Many unicorns in one civilized place form a blessing for your Saturday. Here is this week’s herd, corralled all together:
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Louise Perry’s latest for First Things, “We Are Repaganizing,” is the most important thing I read this week. A taste of this marvelous essay that considers the difference that Christianity had made in world history, and what is coming if a post-Christian world prevails. Perry’s focus concerns, in particular, issues of life and protection for the vulnerable:
It was the arrival of Christianity that disrupted the Romans’ favored methods of keeping reproduction in check, with laws against infanticide, and then abortion, imposed by Christian emperors from the late fourth century. Christians have always been unusually vehement in their disapproval of the killing of infants, whether born or unborn, and their legal regime prevailed until the mid-twentieth century when we experienced a religious shift that will probably be understood by future historians as a Second Reformation. Christians are no longer in charge, and their prohibition of abortion—unlike their prohibition of infanticide, at least so far—is regarded by most pro-choice secularists as archaic, illogical, and misogynist…
Christianity is often imagined as water. “But let justice run down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream”: the words of Amos 5:24, repurposed by Martin Luther King Jr. “He who believes in Me,” promises Christ, “out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.” Water baptizes, gives life, quenches thirst, purifies filth, expunges flames, transforms things for the better. If Christianity is water, then it is an unstoppable force: It will run down and seep up, no matter the impediment.
But what if Christianity is not water? What if, instead, we understand the Christian era as a clearing in a forest? The forest is paganism: dark, wild, vigorous, and menacing, but also magical in its way. For two thousand years, Christians pushed the forest back, with burning and hacking, but also with pruning and cultivating, creating a garden in the clearing with a view upward to heaven.
At the risk of shameless self-promotion, I will add that my book manuscript, Priceless, which I just sent off to IVP Academic at the end of August, tells some of this same story: that the post-Christian view of issues of life, especially as these pertain to our society’s view of mothers and children, are the same as the pre-Christian pagan views.
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Alex Sosler, whose book on college as pilgrimage Perry Glanzer and Austin Smith reviewed at Current this week as part of our forum on higher education, has a beautiful essay over at Front Porch Republic, titled “Perseverance and Grace: Or, Why I Don’t Deserve a Damn Bit of Credit for my Life.” A taste:
Looking back on those days after college, seeing people succeed where I felt like I was a failure, much of my distress was caused by my sense that my life wasn’t measuring up to my plans for it. I wanted the ease of comfort, security, control. I didn’t want dependence. I didn’t want submission. I didn’t want to live into my limits. The pains, concerns, and conflicts were never part of my design. Suffering isn’t typically part of my five-year plan. There really is little consolation for the pure suck-i-ness of life at times.
And yet.
I can also look back on my life in gracious bewilderment. I would have never planned for my life to go the way it has. If you would have told high-school-me about my current life, I wouldn’t have believed you—not so much because it’s exactly what I wanted. Far from it. I have a doctorate and am an Anglican priest. I would have made fun of myself if you told me that in high school. What a nerd. But I also can’t describe the sheer joy I feel when I walk into a classroom of 18–22-year-olds. I’m not being modest when I say I’m not very impressive. There are much smarter people than me with PhDs who don’t have an academic post. I can’t explain the rest I experience when praying the liturgy with my church family. I thought I wanted kids, but no one could prepare me for the way my 3-year-old son tells me that he loves me, or my daughter squeals when I arrive home from work. I couldn’t concoct this delight. Call it luck or coincidence. I’ll call it providential grace.
And the proper response to grace is submission.
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Recently, U.S. Senator Tuberville criticized the U.S. military for going “woke,” which (to him) apparently included reciting poetry (“We have people doing poems on aircraft carriers over loudspeakers.”) In response, Joel Christensen argues that “Tuberville’s Attack on Poetry in the Military Reveals Lack of Understanding of Ancient Greece’s Martial History.” As a Homerist, Christensen makes an especially important argument for the value of soldiers reading the Homeric epics. But ultimately, this is an essay about the value of the liberal arts for human flourishing of all people, including military personnel. A taste:
The Iliad is a complex poem with many different messages. At its core, it helps audiences think about the cost of violence and the meaning of war. Ultimately, I think it suggests that the only true reason to fight is to protect the people you love, whether that means your family, your citizens, or the people standing next to you in the trenches. Surely, this is not a bad lesson for any warrior today…
Our soldiers, sailors, and airmen are human beings. (Disclosure: My wife, along with many members of my family are veterans of the U.S. Army.) They have lives and families and make meaning of the world like the rest of us.
And they are better soldiers and citizens if they have the frameworks to ask questions of themselves and their world provided by literature and art.
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Speaking of literature, over at Law & Liberty, Philip Bunn writes “In Defense of Voracious Reading.” A taste:
As a teacher, when I sit down to read John Adams’ Thoughts on Government or Dissertation on Canon and Feudal Law, I no longer read like a student cramming before a seminar. I read carefully and slowly, marking allusions Adams makes to other texts, historical events referenced, interlocutors to whom Adams is responding. I take time as I read and after I read to hunt down context for Adams’ arguments, the sources of his quotations, and the texts to which he might be responding. I approach the work with an eye to understanding it deeply, so that I might better facilitate the learning of my students as I guide them through a text I must know well. This form of reading is plodding by necessity, slow and steady as it were. One cannot do scholarship at the Hare’s pace.
But when I put down my John Adams, or my Plato, or my Adam Smith, or anything else needed for teaching or research, I turn to my endless pile of “to be read” books. These books, I read differently. If I pick up Brandon Sanderson’s latest fantasy offering, for example, I can simply allow myself to become immersed in the story. I get caught up in the characters and their drama, their emotions and their goals, hungry to discover what twists the author and the story will throw at them as I consume the story set before me. In this form of reading, I can cover material much faster than I can with the previous method, and thus my Goodreads “read” list inflates apace.
I submit that this latter type of reading is neither less valuable nor less essential than the former.
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We’re happily celebrating the good news of the week for Jeremy Sabella, a Current Contributing Editor, who signed a book contract with Oxford University Press for his book The Politics of Original Sin: Rethinking the World the Cold War Made. If you would like a sneak preview, check out this interview with Jeremy at the Arena back in April.
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My favorite American historian visited America: A History Podcast to talk about Jimmy Carter!
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Finally, over at the Anxious Bench, this week I told a story from my forthcoming book, Cultural Christians in the Early Church, which will be out in the world in two months! Perhaps the best marketing a Greco-Roman historian could have asked for is this story this week.
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