Week 29 (2024)
desert songs, maternal knowing & integrated home lives, cooled loves & practicing virtue, miracles & restoring women's health
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to read: books
The Big Rock Candy Mountain — Wallace Stegner — Oh, this was lovely, and rough. It took a while to pull me in… but the wrestlings of home and the interplay of family dynamics were masterful.
“Perhaps it took several generations to make a man, perhaps it took several combinations and re-creations of his mother’s gentleness and resilience, his father’s enormous energy and appetite for the new, a subtle blending of masculine and feminine, selfish and selfless, stubborn and yielding, before a proper man could be fashioned.”
to read: essays, articles, newsletters
Motherhood And The Intellectual Life —
, Comment — “…in the crush of the duelling idealisms, between the classical pictures of “mother” and “intellectual,” I started pressing on them critically, wondering why some forms of knowing were given such deference and others were denied, and why the relationships between these particulars seemed so separate and distant.”(related: With All Her Mind, shared previously)
- , The Hollow — A realistic example of the discernment, intentionality, and flexibility required to integrate education/work/creative pursuits in the home in a way that honors everyone. Dixie is one of many who model how homeschooling (while demanding) doesn’t require annihilation of self or forever hiding worthy endeavors away from children.
Poetry Doesn't Need A Room Of One's Own —
, Church Life Journal — “Instead of stifling me, this chaos all around inspires me daily, even if sometimes it can be exasperating. Ultimately, it reminds me that my creativity is not the only one that exists and is not the only one that matters.”
On The Cooling Of Our Love — Harrison Garlick, The Public Discourse — “Have I allowed God to illuminate and arrange the lesser beauties in my life? Do I cultivate an intellectual life or has my pursuit of truth quietly cooled? Am I spirited and do I seek to be magnanimous, or have I grown comfortable in mediocrity? Do I moderate pleasure, or do I make my reason a slave to my lower appetites? Do I turn to the virtues to help perfect the parts of my soul, or has the impulse to beauty waned and tired?”
(related: The Limits Of The Burnout Society Critique and America's Mental Health Crisis And The Loss Of Meaning, shared previously)
Doing What You Don't Want To Do — Mandi Gerth, Theopolis — “Like it or not, virtue involves doing something we do not want to do. Because virtue is the opposite of vice, when we choose to act virtuously we put to death some form of vice which means pain.”
(related: Glittering Vices, shared previously)
- , Plough — “When one is baptized into Christ, it is not a “supernatural” life that one gains, as Alexander Schmemann noted, but true life. The coming of Christ recovers creation as his symbol, and by dying upon a tree, he gives us another chance to eat of the Tree of Life: Christ himself. A tree is a symbol, and it is real.”
Spare, Strange — Hannah Carrese, Dappled Things — “if all this:
do you believe or go mad or dismiss the ruse
of it—do
you submit your hand to scientist and skeptic
do you pocket it hoping that denim will
keep it from miracles? If?”
For the big ol' compilation:
Women's Healthcare Needs More Than A Band-Aid Solution —
, Washington Examiner — “The current standard of reproductive care for women in the United States is a prescription for the pill at 13 and a referral for IVF at 30, which is no standard at all… The RESTORE Act seeks to change that, and any senator who believes women deserve better should vote to pass it.”(related from Katelyn: This One's About Sex, shared previously)
Doctors Are Lying About The Pill... Again —
, The Credo Catholic — “Its lingering influence will prolong my recovery and my husband and I’s journey to parenthood. For others, the Pill alone can entirely cause PCOS. This is a true travesty, as many will only discover what a decade on the Pill has done when they struggle with infertility after ceasing its use.”Coming Off The Pill: Olivia's Story — Anne Marie Williams, Natural Womanhood — “In her professional role now… Olivia ensures other young women and couples can access the personal health data and providers trained in restorative reproductive medicine that she never had access to in her teens or during college.”
to watch, listen to
Matt Stewart on Wallage Stegner — Front Porch Republic — My husband and I also listened to him on Volume 157 of the Mars Hill Audio Journal several months back while on a roadtrip, though it’s only for subscribers (or for purchase). I remember it being incredibly moving as he discussed “the placemaking tragedy” of Stegner’s work in his book, The Most Beautiful Place On Earth.
Continuing On:
to glean from: tip, product, resource
Woman At The Well — by Valerie (PaxBeloved) — With all the reads related to women this week, thought I would share this artwork I’ve loved having in our living room for a while now.
Road To The Hills — by Julian Onderdonk (see Week 26) — We just celebrated our sixth wedding anniversary, and initially met and dated in Texas. So finding this painting was viscerally nostalgic enough to gift on the occasion.
to look back on
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I never manage to get through all of the links each week, Haley, but I enjoy perusing them. Motherhood and the Intellectual Life has been a meaningful slow read. It has always troubled me that all of the requisite responsibility and insights of motherhood have been shifted away from the intellectual realm, as if any role or function rooted securely in the body cannot also involve a thriving life of the mind. I feel like both my creativity and my engagement with and examination of ideas has deepened and strengthened through motherhood, rather than being suppressed or eradicated. Thank you for sharing!
Happy anniversary, yall!