This Week's Miscellany (05/013/23)
Diagon Alley, Are the Humanities Risky?, Nuns, Sumerian Poetry
Hello to new subscribers and welcome all to another edition of This Week’s Miscellany. TWM is full of my favorite things from around the web, typically trending literary.
Well, I survived my son’s 8th grade class trip to Universal. It had been 11 years since I’d been and they didn’t have Grimmauld Place, Diagon Alley, and Gringotts then, so lots of new things to see.
We rode the Hogwarts Express, drank butterbeer, walked seven miles, and didn’t lose any kids. Success. (Did I have to lay in bed in a dark room for 24 hours afterwards due to overstimulation? Yes. But, we had a great time so I’m gonna say it was worth it.)
And then I went back to Orlando on Wednesday for a short publishing team meetup. Great time with my wonderful WOF colleagues and one of our Spark author/illustrators. Last work travel until late July!
Thoughts on the Liberal Arts
Playing the Long Game by Jessica Hooten Wilson
We all look with dismay at the public square when it comes to these areas that we prize so highly and how much we need more people to step into these spaces to serve. Yet, we lead students away from service, away from their creative gifting, away from religious calling because those careers do not make money!? We are so short-sighted. We are playing the short game, rather than the long one.
The benefits (and challenges) of studying the liberal arts in college is a topic I’m very interested in. When my husband and I graduated with degrees in the humanities from Baylor’s University Scholars program, we were very prepared for graduate school. But we also had babies to raise. Daniel got a full-time job that had nothing to do with what he studied in college and it didn’t pay well. I did a semester of art history grad school and determined it wasn’t good timing. (I had a high needs, neurodivergent toddler who required all of my energy and we wanted another baby. Looking back, it was a good decision because my terrible pregnancies seem to only get worse as I age. I’m grateful I was able to grow our family while I was in my 20s because my 4th pregnancies—and the only one in my 30s—was a doozy.)
So I raised babies and toddlers and taught ballet for a few years part-time. If we had taken stock of how our education served us during that season we wouldn’t have been very impressed, to be honest.
But our education is what cultivated my writing skills which I developed during naptime for years. It also prepared us to homeschool, something we really enjoyed. My writing career grew, I published books, and now I am a children’s book editor. Daniel now works in a field he loves as a distiller. And he does free lance writing for distilling publications as well as literary magazines. We keep coming back to the humanities—not only in our careers but in living full lives.
I do believe in the value of the liberal arts, not just for us as individuals but for society. And yet, I also know plenty of folks with liberal arts degrees who were not as lucky as we are. They hoped to be professors but couldn’t get work in academia. They had to start over in order to find work that could maintain their family. We certainly lived for many years under the poverty line—in part because we were determined to make it on one income when our babies were little so one of us could be primarily at home. But if we’d had, say, engineering degrees, that might have looked different.
And so while I don’t think money should be the be all end all of educational aspirations, I don’t dismiss the struggles of trying to make a living with a humanities degree. I wonder if ideally studying great texts, philosophy, theology, and art history should be tackled in high school so that everyone has a foundation in these subjects. And some will be called to dive deeper in college. I also think pursuing the humanities as non-academics is becoming more common and there are more resources (like the Catherine Project!).
In the end, it all worked out for us. I wouldn’t change a thing about our great text education. But I’m often at a loss when young people ask me for advice on pursuing the humanities. I suppose my attitude could be summed up with: Everyone needs the humanities, but not everyone needs a degree in the humanities. I just got to visit the new Chesterton Academy of Orlando on Thursday and that seems like the dream as far as equipping high schoolers with an incredible foundation in the humanities to benefit them no matter what their plans are for university. I wish there was one in Tallahassee (but no, I do not have time to found one! I will, however, be happy to help anybody who does.)
And also by
is a wonderful piece on Sumerian poetry by Endehuana.More Links
Motherly Models and Mentors, Best Books on Motherhood by
This is a wonderful list of beautiful books!
And while we’re on the subject of motherhood:
Justice for Mothers by Erika Bachiochi for Plough
American parents need not only opportunities for justly remunerated work, as that nineteenth-century union boss declared; they also need pro-family policies that, as Eichner rightly argues, “insulate family life from market pressures” so that parents have time to provide the nurture and care that only they can do. Reviewing the panoply of veterans’ benefits for their transferability as caregiver benefits would be a good place to start.
And related:
Pope says only rich can afford to have children in Italy by Crispian Balmer
"The free market, without the necessary corrective measures, becomes savage and produces increasingly serious situations and inequalities," he added.
The pope said pets were replacing children in some households and recounted how a woman at a recent audience had opened her bag and asked for a papal blessing for "her baby", only to reveal that it was a dog.
Fancy two stories about nuns?
