Week 29 (2025)
friction & our bits of earth, stories & little things, romance, fidelity & forsaking all others
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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
- , inaugural Director of The Robert Farrar Capon Memorial Center for Needless Splendor and Research Institute in Unnecessary Studies — This one I spent months with as a paperback. Truly one of those life-giving books that encapsulate and mark a moment in time. Going so slow with it—while working on our own garden, attempting to get acquainted with the Book of Common Prayer, all while navigating our life’s particular realities—had me able to soak in these earthy images in tender ways. A rich invitation, this book. The leisurely walk through both the church and garden years felt gentle and fitting. We are creatures who need the stuff of earth to truly know the stuff of life and death, resurrection and the life of the Spirit (see also Hannah Anderson’s Humble Roots and Turning of Days). The thread of our relationship to time—both metronomic and liturgical, eternal—is a well of wisdom. I’ll be returning to mine the quotes that struck deep and deserve mulling over.
And yes, somehow I’m in the acknowledgements next to people like
. Very much a first. I’m just a lady who knows worthwhile writing when I see it.“The book conveys a truly sacramental outlook in a manner that a traditional theological treatise could not—because it embodies this outlook.”
to read: essays, articles, newsletters
What We Lose When We Lost The Plot — Holly Stockley, Front Porch Republic — “But what if we could take the best parts of all these models and recombine them? What if we borrowed Strong Towns’ idea of “thickening”—focusing growth where people already live—and married it to a genuine preservation of farmland? Not just as landscape, or yield per acre, but as a living part of the community: stewarded, productive, and accessible. What if, instead of isolating people on ornamental plots, we offered them a real oikos—a household economy in the truest, oldest sense of the word?”
Friction, Distance, Incidental Activities —
, The Deleted Scenes — “But Jane Jacobs articulated a sociological truth here which explains what I’m feeling… The more little friction points there are in doing a thing, the more likely you are to just skip it.”The Uncommon Power Of Common Things — Kinley Bowers, Cogitare — “These artists focus on what is immediate, commonplace, and precious. They dismantle the myth that people must scrabble around the earth questing for purpose and beauty. These things are easily within reach, in the here and now, waiting to be seen. We must delight in what is ours at present. In the words of Henry James, “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!” In appreciating what is often overlooked, our connections and communities will expand and include other observant, kindred spirits. When we attend to wads of golden honeycomb, friendly introductions, and gossamer spider webs, our delight is bound to increase.”
(h/t Jeffrey Bilbro)
Understanding Your Story: An Interview With Dan Allender — John Eldredge, And Sons — “Healing comes when I am willing to face the truth—deep and specific truth about myself. It is when my deepest desires are seen in light of what I can’t do for myself that I turn, again and again, to the One who loves my ache and knows my sin better than anyone in the universe.”
(h/t for sharing, especially on the heels of me enjoying his recent marriage book)
- , Gathering Light — “This is why, too, the person of Christ, even in these darkest moments, is still so alluring to me… Christ came not to merely philosophize or purvey a set of beliefs but to give his whole self to us.”
Daphne — Emma Atkinson, New Verse Review —
“This you allowed that I might know first-hand
With what vehement love you bled
Since all but you betray the one they love.”
This first piece was featured in Mere Orthodoxy’s recent print journal. (BTW shoutout to Ian Olson, also in the print journal, whom my husband and I got to talk with for a good long while during a local church’s VBS. Too many Life Considered and lifey thoughts from that convivial conversation.) Anyways! I relished holding it in front of my non-digitized self on the sunlit couch before realizing I would actually like to share it here. Lo and behold, it was published a few weeks later on the site—the day of our anniversary. This second essay was shared here a few years ago. But I remember being so enamored with it, I’m re-visiting and re-upping.
- , Mere Orthodoxy — “To choose one thing, or in this case one person and one life, you risk having only that one thing. In this constraint we resist the optimization and ordinalization of our worlds. When we bind ourselves to just one thing, we refuse to imagine ourselves as the sum of all of our choices. We might then become persons who have received grace, not made but given.
To have at the end of your life one single story, a promise that was kept, would gesture to all the things you did not choose. It might leave their shadow in its wake. But it might reveal as well the One who in fire and blood made himself known as Covenant-keeper, as a promise-making God. In forsaking all others, you’d be choosing this one thing, marriage as the shadow of the oath made in smoke and fire.”
Views From Fidelity — Cole Hartin, Ekstasis — “Such little moments lighten the deep beauty of marriage with additional joy. Romance is to marriage what flowers are to a vegetable garden. Flowers and romance may not be immediately useful, may not be sufficient to sustain a human body or a lifetime of love, but they have a beauty and loveliness all of their own.”
to watch, listen to
Kyla Scanlon on the Ezra Klein Show — Just a few minutes at this timestamp. Hearing an explanation of The Screwtape Letters here is a wildly eerie experience. In doing so she's.... basically explaining.... so much about the world. Would have been a good segue into John Mark Comer’s Live No Lies to get into the weeds of the distinct temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil. Regardless, there’s now no telling what can happen on a NYTimes podcast in the year of our Lord 2025.
(h/t )
Continuing On:
#8: Embodying Cultures Of Life, a recording from this recent conference. This is the kind of multifaceted and rich dialogue I live for. Grateful for each person’s unique offerings. Perhaps my favorite recording thus far, so highly recommend.
Man, I really like Sarah Denny Lorio. A bioethicist trained as a fertility awareness instructor who put Sanger in dialogue with John Paul II for her dissertation? Basically my hero. “Freedom can only be lived within the limits of reality.”
“Because of woman’s close proximity to life, I think she, too, comes under attack in that particular way…” Something I thought out loud a bit here regarding the book You Are Mine.
“To give an account of our lives and our friendship with God has to involve an openness to the full range of lives and deaths He may prepare us for.”
also brought up the work of the Trappist monks she profiled in this devastatingly beautiful piece she wrote a few years ago, somewhere in the archives here.Woven Well Podcast with
— Episodes 83-85 — Client Story: Katie Caroline (Postpartum) / Early Pregnancy with NaPro Technology / Uterine Fibroids — “Thinking about God’s presence and participation in our fertility is not a hassle, but a blessing.” // “…it allows us to talk to each other and be prayerful: What is God calling our family to this month?” // “Constant communication has only added to our marriage… for [my husband] to be in this process with me has only added to our marriage.”
(more resources on female embodiment here)
to glean from
Something Beautiful
MATIN: Home from Jess Ray — Have relished each of her four Matin albums. Have been toying with the idea of a melodic memory series. Think: choosing certain songs or albums and painting vignettes of time associated with them. Gotta work on that right brain strength. After all, it’s far too easy to use the “intellect in overdrive as a crutch for a weary, battered, hardened or hobbled spirit that needs to rest itself in Goodness, in Beauty.”
Something Helpful
Thermal Laminator — I bought this recently and promptly went looking for more and more things to laminate. Combined with a color printer, our household life is forever changed, unstoppable, etc.
I looooved listening to the Embodying Cultures of Life panel. Thanks for sharing Haley!
Happy anniversary!