Week 35 (2024)
accumulated absences & communal joy, fitting into men's jeans & what survives modernity, Lambeth, guest virtues & new poetry
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to read: books
The Peregrine — J.A. Baker — Thanks to
for mentioning the book and sharing these exhibit photos. It was a feat of attentiveness and beauty, both in the writing and the reading. The book equivalent of “touching grass.”Women, Sex, and the Church — edited by Erika Bachiochi — Truly, she is one of the matriarchs of this resource list. Clear, wise, charitable, resolved. A worthwhile pairing with her most recent book.
(related: re-upping these talks from the archives — The Dignity Of The Sexed Body and Healing The Sex Wars with Erika Bachiochi, Abigail Favale, . They are a couple years apart, but the former is how I was introduced to Favale and Bachiochi’s work, and the latter was quite interesting as a continuation or “sequel” of sorts. I could listen to these three all day, and you’ll find plenty of their writing here with an archive search.)
to read: essays, articles, newsletters
Accumulated Absences — Jake Meador, Mere Orthodoxy — “Berry's first concern is not with size or scale per se, but rather with the presence of affection in a place and the potency of that affection. There are conditions necessary for human affection to take hold and endure…”
(related: Meador’s book, Alienated America, and Localism In The Mass Age — also No You Cannot Have It All and Hannah Coulter The Green Lady And Me, shared previously)
On Joy — Christina Brown, Anselm Society — “At its heart, joy is deeply communal.”
Past, Future, And Breeding Out Of Captivity — Adam K. Webb, Front Porch Republic — “Late modernity creates a demographic and cultural bottleneck. Anything purely present-minded will most likely not survive it… Whatever is sufficiently disposed to survive by definition will displace a way of life that has abandoned even the desire for continuity between past and future.”
(related: on Our Demographic Ennui, shared previously)
Men's Jeans Don't Fit Feminine Curves —
, Writer’s Blog(ck) — ““It’s not you,” we say, “It’s me. I’ll figure out how to live in a man’s world.” And so self-proclaimed feminists continue to squeeze their curves into bloodflow-restricting, wedgie-inducing men’s jeans; to suffer in silence…”(related: this from Public Discourse, this and this from Church Life Journal, this from , the Out Of The Box Series from , shared previously — and a response from Catherine Pakaluk)
New Verse Review — This summer edition is their inaugural release. There’s a handful of folks in the poetry section whose writing I’ve enjoyed and shared in the past, which is always a joy to see. But I’ll highlight A Suit For Grandfather from
Locusts — Yours truly, for Ekstasis
Shores Of Virtue — Jude Russo, The Lamp — “My life is a collection of episodes in which people are kinder to me than I am to other people, which in a better man would be a cause for more self-reflection and reform than perhaps it has been.”
Why Sex Matters — R.J. Snell, The Public Discourse — “…virtue seems trivial, fussy, and busybodied. Except it’s not… Virtue is always, in every context, dealing with our body; for virtue is about us, ourselves, and we are a body, and virtue is always and in every instance related to our instincts, emotions, desires, and passions. Virtue orders humans as we are, in our totality.”
(these next links are perhaps of interest to those who’ve come across this from , this from , or this previously shared from First Things — the newsletter is a humble charcuterie board of food for thought around here, my own included. we’re after truth and goodness in all spheres of life.)
Christians Rejected Contraception For Centuries —
, Fertile Faith (paywalled) — “Anglicans get a bad rap as being the Protestants who “abandoned ship” on a once rock solid agreement among all Christians across the world. And that’s true… But today I wanted to take a closer look at the statement itself… When is there a morally sound reason to need to avoid abstinence during this small window of time?”A History Of The Protestant Debate Over Contraception — James A. Altena and Lambeth On Contraceptives — Charles Gore, Touchstone (originally published in 1930) — “…are we authorized in shrinking from strictly claiming obedience to a moral law, of great general importance and believed to have divine authority, because it involves great or even extreme sacrifice? May we say: the way of sacrifice in extremis is the true way; but regrettable necessity may justify us in falling back, either in what we ourselves practice or what we allow as teachers of the Church in others, on a lower level in view of human weakness?”
(both found in this edition. thanks for the chat and stack of journals, Doug.)
to watch, listen to
Continuing On:
The Commonplace with Autumn Kern — Two Emergency Habits For The Nature Trail / Books To Read As A Postpartum Mom / Love What Lasts: An Interview w/ Joshua Gibbs
to glean from: tip, product, resource
The Sound Of Music Soundtrack — We’ve been obsessed, and recently introduced the boys to the film (along with Mary Poppins, the inferior of the two stories of endearing and lovable nannies with… the same face and voice.)
Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic —
, who has many essays in the archives here, wrote a book launching in October. You can sign up at the bottom of that post to preorder. There’s books out the wazoo being published these days… but this one is completely up my alley, and perhaps yours.Natural Law & Scriptural Authority — A course from
, which you can audit as well. August 26th is the cut-off for late registration, which I realize is... the day this goes out.Find A Fertility Awareness Class Or Instructor — Natural Womanhood — Someone asked a question pertaining to the compilation and I realized I didn’t have a basic list of this kind. It’s been added it to the additional resources, help section.
Love love love that tweet from Catherine Pakaluk - I've been planning to write about this...