Week 22 (2025)
greedy jobs & educating boys, Nicea & the church in America, endometriosis, post-mortem procreation & the ick-factor
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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 Tenant Of Wildfell Hall — Anne Brontë — My second Brontë book of the year. Fascinating, heartbreaking, emboldening. If this is dubbed one of the “first feminist novels” I suppose we can cheer on the fact (emphasized in this explainer) that she drew out the double standard wherein boys were raised to experiment and revel in vice (becoming who you would expect) and girls were raised to be naively blind and shielded from such vices (becoming the vulnerable wives of such bad men).
This is the perfect time to roll out my recommendation for ’s phenomenal The Rights Of Women, perfect for parsing out the stark difference between first and second-wave feminisms. (We’re in the the third wave which is getting weird. For that you’ll want The Genesis of Gender… but I digress.)
to read: essays, articles, newsletters
- , The Home Front — “…we should rethink our emphasis on eliminating the gender pay gap, increasing women’s workforce participation as much as possible, and achieving a perfect 50-50 division of labor between mothers and fathers.”
Boys! Homeschooling Through High School —
— “We’ve had a lot of opportunity to see the results of the education system via friends’ children who attended Christian & public schools. I don’t think their parents had an easier time than we did. Their children had opportunities that ours didn’t, but the opposite is true also. They were not immune to problems and conflict because they were away from home all day. Raising children is hard work and sending a child to school is swapping one set of circumstances for another, each with their pros and cons.”Notes From The Emergency Room —
, —“And yet, the pattern seems to be:
loneliness makes grave our misery,
but love brings laughter from the tomb.”
The Not At All Secret History Of Nicaea — Susannah Black Roberts, Mere Orthodoxy — “In church, what you would hear was that the Most High God had become a human baby. This seemed… vulgar. Surely there was a more refined way to understand it all. And you weren’t Jewish so you had no real hangups about worshiping only the God of Abraham. Was there a way you could… like… maybe inform your Christian faith with some of the ideas of your Gnostic friends?”
Low Church In High Places — Brad East, The Public Discourse — “It could be argued that, in the last seventy-five years, every major public debate in the American church, including every occasion for schism or division, has been about sex. Divorce and remarriage, artificial contraception, births out of wedlock, working mothers, single parenting, the Pill, abortion, the ordination of women, sex outside marriage, same-sex marriage, gender identity and biological sex—these, and not arguments about Jesus or justification by faith, have dominated Christian discourse.”
(you don’t say — related from him: Goldilocks Protestantism, of which this is kind of the sequel and about which I freaked out a few weeks ago)
Post-Mortem Procreation & Further Thoughts On Post-Mortem Procreation —
, The Path Before Us — “This is all part of the strange dependency infants have on mothers, which is often eclipsed in conservatives’ moral reasoning about beginning-of-life ethics. Requiring post-mortem pregnancies to continue reduces the mother to a cipher, a host, who can be eclipsed and circumvented in order to directly care for the embryonic child.”(pair with: ’s In Defense Of The Ick Factor: “…I’d argue that a gut-sense that something is wrong is a moral intuition that should be paid very close attention. But as Leon Kass said, “Revulsion is not an argument.” The ick factor should be a starting point for moral/ethical deliberation, not a trump card. Both things can be true: People need more ick, and the people who have it should learn to articulate why.”)
Float — Lisa Nikkel, Comment — “I haven’t always been this present with my body. Chronic pain has a way of fragmenting reality. Endometriosis has been so painful at times that I abandoned my body and tried to hide in my brain. It was a coping technique that wasn’t sustainable. If not for the beautiful truth of the incarnation, I would still be trying to ignore my body. But I was never able to shake the reality that Jesus lived in his body. I knew that no matter how painful, I had to try and live in mine. After all, I am my body.”
