Week 27 (2025)

following the way & saying the prayers, protecting children & facing the blue, seeing people & aiming toward health

Jul 02, 2025

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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 Deep-Rooted Marriage — Dan B. Allender and Steve Call — Allender somehow, miraculously (it is difficult to do), intertwines his therapeutic wisdom with a thoroughly Christian lense in a way that is so gracious and beautiful. I cried a some while listening and believe me… this doesn’t happen often. (I think The Heart of Man film included in this compilation was how I first encountered him?)
This interview was a good taste of how he seamlessly weaves language of health and wholeness with the truths of scripture. It’s beautiful and I am in awe. Grateful for the ways he pushes back darkness and invites the light. I’m grateful, also, for all the agrarian and plant imagery which Christ himself was fond of. Perhaps there’s a reason for it our soul needs.
In any case, I loved hearing them (and their wives at times) both read this book.

The Deep-Rooted Marriage: Cultivating Intimacy, Healing, and Delight [Book]

Shop my booklists

to read: essays, articles, newsletters

An Agrarian Prayer —
Hadden Turner
, Front Porch Republic — “Who knows how many harvests throughout history have been sustained by saints praying for their daily bread? Who knows how many farmers have been supported by children uttering this most simple but far from simplistic prayer by their bedside? The Lord knows. And He knows too that the Lord’s Prayer is just what this world, its soil, and its creatures need.”
All I Need Is To Walk 15 Miles Per Day —
Dixie Dillon Lane
, The Hollow — “You see, on the Camino, there is no map. I mean, sure, you can buy a map. But that’s not how this Way is navigated… Your job is only to walk and to follow the arrows when they appear and to take what comes to you for the gift that it is.”

(…and now realizing I put side-by-side two folks I had an *actual, flesh and blood* conversation with side-by-side with my husband almost two years ago. A fleeting evening, yet a concrete moment in time I thoroughly enjoyed. Since then I’ve enjoyed hearing their work in their own voice and way of speaking, like the humans we all are. Sometimes I get emotional at just how much I *relished* that rare weekend conference experience, for this currently-limited mother of young ones. Just a delight to meet, chat with, and listen to many people I respect from afar. My most Life Considered experience to date, for sure. I wish for more of them.)

*St. Stephen's Church, Lower Norwood - Camille Pissarro*

for the [desecrated] body compilation:

Historic Ruling For America's Children and Families — Michael Toscano, Institute For Family Studies / The Internet Comes of Age —
Brad Littlejohn
, Commonplace — “All of these measures reflect a return of the commonsense conviction that the barrier between adulthood and childhood that we recognize in the real world should apply to the digital world as well. Until now, that conviction has been thwarted by the technologically obsolete Reno and Ashcroft decisions that ruled most online age verification unconstitutional. This decision at last removes that barrier.”
(see also
Freya India
’s The Mass Trauma Of Porn in case you need any more explanation or reminders of what the reality on the ground currently is)
I Face The Blue — Jacqueline Cleaveland, Ekstasis —
“Holy water raises up
my tangled hair
as if I am being painted
alive.
Starry starry night,
I have been baptized.”

*The Marne at Chennevieres - Camille Pissarro*

What Is Health? — Peter Mommsen, Plough — “Thinking of health as membership in community promises one great advantage over defining health as individualistic self-optimization: it transcends the physical infirmity that must inevitably find us all. Through building relationships of love with others and with God, health becomes available to those who need it most: for example, those with chronic conditions, those with disabilities, and those who are already old. Or, as in my grandfather’s case, those who are dying.”
(thanks to
Sarah Reardon
for recommending the piece as one that dovetails with my recent essay)
A Little Testimony —
Sarah Rowell
, Blind Mule Blog — “I cried that day simply because I felt like someone took the time to see us, as God does.”
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 thirteenth week: Preimplantation Genetic Testing and In Vitro Gametogenesis by Aaron Kheriaty, MD — “Those who are ready to embrace this brave new world of human reproduction seem incapable of thinking deeply about the seriously harmful likely effects on children, on the relationship between generations, on family structure, and on an individual’s genetic identity.”

