Week 28 (2025)
work & discernment, reading poetry & being changed, postpartum depression & more on embryo adoption
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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
Phantastes — George MacDonald — Third time through. Some favorite quotes.
to read: essays, articles, newsletters
Morality And The Practice Of Poetry — Garrett Soucy, Theopolis — “With poetry, you don’t want to treat it like a paragraph that’s been soaked in formaldehyde. How do we attempt to understand it then? In a manner similar to the work of natural biologists. Understanding poetry is a kind of biology, a kind of investigation of a living thing.”
A Place To Stand: On Reading Poetry —
, Mere Orthodoxy — “The best poets allow you to feel the leaves crunching under your feet before they wax eloquent about what crunchy leaves represent.”(In addition to Bilbro and Welcher’s own work, allow me to suggest the poetry of or , ’s Home Songs which I recently picked up, or ’ Snowmelt To Roots, which lived with me recently as a physical companion, slowly seeping into my life over the course of several months—have also tried my hand at it here and there)
- , On Love and Longing — “The sociological despair must be balanced with our theological hope, and the more conscious we become of the former the more our hope can grow… These two truths, that we must work and that we must make meaning of our work are uniquely human.”
Essaying Discernment — Christina Bieber Lake, Comment — “Discerning the best way forward is hard work. But because we are human, we don’t like waiting. We quickly find answers that have already been formed within us in the shape of images of ourselves that give us the integrity we long for. Images we can live with. But when God’s illuminating grace meets us in a moment of stillness and true self–reckoning, sometimes something real can happen. We can let ourselves imagine that we are small, frightened, self-protective creatures with tremendous power to hurt others. Then we can understand grace, and then we can let go.”
What I've Learned From Women Choosing A Life Outside The Box —
, Cultivating Clarity — “It’s not easy to have the humility or the courage to buck popular trends, but rooting our identity in being a beloved child of God rather than a productivity robot is a good place to begin.”(related: this talk from Kerri which I’ve listened to more than once, encompassing much of her work at , shared previously)
The Role Of Nutrition In Treating Postpartum Depression — Kristen Curran, Natural Womanhood — “While the research available on treating postpartum depression with nutrition is still small, what is available suggests that getting key nutrients are necessary for the brain to work well.”
(related: this on progesterone’s importance, a related treatment for PPD, and this on wading in the deep darkness, 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 fourteenth (and last) week: Embryo Adoption: A Humane and Compassionate Response to Frozen Embryos by Melissa Moschella — This is the first of two of her links this week (as I’m sequentially going through both this EPPC project and the recordings from the Notre Dame conference) and that was insanely serendipitous. It’s what Life Considered lives for. Anyways, I have shared two pieces on embryo adoption before—from Matthew Lee Anderson here and, ironically, fellow conference speaker Rachel Coleman here. Moschella has left me unconvinced in comparison to those pieces.
to watch, listen to
This Interview with
— Honestly I’m kind of over much of the birth rate discourse at the moment (even though I wrote a whole book review about it.) Maybe it’s just that I have my own pessimistic thoughts, after all his helpful demographic statistics are said and done. Anyways, I think I was having a drink or two when my husband started this and I just decided to listen along. Honestly it had us laughing more than I thought I would, definitely more than any Serious Substack Discourse about it ever has.
Continuing On:
#7: The Female Body & A Culture Of Life presented by Melissa Moschella, a recording from this recent conference. // WELL Y’ALL, SHE DID IT. She essentially gave the keynote talk for the female body compilation, one section of my review of Tim Carney’s Family Unfriendly, and this recent exploration of a chapter in Neil Postman’s Technopoly. It seems I have some particular axes to grind—yes even as a Protestant, we do exist. There’s a whole squad out there aspiring to, in ways big and small, help “right the massive reproductive ship” as
coined it a few months back—with numbers increasing as these issues are talked about frankly and robustly. (You don’t know what you don’t know, can’t consider what has simply never been considered, etc etc…) To me it’s all fascinatingly mixed up in everything else: the physical & biological, relational & social, spiritual & moral.Woven Well Podcast with
— Episodes 80-82 — Intimacy with NFP / Client Story: Emily & Kirk (Vasectomy Reversal) also interviewed at Natural Womanhood, shared here along with some thoughts several weeks ago, and maybe I’ll pull together a piece in this vein / Living With Regret
(more resources on female embodiment here)
to glean from
Something Beautiful
5 Fingers (“Some Aloe For The Sunburn On Your Heart”) from
— Do listen to his music, read his poetry, go to his shows, buy a cool mug from him, etc.
Something Helpful
This Multifunctional Tool for the garden — My husband has real-life Texas connections to the family who runs this company, and also simply enjoys these tools.
Rum + Ginger Beer + Mint is a great combo.
I also loved the Rachel Joy Welcher piece in MO - I wondered if it would show up in Life Considered!
Thanks as always for including a mention of my work... you are a true champion of the arts and an uplifter of your fellows.
I want to be excited about that PPD article, but my honest response is more akin to "No __ Sherlock"... I'm glad people are seeing that nutrition matters, but also of *course* it matters. If your brain is this huge organ that uses massive amounts of cholesterol and fat, and if serotonin and dopamine require protein to synthesize, and if the baby is already prioritized because of pregnancy and then breastfeeding, and if postnatal depletion is well documented.... but we just act like moms should bounce back and the fact that they struggle a bit is a surprise?
I think we've lost the plot.