Week 27 (2023)
the liberal arts & Dorothy Sayers, beautiful cities & compost lessons, self-creation at church & The Need To Be Whole, the paradox of choice, localism & raising children at home
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reading: books
Sometimes Women Lie About Being Okay, Rachel Joy Welcher — paperback — Simply wonderful.
Timothy Keller: His Spiritual And Intellectual Formation, Collin Hansen — audio — Excellent.
reading: essays, articles, newsletters
Pleasure In The City — Tiffany Owens Reed, Strong Towns — “Fast-forwarding to where we are now, perhaps we could call the kind of architecture and city design we have now “Efficientalism” or “Commercialism”'…It’s not as philosophically driven as Modernism, but it mirrors it in its disregard for our need for pleasure and beauty.”
Why Women Need The Liberal Arts — Jessica Hooten Wilson, The Scandal Of Reading — “When people ask why women should need the liberal arts, they are assuming that women are less than human.”
Reflections On Dorothy Sayers’ Work, Life, And Lost Motherhood — Nadya Williams, Current — “Why work? And, especially, why do creative work, such as writing? Sayers’ answer continues to resonate: to love something greater and more beautiful than oneself; to love other people, past and present, through telling ideas that matter. The love of work as the love of the self can, at the end, only take one deeper into the trough of despair.”
Big Isn't Beautiful Either — Joshua Bowman, Law & Liberty — “Furthermore, thoughtful localists do not see themselves as defending some mass movement or ideology. They are animated by a love of a particular place, with particular people and traditions.”
The Paradox At The Grocery Store — Adam Fleming Petty, The Atlantic — Team Aldi over here.
(related: Practicing Temperance At The Grocery Store, shared previously)
Raising Young Children At Home — Katharine B. Stevens, American Compass — “All the while, the upbringing of young children is increasingly framed as an especially time-consuming household chore that can be outsourced to paid strangers, like housecleaning or washing the car.”
(related: Reframing Family Policy and Supporting American Homemakers from Ivana Greco, shared previously. and IFS research on child care.)
Patriotic Work: Wendell Berry’s The Need to be Whole: Patriotism And The History Of Prejudice — Allan Carlson, Front Porch Republic — “So, what should now be done? Berry insists that race prejudice and the sufferings attached to it should not be seen as special and isolated problems. Rather, they are aspects of a greater tragedy involving the destruction of land and human community, which has left Americans as a scattered, uprooted and unhealthy people.”
Lessons From The Compost Heap — Nathaniel Marshall, The Blue Scholar — “How Boethius helps us see the value in failed attempts at the Good, and how those failed attempts energize future growth.”
My Church, My Choice — Hannah Anderson, Christianity Today — “In fairness to him, the majority of low church traditions—including the one I was reared in—hold this same individualist assumption… Without a denominational progenitor, they embody self-determination and self-creation at an organizational level.”
The Point Of Church Isn't To Make You Feel Whole — Jake Meador, Mere Orthodoxy — “…because evangelical liturgy centers on individual experience, former evangelicals coming into the PCA or ACNA carry those assumptions with them into their new ecclesial homes, and this precisely inverts the way that we ought to think about church life and public worship.”
watching/listening
Matthew Stewart on Mars Hill Audio Journal (nothing to do with that one) — This is behind a paywall but I’m sharing in case any of y’all haven’t heard of this audio journal that does really fantastic interviews. I always recognize some of the names. My husband and I usually listen together every now and then. This time we were driving past cornfields with some life ponderings in tow. This guy was saying things that resonated, but in the context of the life & writings of Wallace Stegner. Check it out if you want to live up to even part of Wendell Berry’s ideals of membership (or know you don’t) and want to find out about the helluva phrase “The Amputated Present”.
Continuing On:
Verity with Phylicia Masonheimer — Episode 95-96 — How Do I Know I’m Interpreting the Bible Correctly? and The Mean Old Testament God
100 Days Of Dante — Paradiso, Cantos 11-18
etc: product, tip, resource
Snowmelt To Roots — Zach Winters has been a constant favorite, a melodic & lyrical comfort, the background to my life for many, many years. (The same goes for Josh Garrels’ music… and my husband definitely finds opportunity to poke fun at me for both.) He’s got a current fundraiser for what I know will be two lovely projects of music and poetry.
The people over at The Rabbit Room generously published one of the poems.
remembering
One Year Ago:
Two Years Ago:
This Week:
Haley, what book is the Windows Down poem from?