This Week's Miscellany (08/12/23)
The Outsides of Holy Things, Motherhood and Grad School, Tudor Life, and Flannery.
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.
School starts early in Florida—likely because August is so hot we might as well all be hiding out in the air conditioning and hitting the books. I’m grateful for return to routine and normalcy and I have high hopes for this school year.
The Kindergartener, 5th grader, and 6th grader are all at the same school as last year and have great teachers. It was a difficult transition last year with the big move and I’m grateful that we’re not starting out facing a big learning curve navigating a new place.
This week I also watched my oldest hop on the school bus for his first week of high school—at my former high school. He has two of my former teachers this year! It was a very strange experience walking the halls with him at orientation. Starting as a new student in 8th grade at Pre-K-8th school last year was, understandably, not an ideal situation. He’s excited to start a new chapter!
My work is busy but so exciting as we get closer to the launch of our first Word on Fire Spark titles in September-November. I can’t wait to share all the details with you about the books I’ve been midwifing into the world.
Links
The Intellectual Life of Doctoral Student Mothers by Eileen Reuter for ND Church Life Journal
My friends and I have shared the common experiences of being the “odd” ones in our programs because we are married, have had multiple pregnancies during graduate school, and tow our babies along to school events. Yet, despite our uniqueness in our programs, we have also found each other and realized that our numbers are growing. Many of the women I look up to—mothers doing intellectual work who are a few decades older than me—did not have the experience of camaraderie that my friends and I have found with each other.
I found this piece really interesting and I’m excited that conversations about how to structure graduate school for women who are mothers are being highlighted! I quit grad school after one semester because I realized that I wasn’t going to able to have more babies (my pregnancies are rough) and give my all to my art history program. The program was not friendly to family life (a professor told me that I should spend less time with my toddler because “at that age they don’t care who’s with them—a dog could take care of them”) and I have no regrets about quitting but graduate school and family life should be things that can be pursued at the same time!
Public engagement must be balance by times of withdrawal and silence by Tish Harrison Warren for her last column for The New York Times
…writing publicly about God each week can do a number on one’s soul. Thomas Wingfold, a character in a novel by the Scottish minister and poet George MacDonald, said, “Nothing is so deadening to the divine as an habitual dealing with the outsides of holy things.” Holy things, sacred topics, spiritual ideas, I believe, have power. Dealing with them is a privilege and a joy, but habitually dealing with the outside of them is inherently dangerous…Social media and digital technology have made us all pundits. We are faced with a constant choice: Every experience, belief, feeling and thought we have can be shared publicly or not. In a single day, we can take in more information and ideas than was ever possible, yet at the end of the day we can still lack wisdom.
Constant connectivity empties us out, as individuals and as a society, making us shallower thinkers and more impatient with others. When it comes to faith, it can yield a habitual dealing with the outsides of holy things, fostering an avoidance of those internal parts of life that are most difficult, things like prayer, uncertainty, humility and the nakedness of who we most truly are amid this confusing, heartbreaking and incandescently beautiful world.
I think most of us are longing not for shallow hot takes but well-formed ideas that have taken their time to simmer and develop. And yet, to allow the time for that goes against the structure of our systems of communication: social media, daily/weekly columns or radio shows. Slow, thoughtful takes require going against the grain.
‘Barbie’ affirms the goodness of women’s embodiment by
Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is a moving meditation on being embodied humans, specifically embodied women.
Gnosticism — the dualistic heresy that bodies and the greater material world are bad, and that God rescues us out of our bodies, through a gospel available via some secret knowledge — rages today as much as it did in the first few hundred years of the church. Then, the first Christians had to continually reassert the goodness of bodies, made evident in God in Christ humbly taking on flesh, and defeating sin and death through his body, nailed to a cross. From the Incarnation to the Cross to the Resurrection, the Christian story tells us that our bodies are good. We’re not headed toward a perfect, plastic utopia, where our souls rise up into immaterial bliss; we’re headed toward a new heavens and earth, where our very bodies now will be transformed, healed, and redeemed.
I haven’t seen Barbie, yet, but I want to!
Look, I am at heart a lazy nerd and take no pleasure in reporting this, but if a computer can match or exceed your vaunted intellect, maybe that’s not what matters about you. The more of your life that could be taken over by a machine, the faker, the less human, it turns out your life was.
