Week 24 (2025)
cultivating church land & embracing our own, mangroves & Protestantism, assisted reproductive technologies & moral culpability in medicine
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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
- — This spot is reserved for books completed during the week, but I did not complete any this week. Big shocker, but four growing children is leaving less time for certain kinds of time I used to have! Trying to adjust. Come back in the future to hear me wax poetic about this one.
to read: essays, articles, newsletters
In Due Season — Chris Gregorio, Fare Forward — “In this way, the book conveys a truly sacramental outlook in a manner that a traditional theological treatise could not—because it embodies this outlook. Sacramentality is all about participation. Appreciating the eternal within the repetitive cycles of church and garden to their fullest extent possible (this side of the eschaton, that is) requires, more than anything, inhabiting those rhythms intentionally and being shaped by them. Leaves of Healing is clearly the fruit of this sort of participation, and it offers a picture of what this participation could look like, extending to us a compelling invitation to draw near to the eternal within the seasons of the Church and garden.”
Listening To The Land — John-Paul Heil, Commonweal — “Profit is not the standard for how well we are stewarding local land, nor, certainly, for the dignity of the land itself. Church land, like the sacraments, does not have to be “useful” in order to be good or beautiful… It is not a moral imperative that every parish in America start a farm, but it is vital that the U.S. Church begin to think about how to restore the connection between humus and human beings—between adamah (the Hebrew word for dirt) and Adam’s sons and daughters.”
Saving The Farm: How One Southern Family Has Long Championed The Radical Power Of Rural Life — Jason Kyle Howard w/ Mary Berry, Garden & Gun — “That is so wonderful that you’re seeing that because education in this country has been treated as a vehicle of upward mobility for way too long. And now we need education in homecoming—how we [have] to live in particular places and live well in them and do as little harm as possible and as much good as possible. And to be joyful in those places.”
Mangroves — Suzanne Underwood Rhodes, Dappled Things —
“But maybe the parable is, be silent
like the moon, like oysters breathing in the dark
making pearls.”The Greatly Exaggerated Death Of Protestantism — Daniel K. Williams, Mere Orthodoxy — “As for the conservative form of magisterial Protestantism in the United States, I suspect that its future will look a lot like its present state and its recent past – that is, it will continue to appeal to a small minority of college-educated (mostly white) evangelicals who find low-church evangelicalism too theologically vapid and are looking for something deeper… just as magisterial Protestantism has not disappeared in Abilene, it has not disappeared in the rest of the country either. Nor is it likely to do so. This should be both humbling and reassuring to those who are conservative magisterial Protestants.”
(related: this whole fluster began with Goldilocks Protestantism and continued with the sequel Low Church In High Places, both shared previously — apparently wherever Brad goes, I will follow)
- , Ekstasis —
“The Conversation begins to grow and to shine
and to take on what we lazily but rightly call “a Life of its own,””
Medical Miracle Or Abomination —
, Wanderings Through The Crimson Twilight — “This case is not about abortion, but as in every circumstance where the life of a fetal human is in tension with the state of his mother, it hums in the background.”(related: on Post-Mortem Procreation here and here, shared previously)
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 tenth week: Responsible Self-Governance & Assisted Reproductive Technologies by Carter Snead and Yuval Levin — “…it is useful to pause a moment to consider the complexity of the issue before moving forward. Yes, IVF has made it possible for many families to have the beautiful blessing of children. But the practice of IVF in America is also fraught with serious peril…”
(related: Snead’s book What It Means To Be Human, shared previously)
to watch, listen to
Continuing On:
#3: Modern Heresies About Women moderated by Abigail Favale, a recording from this recent conference — Strait bangers, as they say.
The Natural Womanhood Podcast with
— Season 4, Episode 1 — NeoFertility Has Entered The Chat: A Conversation w/ Dr. Monica Minjeur — “This [IVF] focus of how do we get more people pregnant is really missing the forest for the trees… If our intention is to get people healthier, than Restorative Reproductive Medicine is where every person needs to go, and unfortunately many people don’t know about it as an option. Sometimes their doctor has said look, IVF is your only option. Well, their own doctor might now know that Restorative Reproductive Medicine Exists.” // Also, male DNA affects the health of the placenta and much more, perhaps even preeclampsia…!? Actually, now that I think about it, the male component was talked about some in Abigail Tucker’s fascinating book Mom Genes.Woven Well Podcast with
— Episodes 73-74 — Continuous Mucus and Client Story: Karlyn (Advocating).
(more resources on female embodiment in the Big Ol' Compilation — now unlocked)
to glean from
Something Beautiful
Repeat from a couple weeks ago, but simply going further into Forrest Frank’s discography. Notably, California Cowboy is just the right thing for warm weather in the minivan with my husband (and all our offspring) on the weekend… because part of me is still a Basic Girl at heart.
Something Helpful
To influence the best I know how: Become a subscriber to Mere Orthodoxy and you, too, could help save Protestantism through conversations in the Discord. It only took being lured by aspirations of robust discussion on procreation, fertility & sexual ethics for me to get there. And honestly, it was perhaps the most honest, thorough, and fruitful dialogues I’ve seen of outside of Catholic spaces—averse as we’ve historically been to discussing and thinking through the moral categories of these topics in any serious way (a compounding problem). While hoping it continues, I’m somewhat compelled to make outlined meeting notes. (And what says Summer Read-Along like this book to round things out? I’ll think about it. In any case… I’ve already bought it.)
Reading the Mary Berry interview after finishing Hannah Coulter and driving through the American heartlands was very timely. Being able to place the lands that Wendell and Mary were talking about really gives face to the threat farms are facing today. Thanks for sharing!
Straight bangers made me LOL…will absolutely be checking that out 😆 also these Van Gogh paintings make me somehow so nostalgic, beautiful!