to watch, listen to

The Honour of God At The Beginning And End Of Life presented by
Matthew Lee Anderson
— WOW, if there was ever a talk to fill in some gaps by putting a theological accent on my recent essay (which took a slightly different angle), it would be this. I was pleasantly surprised to see someone recently share the recordings from this conference, and when I saw this particular one just days after publishing my piece, well… let’s just say this is the kind of serendipity Life Considered lives for.
“The formation of human life in a lab through IVF runs antithetical to the disclosure of the origins of Christ’s life. Where Mary has no ability to bring about life in the womb, where the life of Christ is conceived by the Holy Spirit, the logic of IVF is aimed at finding more and more efficient ways of creating human beings. It’s a subordination of the creation of life not to the power of the Holy Spirit but to the power of our instruments.” // “ The whole thing takes the conception of human life, instrumentalizes it, subordinates it to technology, and makes it an arena where our wills and our choices are determinative for choosing who lives and who dies. It’s all antithetical to the life of Christ.” // “Jesus resists death, but knowing all is finished, he accepts the hour of death is upon him and he yields his spirit.” // “Jesus is accompanied by these people… Jesus is helped to die.” // “This is the height of humiliation… there is no dignity in this death.” // “We glory in the cross, because it is the revelation of the glory of Jesus Christ though it looks intensely shameful.” // “Christ dying well means accepting the degradation of the cross.” // “It’s not the interest in death that’s driving MAiD, it’s the horrors of dying and the thought of being a burden on our loved ones and being exposed… that humiliation is what terrifies us all. But like abortion’s parody of the Holy Spirit’s overshadowing of Mary, it is a demonic parody of the death of Christ.” // “Our calling as Christians is to conform our bodies to the death of Jesus, carrying in our bodies the dying of Jesus so that the life of Christ may be manifested through them to the world—whether that is as we age and die, or whether that is as we wrestle with fertility and infertility, or whether that is while we live our ordinary, quotidian lives… through the possession of our vessels in honor.” // The anecdote of the magazine story toward the end illustrates more than one point I was trying to make in my essay. Just a lot packed in here.

Continuing On:

#6: Is There a Feminine Genius? Panel Discussion moderated by Melissa Moschella, a recording from this recent conference. // “It’s not until woman appears that he knows what his gifts are for. He has no telos, really, until woman shows up.” // “[Man’s] first encounter with reality is of a horizon that contains only lower-order creatures. Woman’s first encounter with reality is of a horizon that contains persons. Woman has never lived in a created order not already inhabited by persons. The first thing she sees is Adam’s face.” // “Genesis reveals to us that man’s gift is to unearth, unpack the goods of creation and put it in the service of their community. Woman’s gift is to remind all of us that all human activity must be ordered toward authentic human flourishing.” // Deborah Savage was a hoot, and I could listen to her all day. But appreciated
Erika Bachiochi
’s input toward the end, seeking to distinguish the symbolic icon from the level of individual persons.

*The Banks of the Marne at Cennevieres - Camille Pissarro*

to glean from

Something Beautiful

we received the bread and wine that morning // body and blood, flowing free, given, tasted // now there are cupping toddler hands in a splash pad fountain // “wine! try some mom?”// I know what he means, he’s been watching, listening, carried along in the line // it’s the body and blood, well of life // but a fountain so abundant and quotidian, it seems absurd // maybe it is // the grace too abundant, too lavish, too mixed with the ordinary // hiding in plain sight, the eucharistic fountain // we return another day, my eyes are flowing just as free // a crack in the defenses // thank you Lord for the wine, bitter and sweet

Something Helpful

Conversational. low stimulation (relatively speaking), and just plain wholesome and fun shows from the 90’s we let our boys watch: Little Bear and The Magic Schoolbus. They have picked up so many phrases and random tidbits of knowledge and inspiration. (Mother Bear now rivals me in domesticity and Ms. Frizzle in adventurous fun). I heard them saying the other day: “TAKE CHANCES, MAKES MISTAKES, GET DUSTY” and it about took me out. No regrets with those two shows being strategically employed.