Week 36 (2024)
choirs & dark skies, chatbots & writing as attention, consumer spending & intergenerational wealth, breeding immortal beings & IVF sex selection
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to read: books
Hard Times — Charles Dickens — My first but hopefully not last Dickens.
How To Talk So Little Kids Will Listen — Julie King and Joanna Faber — Practical, fun, helpful.
to read: essays, articles, newsletters
Rachmaninoff In Sydney — Alan Jacobs/Annalise Shero, The Homebound Symphony — “When the choir concluded, not a soul moved, nor breathed. (I was desperately trying to weep as quietly as possible). We spent several seconds suspended in silence, the sound of the liturgy still sinking into our bones. Then it was as if the applause would never end, and at this point I laughed until I couldn’t breathe all over again.”
So, A Chatbot Did Your Homework — Jacob Riyeff, Plough — “But education is not supposed to be a probabilistic crapshoot or an information-processing exercise to “solve the problem” of getting a degree. It’s supposed to be a formation of the mind (and the whole person, ideally). I think the chatbot moment is pointing up how our institutions and cultural expectations of education have come to see education really as the former, not the latter.” relevant to Dickens’ novel Hard Times - that opener!
Writing To Stay Awake — Ryan Snider, Ekstasis — “The Christian life is not possible without attention… the one who created with words, became the Word, and hides in words will continue to re-create the world with our words.”
Breeding Immortal Beings — Rachel Lu, Law & Liberty — “No temperament, life situation, or lifestyle preference distinguishes large-family matrons… some women set their sights on a large family partly because the buy-in for maternity is so high. For educated women especially, the highest costs associated with maternity are not direct, but rather opportunity-related… A houseful of children, in this sense at least, may not cost much more than one.”
Who Has Children Anymore Anyway? —
, Front Porch Republic — “She argues that women want more kids in the same way they want to be five pounds lighter. It’s true that they want it, but it’s also demonstrably true that they aren’t willing to accept the trade-offs… These women who chose big families aren’t acting irrationally. They aren’t brainwashed. They are faced with the same trade-offs as other women, but when they consider the upside, the blessing of another child, they have more weight on that end of the scale than their secular counterparts.”
(Those two reviews are for a book I was riveted by earlier this year. Appreciated the embedded links to pushback from both demographer king Lyman Stone and . Here’s ’s written interview and ’s podcast interview, shared previously. And I’m fascinated by Pakaluk’s response to the evergreen problem of the incongruent timelines of peak-female-fertility-years vs. peak-education-and-career-building-years)
- , The Deleted Scenes — “Trying to offset those large expenses with skipped coffees and 20-cent-off coupons is like trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon.” Always love his comment section.
The Right Way To Do Intergenerational Wealth —
, Nuclear Meltdown — “All of which is to say that family wealth exists, and that it can be a boon to people, but success apparently depends on the family’s sense of itself as a unified community, or village.”(related: ’s We Will All Become Boring, shared previously — and his recent piece Why You Should Travel With Your Kids for a more accessible example of turning our families “into a team of collaborators, pilgrims who are part of something bigger than themselves”)
Dome Of Undarkness — Dwight Lindley, The Lamp — “It is Hell, as Dante knew long ago, to be unable to see the stars… There are real costs to shutting out the dark, but like Mammon, we often conclude that “hard liberty” is well won. Truly, to live in the night means relinquishment, and dependency—it means accepting our neediness as finite creatures, and opening ourselves to a grace that is not ours to grasp.”
(related: Missing The Night Sky, The Dark Side, and ’s What Did We Lose When We Lost The Stars?, shared previously)
The Screaming Deer — LaDonna Friesen, Dappled Things — “I bowed my head as the monks sang of wings: “He will cover you with His pinions, and under his wings you will find refuge.” As they finished, the crucifix image trembled with nearby thunder. Christ’s arms stretched out, like a wingspan. The nails punctured his feathers, and they fell softly against our souls.”
The Troubling Questions Raised By Sex Selection Through IVF —
, Deseret News — “Reading through these affluent parents’ concerns about boys, I was reminded of the concerns raised by parents when prenatal screening reveals their child has a disability… In both cases, parents may feel pressured by the responsibility of deciding.”(related: The Hidden Costs Of Prenatal Screening, ’s The Quiet Return Of Eugenics, ’s Why Don't Modern American Parents Want Boys?, ’s Schools Are The Wrong Shape For Boys, shared previously — also , and others here)
to watch, listen to
Reappropriating Feminism, Maternity, And The Woman’s Role — Jordan Peterson with
— This won’t contain anything too revolutionary if you’re already familiar with her writing, and especially her book. But a fun introduction to her thought and work, nonetheless, which is in the same vein as (for one example of many, here they are on a panel together.) These two have fascinated many with their secular reasoning toward many of the same age-old conclusions as Christians and those of other religious faiths—returning to stabilizing norms and natural law foundations of anthropology. I appreciated these thoughts on how we can’t stop there, but rather are in desperate need of divine grace to live the moral life of limits in sexuality, monogamous marriage, etc.
to glean from: tip, product, resource
This Book Summary — While going through the book the last two weeks, I dreamt of a categorized, bullet-point list of its concepts and phrases to refer to… and someone had made one. I downloaded that powerpoint, turned it into a pdf, and printed it off for or our refrigerator.
Two Lists:
Activity Gift Guide For Cherubs Of Chaos —
— Fresh ideas to support our home’s tornado of testosterone. (Notably, number six.)Places To Find Scriptural & Christian Art —
— Pretty sure we’ve been following each other since like 2019, back in the Wordpress Era of my weekly collections. She has experience designing rich, beautiful recourses for Sunday school, with more tips shared in her archives.
Wow, I like your title for my gift guide way better than my own! "Activity Gift Guide for Cherubs of Chaos." I love it.
#6 -- yes. All the spinning, all the time.
I really need to get that book already, but this quote really stood out:
“The fact is, childbearing’s costs fall disproportionately on women. And what comes out in Pakaluk’s research is that these costs are not primarily financial. They are women’s opportunity costs: their loss of status, professional progress, and identity. Religious communities help frame the value of children to counterbalance the costs all women shoulder. Absent living religious communities, raising a large family can seem a foolish investment.”
A friend and I were talking about how lonely having a large family can be, even in the context of Christian settings, because since birth control is such a normalized part of life, eschewing it is a little like saying you’re going to live without a smartphone. It’s definitely doable, but makes life harder in a million tiny ways, because the vast majority of society is predicated on the fact that of course you’ll have one because it’s a modern necessity. You may gain a lot from not having one, but you’ll constantly be reminded that you are different and there will be small inconveniences that wear on you. But these are mitigated somewhat if you’re in community with like minded people who also place value on the same thing…
I think it’s part of what’s worn me out so much. Having a large family is treated as a quirky, weird thing to do, even if the professed value is that children are a blessing. The comparison to women saying they want more children in the same way they want to lose 5 lbs was apt. That is, it’s an easy thing to say, but most don’t want it enough to do it because it’s really difficult.