A blessing of unicorns: a weekly roundup

One unicorn may just be a figment of your imagination: did you even see it? But many unicorns put together form a blessing.

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Let’s start with a news story that my children, who have been digging up the backyard for years in search of dinosaur bones or other historic artifacts, found terribly rude: “Boy Playing in Sandbox Finds 1,800-Year-Old Roman Coin.” This is the dream of every little boy (or girl), but only this one got so lucky (although, of course, he does not get to keep his discovery, which is museum-bound). A little more about the find and the finder:

An 8-year-old boy named Bjarne was playing in a sandbox at his elementary school in Bremen, Germany, when he made a stunning discovery: a silver denarius—or Roman coin—minted 1,800 years ago. While the boy, now 9, made the find last year, officials announced it at a press event on August 11.

Though much of what is now Germany once lay within the borders of the Roman Empire, Bremen did not, making the Roman coin especially rare—and especially puzzling.

Experts can’t say for certain how it got to Bremen, though they have several theories. As the History Blog writes, “Any Roman coins that made their way that far north likely reached the area via barter, washed up in the River Weser, or as a souvenir carried by an auxiliary or other world traveler.

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Monday was Labor Day, and in honor of this occasion, Ansley Quiros interviewed Heath Carter at the Anxious Bench. Two fantastic historians in conversation about the history of labor and the pursuit of justice. Worth reading in full.

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Also on Labor Day theme, Dick Schwartz’s essay for StarTribune, “An English Major Who Melted Aluminum,” praises the merits of doing a difficult and unexpected job well (and many thanks to Brian Scoles for recommending this read). A taste:

On a summer morning at the scrapyard before my junior year at the University of Minnesota, I was reassigned to stir molten aluminum. My foreman, Mr. Robinson, didn’t make me his “stirrer” because I had experience or skill. I had neither. My only qualification: I was the only remaining college boy hire in the yard after the previous stirrer, Leonard, had a panic attack inside the smelting furnace and was reassigned to foraging the yard for stray copper and brass shavings with a wooden pail.

No wonder. The stirrer’s first task each morning was “prepping the furnace.” That meant climbing into it and scraping off aluminum residue that had cooled and hardened overnight. At one point in this hellish task, the massive furnace door had to be closed with the stirrer inside in order to scrape the door’s backside in near pitch-darkness. Mr. Robinson stood with me the first time and said he hoped I’d get used to it, not like the other “college kid.” …

Up to then I’d mowed lawns, caddied, stocked women’s shoes, bused tables and decorated horse stalls at the State Fair. In short, I wasn’t prepared for labor like this.

“Young man, the fellas can’t do their job if you can’t do yours. They’re depending on you.”

Hard-as-nail, skilled scrapyard workers with families were depending on me? A college-kid English major?

Mr. Robinson said so.

Sometimes, in a flash, a few words can rock your world.

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My favorite American historian is in The Atlantic, where he considers “What Really Happens When People Stop Going to Church.” This is a timely piece for the upcoming presidential primary and election season, because, as it turns out, when people leave church, the result is only greater polarization and extremism of a sort that should concern all of us. A taste:

…as church attendance declines even in the southern Bible Belt and the rural Midwest, history might seem to suggest that those regions will become more secular, more supportive of abortion and LGBTQ rights, and more liberal in their voting patterns. But that is not what is happening. Declines in church attendance have made the rural Republican regions of the country even more Republican and—perhaps most surprising—more stridently Christian Nationalist.

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On a somewhat related note, Plough published an excerpt from Andrew Wilson’s new book, Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West. Stay tuned for a review at Current this winter. Meanwhile, a taste from this excerpt, on Benjamin Franklin’s editing of the Declaration of Independence:

Jefferson had originally written that “we hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable.”

Franklin crossed out the last three words and replaced them with one: “self-evident.”

It was a portentous edit. Jefferson’s version, despite his theological skepticism, presented the equality of men and the rights they held as grounded in religion: they are “undeniable” because they are “sacred” truths that originate with the Creator. By contrast, Franklin’s version grounded them in reason. They are “self-evident” truths, which are not dependent on any particular religious tradition but can easily be grasped as logically necessary by anyone who thinks about them for long enough.

To which the obvious response is: no, they are not. There are plenty of cultures in which it is not remotely self-evident to people that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, let alone that these rights include life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and the prerogative to abolish any government that does not preserve them. Most human beings in 1776 did not believe that at all, which is partly why the Declaration was required in the first place. (This accounts for the otherwise inexplicable phrase “we hold these truths to be self-evident,” as opposed to saying simply “these truths are self-evident.”) Some of the founders had not quite believed it themselves just fifteen years earlier. Billions of people today still don’t.

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Speaking of history, over at Hearth and Field, Dixie Dillon Lane had advice on teaching history to children: “When Teaching Children History, Embrace Imagination.” Come for the wonderful stories and anecdotes—like her family’s trip to the Great Pyramid at Giza—and stay for more concrete advice for making history more engaging, exciting, and educational for children, and why it is important to do that. A taste:

History is mystery: it is lives and stories and pain and joy and real experience hidden behind the times. History is a matter of both fact and story.

The facts will be of little import unless we also give children the skills to interpret history responsibly. And that means broadening their imaginations: connecting children with the realities of history through play, conversation, and story so that they intuitively understand the importance of the past. If your young pseudo-Etonian memorizes a timeline but does not play at King Arthur, he will not grow up to be a great statesman, nor even the sort of citizen he really ought to be, because he will not understand what it might possibly have been like for historical (or semi-fictional, like Arthur!) people to actually be alive in their own contexts.

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Saving the most moving read for last. Beatrice Scudeler has a beautifully moving essay in Fairer Disputations: “Towards a Theology of Birth: Jennifer Banks, Julian of Norwich, and the Acceptance of Suffering.” A taste from the concluding portion:

In our contemporary society, which values bodily autonomy over sacrifice, and thus undervalues the astonishing things a woman’s body can do, Julian’s perspective can feel revolutionary.

We are accustomed to thinking of birth and death as separate events, but for Julian, Christ’s Passion connects them by reminding us that we must die to ourselves in order to be spiritually reborn. Although maternal mortality rates are much lower now than in the past—and should be far lower still—women still risk their lives and their health for the good of children being born. They endure protracted, lingering pain over which they have little control. If they choose to nurse their children, they freely surrender their bodily autonomy for the benefit and nourishment of their newborns, knowing that their bodies will be depleted, and that, for the first few months of their infants’ lives, they will have little sleep and little strength.

And yet, we rightly speak of birth and motherhood as “beautiful.” Just so, Julian describes Christ’s body at the crucifixion as both a horrible sight in His suffering, and yet a beautiful sight, also.  His body is not only “hideous and dreadful” but also “sweet and lovely.” Julian finds beauty in suffering for the sake of another, because she believes that through death Christ reveals our salvation. In a parallel way, motherhood requires the pain of childbearing to reveal new life.

Wishing you a beautiful weekend, friends!