What’s special about us is the intersection between the mental and the physical, the fact that our intellects are embodied and our bodies are directed by rational minds, so the most human things you can do — the ones best aligned with your nature — are those that employ your mind and body in tandem. We’ve long recognized that it degrades a person to reduce them to their pure physicality like a draft animal or (a much later metaphor) a piece of machinery: “What,” Tocqueville once asked, “can be expected of a man who has spent twenty years of his life in making heads for pins?” But by now most of the mindless drudgery that was innovated into existence with the Industrial Revolution has been automated or outsourced away⁹ and it’s time to confront the fact that a reduction to the purely mental is just as degrading and deformative of the human person. Maybe it’s just as well that email jobs are next on the chopping block of technological progress: what, after all, can be expected of a man who has spent twenty years of his life in making #content?
What an interesting read!
I: Structure by
When it comes to writing woes, I’ve found one thing to be consistently true: most people who are having trouble, most of the time, are failing at the level of structure. Their prose might be good or bad or just kind of serviceable but the real problem is how they’re putting stuff together.
I’ll read B.D. Maclay on pretty much any topic. In this piece she touches on the truth that good writers are good thinkers. I don’t have a very organized mind, so one step of the process for me is often verbally processing my ideas with a sounding board (usually longsuffering Daniel). Then I’m able to see where I’m going with the piece I’m working on.
O’Connor as (Hillbilly) Thomist by Fr. Damian Ference
O’Connor’s use of the term “hillbilly” is not meant to be derogatory but does suggest that even country folk with no formal background in philosophy nevertheless reflect Thomistic epistemology: they use their common sense and trust that their senses are telling them the truth about reality. As Robert Sokolowski puts it, “There can be a hillbilly Thomist, but there could not be a hillbilly Kantian or Hegelian, let alone a hillbilly Derridean.” In other words, the insights of Aquinas “can be expressed in a simple, straightforward manner,” a manner that even a hillbilly would understand, but the same cannot be said of Kant, Hegel, and Derrida because their philosophies all reject the starting point of common sense.
If you are interested in St. Thomas Aquinas and Flannery O’Connor, this is the book for you.
And if you’re still feeling summery (relentless heat indexes over 100 degrees here), check out Aleteia’s summer reading recs including one by yours truly.
You may not have heard that G.K. Chesterton was secretly accompanied by a tiny cloister of talking mice who were also nun-detectives, but after your kids read this book (and the rest of the series), they can tell you all about their crime-solving escapades.
Listening
I was inspired by this beautiful review in Fare Forward by Joseph Collum to listen to Jason Isbell’s new album, Weathervanes. I’ve also been enjoying Feist’s new album.
The Year of Jane
The first reflection for Sense & Sensibility drops tomorrow! Keep an eye out for the weekly reflection and discussion question email.
Coming Soon!
-An Interview with playwright Laura Pittinger about her new play about Servant of God, Dorothy Day
-Excerpts from my recent talk on G.K. Chesterton’s detective fiction
-Mini book reviews (for paid subscribers)
Upcoming Events:
Together in Holiness Conference, October 21st, Fort Myers, FL
Heavenly Hops Pilgrimage with Fr. Harrison Ayre to Belgium and Germany (registration will go live next week)
And that’s all folks! Wishing you all a wonderful weekend. And a huge thank you to Brittany 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
Thanks so much for sharing the Eileen Reuter piece! As a PhD student who has recently (a year ago) become a mom, I’ve been struggling and this article was a major dose of encouragement.
I didn’t read the article about doctoral student mothers, but I am glad to hear that women in all walks of life are being encouraged to have families and embrace motherhood. However, I get the impression from many fronts (articles, movies, novels) that we somehow have to spend time encouraging mothers in their careers and education, as if that aspect of motherhood is under attack, or in danger of not being fostered. At the same time, I see very little on the same fronts in terms of encouragement to be primarily a homemaker (not excluding an intellectual life, just one that serves the home and family first), and encouragement for young women who desire this, and do not desire a career or higher education. For example, we like to sometimes watch those light Christian romance movies, along the lines of the old Hallmark movies, and you NEVER find a main character who just wants to get married and raise a family--apparently that is an embarrassing desire that shouldn’t be encouraged, or only for the ignorant, or something. To be fair, this isn’t new. I was in college in the early 80’s and all I wanted was to be a wife and mother, but I spent a lot of time making excuses and choosing a major that didn’t make me look bad--then I chose elementary school teaching in the hope that if I had to work, I could have the same schedule as my kids. But, I was, even then, embarrassed to tell people I didn’t want to work outside the home. I still don’t--I love my home life and being with my young adult kids. And, frankly, for the future of society, that ought to be okay for a large percentage of mothers. Wondering what you think?