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 eighth week: How Doctors Ignored My Stage-Four Endometriosis by Abigail Anthony — “Sometimes, I wonder how dramatically different the past decade would have been if a doctor—just one doctor—had properly identified my condition. After all, it should have been an easy diagnosis: The disease is about as common as diabetes, and I had exhibited nearly every symptom.”
(related: her pieces at The Free Press and Fairer Disputations, and conversation on the Natural Womanhood Podcast, shared previously)
to watch, listen to
Beginning to go sequentially through the recordings from the recent conference, True Genius: The Mission Of Women In Church & Culture. Some of these women have been intellectual mentors, if you will. One will find
, Abigail Favale, , and Angela Franks multiple times over in the Life Considered archives. They have helped make sense of certain tangles, forming contours and backbones in my understanding of issues surrounding women—in all our wholeness—in recent years. (I would have had there as well if it were up to me… but hey, you can also just read her worthwhile writing thinking through some of these topics as one theologically trained. And she’s been quite generous here on the Substack platform.)#1: The Church's Vision For Women presented by Angela Franks — Especially appreciated the three principles of 1) Essential Equality 2) Reproductive Asymmetry, emphasizing the generative differences in our bodies and 3) Symbolic Differentiation. We need all three held in proper tension, or things get wacky. “The bride is loved. It is she who receives love in order to love in return.” // “Women prophecy in their very being.”
(also from her: Why Does Higher Ed Throw Women Under The Bus? and this Exploration Of The Full Personhood Of Women, shared previously)
On Clerical Celibacy from Sean Luke and Gavin Ortlund, for ecumenical balance — Have you ever made rum drinks and enjoyed discussions on the celibacy of Catholic priests with your spouse on a Friday night? The history of its genesis as explained in the first video seems highly problematic, not gonna lie. Sean is kind of a hoot on his Youtube channel though, and a great communicator. (Move over slick aesthetics, Sean’s Underdog Aesthetics with a soul are SO IN.)
Continuing On:
Woven Well Podcast with
— Episodes 68-69 — Welcome, Elizabeth! and AMH: Can It Tell If You're Infertile?
(more resources on female embodiment in the Big Ol' Compilation — now unlocked)
to glean from
Something Beautiful
Forrest Frank — Woke up on a Saturday to my husband blasting this in the house, our 5 year old painting to it like he was vibing out in the art studio.
“How old is this guy?? With that hair and that vibe, he’s gotta be like 25.” “Nah he’s *checks internet notes* 30 years old. Been married for 5 years with a kid named Brodie.” “Okay so we aren’t actually that much older.”
Yes, we’ve been listening to this album in the minivan with our gaggle of kids. Ruslan talked about meeting him… and since I was listening to Ruslan’s own group Dream Junkies in the tumultuous year of 2016 as a twenty-something in San Antonio (yes there was a hip-hop phase of my life, I truly cannot believe I have a marriage and four kids sometimes lol) …it seems life has come full circle. I love that the top comment on that video is Forrest’s dad. The dude was homeschooled with a musical family! In this cultural moment, he seems to be for music what John Mark Comer has been for practical theology: filling specific voids, not necessarily a bad or cringey thing.
Something Helpful
Thoughts On Mentorship — From the perspective of mothers, inspired by the prompting of
. And maybe sign up for a free (or paid) account with Mere Orthodoxy ASAP, to read the future piece.
I've been recommending The Tenant of Wildfell Hall to young women for years. It contains such a wise and painful perspective on making hasty choices for a spouse based on appearance and feeling without weighing character and actions. Great recommendations as always, and love the obscure Monet paintings :)
Feminism as envisioned in Tenant of Wildfell is the kind I can get behind--one deeply informed by a Christian ethic. She nurses her husband in his final hours while still holding her boundaries? That's some heroic virtue. I love the Monet paintings you chose!
Also, Olivia's poem! Such a beautiful depiction of friendship. It reminded me of my friendship with my college roommate. "Laughter is a context we inhabit" Gorgeous.