Every year, as we begin our homeschool year on August 1st, there’s some gnashing of teeth over the less loved subjects rolling back in. But on December 2nd, we finished our fall semester, so it is now a time of rejoicing for the junior crew. If we see snow flurries in the morning, we get our boots on and run out to frolic. To be fair, we always did this. Children need a lot of time outside each day. Just like unicorns.
It worked out well that our fall homeschooling semester has concluded, as a couple of days after that, I received the editorial report from IVP Academic on my book Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity (my original title for this book was Priceless, but I concede that it wasn’t quite so descriptive of what the book is actually doing). My revised manuscript is due back at the end of this month, and the book will be out sometime in Fall 2024! In it, I present my vision for human flourishing as fundamentally pro-life, an idea that was as counter-cultural in the days of the early church as it is today.
Revising a book that is a manifesto for valuing motherhood and children is a very appropriate Advent activity, I think. But it also means that this is my last Unicorns roundup for this month, as I scale back on other work and reading to focus the tiny snippets of working time that I have on book revisions. I look forward to resuming these Saturday roundups in January!
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Agnes Callard seems to relish saying cringy things for kicks. And so, she continues to court controversy—this time, by writing a bizarre NYT op-ed about her inability to see any value in teaching/studying the humanities for, well, anything. It doesn’t train anyone in ethics, make for a better democracy, etc., she claims. I was left wondering: if you don’t believe in the value or purpose of your work, why do it?
But another piece I read this week, Iya Kiva’s essay, “The Defense of Humanity”, offers a poignant counterpoint, as the author considers the value of poetry in wartime. A taste:
In war, poetry is definitely not a soldier. It’s more like a shout instead of a gunshot. That’s why Ukrainian poets often remind me of people who, after a car crash, are the first ones to rush into the lane of oncoming traffic, desperately calling for help. They stand there bewildered, shocked, with faces distorted in terror, clumsily waving their arms, and sometimes they just lie right in the middle of the road if another car refuses to stop. Poetry in war is a scream, a howl, a plea, a shriek, a clamor, a roar, a lament. It’s a great collective mouth searching not for the most precise words in the best sequence but a way to make oneself present through sound, so that people who haven’t experienced the Russian-Ukrainian war in their own lives can feel it the way we, Ukrainians, feel it.
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Gretchen Ronnevik’s moving essay, “A Tale of Two Fathers” offers important theological reminders for this season and for how we think about family and trauma–and inherited family trauma.
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LuElla D’Amico, a prolific essayist whose work always makes me think, has a lovely and Advent-appropriate essay in Church Life Journal on the spiritual angle of the film Home Alone. A taste:
Kevin in my estimation is not a spoiled rich kid who tortures others for fun. Instead, he is a hurt child, looking for God. And I believe he finds him. While the majority of the film focuses on Kevin’s relationship with the criminals, the heart of it focuses on his relationship with Marley, an elderly neighbor whom Kevin initially fears.
You might remember the name Marley from Charles Dickens’s 1843 A Christmas Carol. “Marley was dead: to begin with,” Dickens’s narrative about the meaning of Christmas opens. A former business partner of Scrooge, Marley serves as a cautionary specter, visiting Scrooge on Christmas Eve and reminding Scrooge that he will soon suffer a similar fate. Laden with heavy chains and money boxes, which symbolize a life consumed by greed and selfishness, Marley tells Scrooge that he will encounter three spirits and must heed their messages, or else, he, Scrooge, will be condemned in the afterlife to bear even weightier chains of his own greedy making. Scrooge has a decision to make: change his ways or lose his soul.
In the context of Kevin’s story, the name Marley carries spiritual weight.
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Speaking of families, I enjoyed Abigail Wilkinson Miller’s essay What “Home Is Where the Eggs Are” Taught Me About Cooking as a Mom. A taste (no pun intended):
Like many other women, I’ve experienced a change in my relationship with cooking since the birth of my first child. I used to be able to pop on a podcast and spend hours on a single meal if I wanted to; as a new mom, I quickly found myself chopping vegetables between nursing sessions and singing folk songs to a tiny little person in a bouncer, hoping to win myself enough time to finish boiling pasta.
But it isn’t just the interruptions of parenthood that have transformed the way I think about my time in the kitchen. I also find myself thinking more about the way our meals transform our life together as a family. A 2022 survey by the American Heart Association revealed that 91 percent of American parents notice less stress when their family eats dinner together—something I’ve noticed in my own life, in spite of the way food preparation has changed. I’ve wondered, how might the time we spend at the table influence us in the day-to-day life we share? How might our food serve as a reminder of the people and places who have shaped us?
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Switching to a subject that makes us all happy: BOOKS! In light of Christianity Today’s Book Award announcement earlier this week, my reading recommendations this week from the Current vault are by two of this year’s award winners:
Lucy S. R. Austen’s essay “What Has Faith to Do with Biography?” is truly lovely and gives a glimpse of the challenges she had to think through while writing her book.
Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt, “Seeing Mrs. Riddle” likewise is beautiful in every way and offers a taste of the kind of insightful analysis that you can find in her book.
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On another book-related note, Peggy Rosenthal reviews Emily Wilson’s new Iliad translation at Slant Books blog and notes its many merits, especially on the poetic front. If you’re on the fence about this one, Rosenthal’s review may just get you off the fence.
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Finally, my children are agreed on their favorite history book for this year: Mac Barnett’s emotional rollercoaster of a ride, President Taft is Stuck in the Bath. It’s a poignant and awkward reminder that apocryphal history can be so much more fun (and more funny) than the real thing.
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This week I learned about Kalikantzaroi, the Christmastime goblins of modern Greek folklore, so now I feel like you need to learn about them too:
These little creatures are said to live under the crust of the earth all year round, sawing at the tree of life that holds up our planet and keeps it spinning, hoping to bring it crashing down. Every year during the holidays, however, these mischievous creatures come up to the earth to steal our sweets and just basically give us a hard time.
The Kalikantzaroi come up to the world during this period every year, the belief goes, because Christ has not yet been baptized and therefore cannot protect humanity from evil.
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Speaking of humor, it may be a niche Classicist thing to keep up with scandals about looted artifacts in the British Museum, but my reward now, which I generously share with you, is the Guardian’s collection of top ten bad jokes of the year—and the one about the British Museum is the winner. The winner:
Did you hear about the Christmas cake on display in the British Museum? It was Stollen.