Week 26 (2025)
obsolescent faith & playlists, belonging & becoming safe, slippery slopes & machine 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
Time of the Child — Niall Williams — I stand by my description of his writing after re-visiting This Is Happiness: “It's as if the rooted community characters of Wendell Berry's novels met the playful and lyrical prose of Leif Enger while also mingling with Claire Keegan's understated-yet-piercing Irish storytelling.” Some quotes.
![Time of the Child: Winner of the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award [Book]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ROdc!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fba0446e9-6ab0-43bd-b15e-3e98de696057_1684x2560.jpeg "Time of the Child: Winner of the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award [Book]")
to read: essays, articles, newsletters
We're Holding The Blossoms Up High — Symon Brouwers, Dappled Things — “Maybe the question I am really thinking about and that am looking to answer is more particular: Who am I when I feel safe?”
- , Waymarkers — “not the end of your turbulent lifeflow but the culmination of it, fulfilled by the fullness”
Hints and Guesses — Leslie Gelzer-Govatos, Fare Forward — “But over time what has stood out to me is the physicality of the images. These are gates you can enter, roads you can walk on. Here is a river you can wade in and trees with fruit you can eat. Heaven isn’t merely described as some sense of being close to God—it is painstakingly fleshed out as a real place. It is a new place, different from any we’ve ever known and, I think intentionally, difficult to even imagine. But it will be home: more, and not less, embodied than any we’ve ever known.”
(related from her: Longing For Home, shared previously)
Overlooked Treasure — Susan Bigelow Reynolds, Commonweal — “If I seem overly fixated on generational music-consumption habits, it’s because the metaphor Smith offers us is actually far more interesting than he gives it credit for. Obsolescence may be the source of Millennial religious rejection, as he argues. But, I contend, it is also the key to understanding Millennial religious embrace.”
In Defense Of Playlists — Thomas Sieberhagen, Brewer Eberly, and Josh Weir, Mere Orthodoxy — “Burning CDs was a bit of a pain, but seeing your friend light up with delight over your song curation made the process worth it… What we hear is not only great, niche, weird, and wonderful new music, we also hear the love of our friends.”
- , —
“We enjoy our toil here, my son and I.
I build him a pool with a seat
In joy, his plump hands sand-dappled,
patting. Forever, sculpted: sculptors, ever.”
A Northern Warning — Jonathon Van Maren, Commonplace — “When suicide becomes healthcare and death a legitimate—and legal—response to suffering, society changes beyond all recognition.”
(related: this recent discussion on MAiD from Plough)
The Ideology of Machines: Medicine In Life and Death — a rare one from yours truly — “The gift of our bodies, the begetting of life, and the embrace of a creaturely death can all be warped into something beastly. In a grimly mocking way, that beast returns uncontrollable.”
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 twelfth week: Commercial Surrogacy by David Smolin, JD — “Intending parents are the paying customers of surrogacy, but there is controversy about how to characterize what they are paying for.”
to watch, listen to
Continuing On:
#5: Rethinking Complementarity presented by Abigail Favale, a recording from this recent conference. // “When [JPII] uses the terms masculinity and femininity, he does not apply these to traits that are abstracted away from embodiment, rather those terms refer back to the body, to our distinct ways of embodying human nature.” — Annnnnd now I realize I’ve mostly ever heard complementarity defined in ways abstracted away from the body, and that holds potential for some weird thinking surrounding femininity, married sexuality, etc.
As one fellow observer put it (after it was pointed out that many women have been attracted to the tradition that brought us Theology of the Body, for that very reason): “I mean, if you grow up as a woman in a culture which is engaged in a large-scale denial or avoidance of the nature and meaning of women’s bodies as such, and then you encounter a framework that for the first time offers a fairly complete account of that in accordance with the intuitively recognized truth about yourself… hard to see how that wouldn’t be compelling in a meaningful number of cases! and the best parts of TOB are, in my view, the inheritance of the Christian tradition in general, not just the Roman Catholic tradition in particular.”
Woven Well Podcast with
— Episodes 77-79 — When To Take a Pregnancy Test / Client Story: Carolyn (Single, Endometriosis) / Thyroid Health — “Your health matters right now regardless of goals for reproduction.” (Please don't settle for being gaslit.)
(more resources on female embodiment in the Big Ol' Compilation — now unlocked)
to glean from
Something Beautiful
Sunny Side Up + Wave Of You from Surfaces — Some of what you can find us listening to in the minivan in this hot weather. The boys think the sunny side up song is goofy, which… is not untrue.
Something Helpful
This Book Stand — If you have ever tried to read a book to three tiny children surrounding you while simultaneously either nursing or holding a baby… you will understand how much of a game changer this is. My mind did the exploding meme thing when I realized this could be a solution to (some) of the logistical reading chaos.
> I’ve mostly ever heard complementarity defined in ways abstracted away from the body
Now there's an insight. Of course there is also all manner of "complementarian" weirdness extrapolated "from" the body out there, but I think you're onto something in saying that it's mostly disembodied. Maybe that's why some of it has always landed so poorly with me as a woman with a non-stereotypical-woman's mind.
Homemade playlists are such a nostalgic throwback. This was a gut punch though: "When it comes to sharing music, it is a tragedy that we have allowed AI to take over the role of the best friend."
My husband also got a bookstand for late night and early morning baby holding this time around and he is a big fan :)