Weeks 48 / 49 (2025)
liquid selves, the body God gives, and being formed in our control of them
Enjoy this collection of digitally scrapbooked resonances… this attempt to weave unexpected connections… this Imaginary, Weekly Magazine I’d Like To (Or Need To) Read gleaned from other magazines, journals, writers, creators of good things. Perhaps it is many things. I can’t guarantee a niche (my life story, amiright) but I can guarantee the equivalent of a satisfying charcuterie board. Comments are imagined to be around a conversation table. Cheers.
to read: books
The Professor's House — Willa Cather — I don’t think I was in the right headspace for this (way too mentally preoccupied while listening, which doesn’t usually happen) but enjoyed it for what it was. She’s always a beautiful writer, regardless of my ability to appreciate it.
Christy Isinger tipped me onto this one a few weeks back, sharing the article Willa Cather's Prescriptions for Modern Life and adding “I think it’s one of the best truly adult books ever written. And not adult in the gross way, but in the “this is how seriously we need to look at our lives” kinda way.”
The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self — Carl Trueman — Initial thoughts. There are more I’m attempting to work out.
![The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution [Book]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!jA2n!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc56a557f-3b7f-4f8b-9f9e-d8e3309f59d4_700x1050.jpeg "The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution [Book]")
to read: essays, articles, newsletters
Bountiful Fire / The Questions — A. A. Kostas, Waymarkers — “We glow and burn and shine, bonfires on the beach, beacons in the night.”
Liquid Selves, Empty Selves: A Q&A with Angela Franks — Serena Sigillito and Angela Franks, The Public Discourse — “The modern rejection of substance rejected the need to have linguistic clarity around who and what the triune God and Jesus Christ are. I think the motive for that is really just the modern obsession with freedom. Because if I am not limited by a certain nature, by my human nature, if I am not limited by being this finite substance, then this whole new world of possibilities opens up.”
Your Body Has Been Made — guest post by Mark Rico, A Stylist Submits —
“Ponder this: salvation has been won
without a fight, perfected by the bloom
of holiness that makes His home inside your womb.”We Resemble What We Worship — Hannah Lang, Further Up & Further In — “Just like these two kingdoms cast off God’s ways, even those in Christian circles have allowed their imaginations to be formed by a culture that sees radical autonomy as the highest good. With this malformed mindset, even God-ordained designs—say, a monthly cycle for women—can be quickly dismissed as meaningless and worth suppressing if it gives us more of the control we so desire. This idol of control, of “I should be able to have what I want, and my body should not get in the way,” is deeply ingrained in our society.”
Such respectable sacred cows abound. They also impact more than simply us and ours, which gets me so dang angry that I wrote a bit about it. In the nicest way I could.
We Are God’s Hospitality — Peter Leithart, Theopolis — “We are the temple of God, the fulfilled house of hospitality. Hospitality makes the church. Hospitality isn’t just what we get. It isn’t just what we do. Hospitality is what we are.” h/t Kate for sharing.
The Body God Gives — Matthew Lee Anderson, The Path Before Us — “One way the church might alleviate the burdens of those with gender dysphoria is by resisting the suffocating, consuming self-consciousness that comes from our culture’s obsession with sex and gender—not by deflating their importance, but by constantly holding in view the reality that our dysfunctions in those arenas are only a species of the more fundamental theo-anthropological crisis from which there is no escape: death. We are all implicated in the social, economic, and moral dysfunctions that together give rise to the possibility that a man will “identify” as a woman: our society’s embrace of the “boastful pride of life” means we attempt to parody the true glory of the new creation, by rejecting our creaturely limits and numbing the anxieties of mortality through the comforts of middle-class luxuries. The transgender effort to reconfigure the sexed body is only a more spectacular, extreme form of a pathology that stands beneath every attempt to conquer “nature,” whether it be vasectomies, in vitro fertilization... Isolating transgender theory for response is understandable, given its unique dynamics: yet a Christian response striving to be evangelical might challenge the superiority of sex and gender in our imaginations by showing how we are all caught up in the deep ideologies we rightly condemn.”
in addition to Serena’s interview and Hannah’s essay above, see also his articles Surrogacy and the Challenge of Fair Mindedness and Why I Won't Sign The Nashville Statement, or even my sterilization piece for more of this same necessary and helpful—if a bit uncomfortable—thread he’s been illuminating for some time. It ties in extremely well to Trueman’s book.
the [desecrated] body compilation thoughtfully shared by Cambron Wright here.
the vasectomy piece linked in Austin Gravley’s Mere Orthodoxy article here.
the [female] body compilation mentioned by Sarah Carter in the footnotes here.
more on sexual and procreative ethics—in medicine, society, and our own lives:
![the [female] body: a compilation](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!wWgM!,w_140,h_140,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4915e0a2-6b60-42c4-93c8-748af2fa1f4c_480x360.jpeg)
![the [desecrated] body: a compilation](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!dRya!,w_140,h_140,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5c9d3ae9-c6b3-42ba-a5db-f5b7f91da982_555x600.jpeg)
to watch, listen to
Continuing On:
Mere Fidelity — Replay: What Difference Does a Doctrine of Creation Make? — “If creation is just a transparent screen where God is poking through all over the place and the only way in which we can talk about creation’s goodness is on those terms… that seems to be, actually, not a sufficiently thick doctrine of creation. So all of my jokes about Sacramental Pixie Dust are kind of rooted in this intuition: that actually the reality of this world is good, and maybe even good on its own terms—extrinsically, intrinsically ordered to God but with a goodness that is solid and whole and complete, and that we can talk about without referring to God every next sentence.” // “This is my most Baptist point of view… my most Baptist intuition.” // The in the arms of my beloved part also took me out.
And O. Alan Noble, this conversation on the doctrine of creation reminded me of this lecture of yours you shared, and which I have saved to listen to.
Woven Well Podcast with Caitlin Estes — Episodes 123-125 — Postpartum Intercourse Essentials and How To Pay For Fertility Awareness Education and Client Story: Claire (Learning in a Challenging Season) — “It’s not nearly as easy to access fertility education as it is birth control, but it’s an investment in your health, your family, and yourself that you’ll never regret making.”
more resources here
Thanks for these recommendations. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self is a great read, I recommend it to others often. Very clear thinking.
I think 2026 is the year I FINALLY read Willa Cather... there are only so many mentions I can take before I am ~influenced~