore our bodies while growing up.” // “In the middle of the presentation, one of our members goes: oh my gosh, now I understand why we’re supposed to have reverence for our bodies… they’re so cool, so intricate, made so intentionally.” // “We approached it from the standpoint of literacy, body literacy, and how people…. when they are illiterate are way more easy to use, and control, and abuse…”

• Woven Well Podcast with

  Caitlin Estes
  — Episodes 62-63 — Body Talk: Kid Conversations and Postpartum/Breastfeeding Nutritional Needs — “You are setting yourself up as the trusted person that is safe to ask questions to and will be honest with them in answering those questions. And you’re setting them up with what you wish you’d had growing up, or maybe repeating what you had growing up if you had a great example…” // And yes, take your postpartum nutrition needs seriously!

(more resources on female embodiment in the Big Ol' Compilation — now unlocked)

Water Meadows near Salisbury - John Constable

to glean from: tip, product, resource

• NEW WENDELL BERRY NOVEL (this October) — Thanks to Jeffrey Bilbro for alerting to this news.

• NEW ZACH WINTERS MUSIC + POEMS (some time in the future) — I was quite happy to read through and give some initial feedback on the poetry collection, upon being requested. The way

  Zach Winters
  describes finding those “sympathetic to the cause” made me smile, as I’ve been sympathetic to his creative cause for a decade now. Alas, I’ve only experienced a live performance once, opening for Josh Garrels somewhere around San Antonio, Texas maybe in 2015? Anyways, here’s the last collection of poetry which is full of treasures.

• New Categories — Had some messages asking about resources both for teaching daughters/girls body literacy in a structured way and also about miscarriage. (The latter truly just contains the first items that immediately came to mind in this particular instance. But there are certainly many other things that have been be said, written, or created to move people toward care—both practical and personal—of body and soul. Would love to hear them.)

A Church Porch - John Constable

to look back on

Week 19 (2024)

Week 19 (2023)

Week 19 (2022)

Week 19 (2021)

Week 19 (2019)