Week 8 (2024)
mental illness & helpful theological ecosytems, loneliness & rebuilding villages, embracing winter & limits, returning to the internet & the freedom of tech despair
(Click title to open in browser, on the Substack website)
to read: books
Here are two beautiful and worthwhile books I completed this week. Their excellent and careful crafting are worth your time, more than the deluge of quick little quips and impulsive sharing which often cheapen the real experience of living with a broken body and mind.
A Mother Held: Essays On Anxiety And Motherhood — Lara d’Entremont — It's great. Here’s why.
A Quiet Mind To Suffer With — John Andrew Bryant — My brief thoughts.
to read: essays, articles, newsletters
How Bad Theology Hurts The Anxious, Depressed, And Suicidal — Joshua Cayetano, Mere Orthodoxy — “The cure for its reductionistic dualisms comes in three doses as well—a trinitarian theology that regards body, mind, and spirit as equally interrelated and supervening upon the other parts; a redemptive theology that imagines Christ working through faith and reason, theology and science; and an incarnational theology that sees Christ on the cross as the God-Man who suffers with us. Together, these understandings form a theological ecosystem that can offer a number of biopsychosocial and spiritual resources to the suffering person.”
The Medicated Soul — Matthew Loftus, Plough — “We’re strange creatures, we humans: not souls inhabiting bodies, but whole persons, blending the spiritual and physical in ways that we don’t fully understand.”
How Does The New Postpartum Depression Pill Work? — Kristen Curran, Natural Womanhood — About time we considered female physiology and hormonal levels in mental health treatment(!!!) Here is Caitlin on why progesterone is so important.
(related: My Mind, My Enemy, Living With Religious Scrupulosity Or Moral OCD, The Disintegration Is The Illness, A More Christian Approach To Mental Health Challenges, God In The Psych Ward, Waiting Out The Noonday Demon, Curing Depressed Humans, Not Nervous Systems, shared previously)
How Many People Do We Need In Our Lives? — Edwin Leap, Life And Limb — “…how many people are there between connection and loneliness? Between assistance and powerlessness? Perhaps, asked another way, why would we want fewer people in our lives? My mother-in-law’s funeral was last week… Until the very end of her life she was buoyed up on a sea of adoring husband, loving children and laughing grandchildren, tides that washed against her shore constantly.”
Instead Of Endless Government Programs, We Need To Rebuild Our Villages — Jim Dalrymple, Institute For Family Studies — “…the upside of the West’s WEIRD evolution is greater wealth, democracy, and education. But of course, the trade off was giving up the kind of big networks many of us seem to long for today… That’s not to say our many contemporary policy discussions don’t matter. But if everyone is right that villages are lacking, the process of rebuilding should be a priority as well.”
(more at his post here)
The Table Where I Belonged — Pete Kaufmann, Plough — “We need communities spiritually – most of us recognize this – but we do not need them any other way. We have insurance to get us out of our financial scrapes, cars to take us to people we like better, and enough money to “free” ourselves economically from our neighbors. Our communities, thus, do not have the stories and traditions that form from mutual needs… We get together for picnics and talk about the weather.”
(related: The Intimacy Of Imbalance, Dependence and What Happens When A Community Comes Together, shared previously)
What I Found When I Came Back To The Internet, 3 Years Later — Erin Loechner, Design For Mankind — “And to that, I will say this: if we are not yet dead, we can still untangle ourselves. It’s not too late to become free.”
How Tech Despair Can Set You Free — Samuel Matlack, The New Atlantis — “Our society no longer asks why we should do anything. All that matters anymore, Ellul argued, is how to do it — to which the canned answer is always: More efficiently! …Human control of it is an illusion, which means we are on a path to self-destruction — not because the social machine will necessarily kill us (although it might), but because we are fast becoming soulless creatures.”
Living Lent — Barbara Cawthorne Crafton, Plough — “This is just the way it is,” we said to one another on the train, in the restaurant. “This is modern life…” Our voices dripped contempt for those people who had such time. We felt oddly defensive, though no one had accused us of anything.”
On Winter — Elise Tegegne, Dappled Things — “But perhaps this is part of the truth winter whispers: an invitation to listen to emptiness rather than scurry to fill it… What if I let the cold cleanse my own heart? What festering diseases must die? What will I lose if I refuse the chill, escape to palmed beaches in my mind?”
to watch, listen to
A Quiet Mind To Suffer With — John Bryant on Mere Fidelity — A truly humanizing and rich conversation. The best way to finish off the book.
Continuing On:
The Commonplace with Autumn Kern — How To Find "Humanzing” Content Online and Why We Read Fairy Tales, Part 2
to glean from: tip, product, resource
We picked up a library book about a boy making this drink with his grandfather, so of course I looked for a Masala Chai Recipe and ordered some spices.
to look back on
This Week:
You can reply directly to this email if received in your inbox — I always enjoy hearing from y’all that way.
Gosh that Erin Loechner piece was 🔥. I have a lot of complicated thoughts about paying for online community/content after a bad experience in an online faith based subscriber-only community (essentially I ended up feeling used - that my lack of IRL community was being used to provide a flexible income opportunity for someone else (maybe that is overly harsh 😂🫢). I was listening to a podcast recently where the host strangely admitted to not having anything more of value to say but was probably going to keep the show going because he relied on the income for his family. !!! It truly left me flabbergasted that someone was comfortable wasting other people’s time bc content is profitable but I wonder how often this becomes the case.
Just here to say that I, too, am so over people who build a huge audience on social media, get what they need from it (email list, whatever), then peace out (totally or mostly) and become wise sages about social media use. OOOOOVER IT. A big popular account on IG has recently done this, and though I appreciate her and her thoughts immensely, I do not appreciate this aspect of it.
(I haven’t read the Erin Loechner piece but I have read all the comments here and I don’t think I need to😁)