Love your thought re: the discussions around end of life are eerily reminiscent of the discussions around beginning of life. It’s very true and the principles we bring to any conversation about the body are going to affect all these moral choices.
(Have you read Donum Vitae? If you haven’t, I think you’d like it.)
Thanks for including the article about graveyards! As a Catholic I love a good graveyard, but there is one in our neighborhood (it’s a family plot - just Southern things I guess) and it makes most people uncomfortable.
I’m so thankful he took the time to write such an honest and humble piece after losing his wife. This vignette was precious:
“Sarah, who required care from others to meet her daily needs, was caring for her deceased relatives, and she wouldn’t quit until she had tended all their graves.”
Married to a pastor who would like a graveyard next to his parish. I have to smile when I imagine the reactions (including the community) to putting one in today, as opposed to preaching next to one that had been there since German Lutherans immigrated to the Midwest.
Thanks again for including me, Haley. You even linked my TNAA essay 🥹 (That made it into the quarterly print edition of the magazine! Still waiting for my copy in the mail.)
Your death and dying section this week might wreck me. It took me a year away to start missing, even thinking about, my nursing work. Layers and layers. I cried after reading Schimmoeller's essay.
"Death can either magnify existential anguish by imprisoning us within our “thrownness” into time or it can therapeutically educate us. In both responses, death reveals we are not God."
"Christian hospice, inasmuch as it encourages the dying to embrace their mortality in the manner of Christ, thus performs a great work of mercy. It makes the deathbed holy, even a heavenly experience."
I don't know all the things that go into your interest in the subject, but I thank you, so, so much for helping people think about these things before they're shoved into them. Hope your Technopoly essay is going/finished well.
Thanks for the mention, Haley!! Though I must give credit to Fr. Schall for creative titling of his own lists! Ha ha! He remains one of my top book listers.
Also love all of the articles about ART! With apologies for frank language ahead, I was recently thinking about someone I know who was conceived with donor sperm, and it occurred to me how unsettling it would be to think your conception was brought about (as in this case) by a med student looking for tuition money who was then paid to masturbate. It seems profoundly unsettling in a way that is difficult to articulate.
As Kerri Christopher put it, “When it does work, IVF bequeaths to a child some uncomfortable truths: that he has his origins in an act of masturbation rather than sexual union; that doctors selected him from among his siblings as the most likely to survive; that his siblings were thereafter discarded, or remain on ice. He will spend his life wrestling with how his existence—something objectively good—could come from something so distorted. If his mother used a sperm donor, this child might spend his adult years trying to find his half-siblings, or even his father. He’ll be grateful to be alive, but deeply confused about what family means. For the rest of her life, his mother will carry these weights in her soul.”
Loved that Food Skills post! My husband (the cook of the family) came to our marriage with the More-with-Less cookbook (cited in the granola section) and it's great! Highly recommend.
Love your thought re: the discussions around end of life are eerily reminiscent of the discussions around beginning of life. It’s very true and the principles we bring to any conversation about the body are going to affect all these moral choices.
(Have you read Donum Vitae? If you haven’t, I think you’d like it.)
Have not. Will check it out. You're like the resident Big Sister Theologian around here.
😅 that’s a great moniker!
Thanks for including the article about graveyards! As a Catholic I love a good graveyard, but there is one in our neighborhood (it’s a family plot - just Southern things I guess) and it makes most people uncomfortable.
Why We Need Graveyards
I’m so thankful he took the time to write such an honest and humble piece after losing his wife. This vignette was precious:
“Sarah, who required care from others to meet her daily needs, was caring for her deceased relatives, and she wouldn’t quit until she had tended all their graves.”
Married to a pastor who would like a graveyard next to his parish. I have to smile when I imagine the reactions (including the community) to putting one in today, as opposed to preaching next to one that had been there since German Lutherans immigrated to the Midwest.
Thanks again for this section this week.
Thanks again for including me, Haley. You even linked my TNAA essay 🥹 (That made it into the quarterly print edition of the magazine! Still waiting for my copy in the mail.)
Your death and dying section this week might wreck me. It took me a year away to start missing, even thinking about, my nursing work. Layers and layers. I cried after reading Schimmoeller's essay.
"Death can either magnify existential anguish by imprisoning us within our “thrownness” into time or it can therapeutically educate us. In both responses, death reveals we are not God."
"Christian hospice, inasmuch as it encourages the dying to embrace their mortality in the manner of Christ, thus performs a great work of mercy. It makes the deathbed holy, even a heavenly experience."
I don't know all the things that go into your interest in the subject, but I thank you, so, so much for helping people think about these things before they're shoved into them. Hope your Technopoly essay is going/finished well.
Thanks for the mention, Haley!! Though I must give credit to Fr. Schall for creative titling of his own lists! Ha ha! He remains one of my top book listers.
Great stuff as usual here. But especially loved the poem. This was a reminder to me to read more poetry.
Loved Matt Miller's piece! I've added his book to my "to buy" list - interested to hear your thoughts once you've read it.
Also love all of the articles about ART! With apologies for frank language ahead, I was recently thinking about someone I know who was conceived with donor sperm, and it occurred to me how unsettling it would be to think your conception was brought about (as in this case) by a med student looking for tuition money who was then paid to masturbate. It seems profoundly unsettling in a way that is difficult to articulate.
As Kerri Christopher put it, “When it does work, IVF bequeaths to a child some uncomfortable truths: that he has his origins in an act of masturbation rather than sexual union; that doctors selected him from among his siblings as the most likely to survive; that his siblings were thereafter discarded, or remain on ice. He will spend his life wrestling with how his existence—something objectively good—could come from something so distorted. If his mother used a sperm donor, this child might spend his adult years trying to find his half-siblings, or even his father. He’ll be grateful to be alive, but deeply confused about what family means. For the rest of her life, his mother will carry these weights in her soul.”
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2024/03/our-bodies-our-anger
Loved that Food Skills post! My husband (the cook of the family) came to our marriage with the More-with-Less cookbook (cited in the granola section) and it's great! Highly recommend.