Week 34 (2024)
a stalled American Dream & the common good, beauty & undertow baptism, surrogacy, the Theotokos & grasping for procreative control
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to read: books
All The Little Live Things — Wallace Stegner — Brief thoughts and some quotes.
to read: essays, articles, newsletters
Better Than Success — Johann Christoph Arnold, Plough — “The man asked the first bricklayer: “What are you doing?” “Well, I take this brick and put some mortar on it, and then I take another brick…” And to the second bricklayer, “What are you doing?” He said, “I’m making money.” Finally, the man asked the third bricklayer, “And what are you doing?” He replied, “I am building a cathedral to the glory of God.”
Strength To Stay — Carla Galdo, Hearth & Field — “Granted, there was a time when I thought myself quite good at being faithful and committed to everyday things. This was in my school days and my early adulthood, before I had children… eventually I had to realize that my commitment to accomplishment in the academic realm, though good in many ways, was mainly easy for me because it was clear-cut and self-serving.”
(related: ’s The Mother's Gauntlet, shared previously)
Clothed — Angela Townsend, Dappled Things — “You watch me do extra credit for little lords. I am clothed in my work ethic and neuroticism, and I have 1% less fear of the future.”
Baptized By The Undertow — Rick Jebb, Ekstasis — “Fifteen years after I had faced death at the base of the falls, I was now drowning in fear, grief and shame—I had tried to escape.”
Counterpressure — Carreen Raynor, Fathom — “to ally yourself
with sequoias,
with curiosity,
with women in labor
–how the weapons of peace are absurdities!”Homeschooling For The Common Good —
, Christianity Today — "But that doesn’t require us to pursue these ends only through the means provided by the state. It doesn’t mean people of good will can’t disagree about the form of the common good while agreeing on its value.”- Walks The World — “Nine years ago I didn’t think what we built and what we ate mattered that much, a small problem dwarfed by the much bigger issues of heroin, suicides, joblessness, spiritual emptiness, but it does, because it can’t and isn’t divorced from them.”
(related: his book Dignity, shared previously — our toddler pulls it off the shelf just about every day)
Beatrice And The Siren — Kyle Janke, Memoria Press — “Beauty must shape our sense of pleasure, if we are to grow toward the sun.”
(related: 100 Days Of Dante, shared previously)
For the big ol’ compilation:
- , The Lamp — “The doctors have a method where your suffering will not be wasted, where it can be converted into cleaner probabilities… The clinics sell a kind of limitlessness: no need to mourn your lack of a marriage or a family. As long as you put a part of yourself on ice, you are as deathless as the Russian fairy-tale figure Koschei.”
(related: her Embryos as Schrödinger’s Persons and ’s Seeking Control, shared previously)
The Dark Side Of The Global Surrogacy Trade — Julie Bindel, The Telegraph — “Implicit within it is a rejection of the fanciful and dangerous notion that anyone, anywhere has an inalienable right to a child.”
Mother Of The Unborn God — Brad East, Commonweal — “The Theotokos… is part of the deep grammar of a Christian understanding of human origins, unborn life, and God’s intimate presence in procreation… In much recent academic theology, there is a strange silence about Jesus’ life in the womb. We are told that what it means to be human finds its norm and pattern in Jesus. Yet his person and work are presented as if they began either at his birth or at his baptism.”
(related: Mariology podcast episode and Theotokos poem poster, shared previously)
to watch, listen to
- — A Conversation with Brad East (author of the Commonweal essay above, and a few others in the archives here).
to glean from: tip, product, resource
Rediscovered those metal, mounted, hand-grinding pencil sharpeners (tiny boys fight over electric motor ones) and also discovered PVA bookbinding glue (some hardcovers were in shambles, but now revived… I only anticipate more of the same in this house, but at least repair is possible).
Crowdsourcing from y’all: What do you do with clothing and fabrics that are beyond use or repair (children’s clothing that is covered in stains, rips, or worn down… sheets that no one would want… blankets or towels on their way to being in threadbare shambles?) Surely we don’t just have to chuck them in a landfill, and not all of us are handy with sewing! I read some thrift stores have contracts with textile shredding/recycling companies for their excess and unwanted clothing, but that’s not a guarantee. Some companies (for a fee) will send you a bag that you use to send in anything type of clothing, fabric, scraps that is then recycled and reused. Natural fibers can be composted, I believe. But am I crazy for thinking we should have easy access to textile recycling bins as the norm? What are we supposed to do with fabric items that are beyond normal wear or use?
For textile reuse, my biggest one is that every pair of pants that wears a hole in the knee becomes shorts. For boys, this means I never buy shorts because they wear through so many jeans and sweatpants in the winter months that by the time summer rolls around we're set! For girls, leggings with holes in the knee become shorts to wear under skirts and dresses. And you can fold under a seam and fix it with a hot glue gun to prevent fraying if you don't want to sew (I usually sew but I have done both). Worn out towels and T-shirts are excellent cleaning rags, and sheets become pillowcases or maxi skirts (those are sewing projects, but they're pretty much all straight seams). But there are clothes that are not worth saving, and I take clothes to our county recycling station which does accept textiles when they're not eligible for reuse. While I have dreams of braiding a rag rug I haven't accomplished it yet!
Thank you for the Dappled Things article! It blew me away.
We cut up our worn-out clothes to use as rags. We keep a huge stash in the kitchen and they are tremendously handy. We hardly ever have to use a paper towel (we do use paper towels for cleaning up milk or lots of grease).
Synthetics (that aren't blends w/cotton) don't work well for this but it uses up everything else!