An Irish Abbey Where the Grass Is Always Warmer by Sarah Archer for NYTimes
Today, the abbey is the only Cistercian monastery for women in Ireland. Despite being an enclosed order, it welcomes visitors from all over the world to its guesthouse, which is busy year round. (“St. Benedict’s Rules for Monasteries” — written circa 530 A.D. — includes an entire chapter on hospitality.).
The Literary Lives of Mid-Century Nuns by Nick Ripatrazone
I wrote my new book, The Habit of Poetry: The Literary Lives of Nuns in Mid-century America, because I kept on coming across poems by nuns in these magazine archives. Some of the poems were devotional and traditional. I say that without disdain; these women wrote with measured skill. Yet more often than not, the poems were stylistic, satirical, and subversive.
And more on education. Charlotte Mason’s ideas have always meshed well with my own attitude toward early childhood education and definitely influenced our homeschooling methods.
The Great Recognition by Leah Boden for Plough
Mason’s first principle of education, that “children are born persons,” challenges this stunting approach to parenting, reminding us that children are born ready to connect with the world around them. This transforming principle states that each child is born with a unique character, innate personality, and set of gifts and raw abilities. As parents and educators, we must learn to be curious about who each child is, to help them become who they are destined to be. The essence of the born person concept is that when a child comes into the world, he or she is not a project, a raw piece of wood to be whittled, or a lump of clay to be molded. They are instead born as whole people: full of life, personality, and the capacity and capability to engage with the world.
And this is from my publisher about my new book coming out in June!
The book is now available to pre-order from my publisher, Pauline Books and Media and from Amazon.
Pauline Books & Media will publish The Strange Sound by the Sea, the third book in the celebrated Sister Seraphina Mysteries children’s book series by Haley Stewart and Betsy Wallin. The Sister Seraphina Mysteries has been featured in the National Catholic Register and OSV News. The second book in the series, The Curious Christmas Trail, was named a finalist in the 2023 Association of Catholic Publishers (ACP) Excellence in Publishing Awards.
The Sister Seraphina Mysteries continue the tradition of Catholic imaginative storytelling with relatable characters, a compelling storyline, and a Catholic worldview. The illustrated, read-aloud series centers around a religious community of mice who live under the floorboards of G. K. Chesterton’s home. When mystery strikes (as it always does), Sister Seraphina, Sister Alberta, and their students at Saint Wulfhilda’s Abbey School must band together to crack the case. In The Strange Sound by the Sea, the setting is the shores of Lyme Regis, a popular British holiday spot with connections to Chesterton and Jane Austen. As Sister Seraphina and her sleuthing students investigate the source of a mysterious nighttime noise, they learn valuable lessons on charity, mercy, and the gift of the imagination.
The Strange Sound by the Sea exudes the warmth and charm that families have come to appreciate from the first two books in the series, The Pursuit of the Pilfered Cheese and The Curious Christmas Trail. The story also has a unique vocational element by casting religious sisters as main characters and giving children a glimpse of religious life. As a hardcover, illustrated chapter book, it is perfectly positioned as a read-aloud story and a space for families to share their Catholic faith.
The Strange Sound by the Sea releases June 2023 from Pauline Books & Media.
The Year of Jane
We wrapped up Emma and are beginning Mansfield Park!
And that’s all folks! Wishing you all a wonderful weekend. This email is free to receive but time-intensive to produce, so I want to offer a huge thank you to Aimee and Martin for upgrading to a paid subscription. This is a reader-supported newsletter so if you enjoy getting these emails, please consider supporting this Substack by upgrading to a paid subscription with the button below.
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Thanks for reading!
Haley
(Editor of Word on Fire Spark, Author, Former Podcaster)
Haley’s Children’s Mystery Series about Mouse Nuns
I largely agree with your thoughts on pursuing a Humanities degree. My own experience is that for most people, the key is to use the skills, if not the actual knowledge, you acquire in pursuing your degree in careers outside of academia. In my case, I was first in banking, then in finance as the business officer at an independent school. I have an English degree, and have never completed a finance or accounting class. But I do know how to learn! I know how to coherently string sentences together both on the page (or screen) and verbally. I know how to problem solve. I have a cache of interesting things with which to schmooze people at cocktail parties. I had to start as a receptionist but the skills I learned studying the Humanities absolutely set me on the ladder to career success.
I was blessed to attend a small private high school where the humanities were front and center. In college I settled on another "risky" major: anthropology. Only recently have I come to terms with the fact that my former dream career of puttering around museum collections for the rest of my life is not likely to come to fruition. Still, I count myself a lucky man. I've been a professional writer for three years now and have "met" (via the internet) all kinds of wonderful creative people who I likely never would have encountered if I had stuck to my "plan" of going into academia. God has greater plans for us than we would ever make for ourselves.