Welcome to this week’s Blessing of Unicorns–a roundup of all the wild, strange, and beautiful short reads I’ve come across over the past week. This week’s unicorns are eclectic and include reads about the Holocaust, family and pregnancy, Christian historian and theologian Nijay Gupta’s conversion story, a short film about an Australian pastor who dissuaded at least 160 people from suicide, a Christian perspective on reforming criminal justice, farewell to Snow Days, and my new Substack.
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Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day (and I wrote about it for Current yesterday). There are so many connections between the Holocaust and what is happening in Ukraine now. I appreciated Masha Rumer’s Newsweek article this week about her story—her own experience first coming to the US as a refugee, and her recent work working with immigrant refugees. A taste of the stories of some refugees whom Masha has tutored for the US citizenship exam:
These women, hardy and tender with their melodious speech sprinkled with diminutives and exultations to God, reminded me of my grandparents and their siblings.
One was found in a ditch shot through the head by the Nazis—and lived. Another was thrown into the Gulag by her own people. They reminded me especially of my grandmother, who’d lived through the Holodomor famine in a Ukrainian shtetl, then the Holocaust.
As a teen, she fled from the advancing Germans on a freight train; her grandparents were slaughtered for being Jews days later in Vinnytsia. She got through World War II in exile, sewing boots in a factory and sleeping in a room with ice-covered walls.
She survived two genocides, and she wasn’t about to give up as an immigrant retiree in America. Not a chance.
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By the way, Agnes Howard reviewed Masha’s book, Parenting with an Accent for Current last year. This seems an apt time to encourage everyone again to read that review—and Masha’s book.
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Also, here are two reading recommendations from Agnes Howard on matters related to pregnancy and children. This piece proposes government payouts for people to have more kids as the way to solve the unfolding population implosion, which is only predicted to get worse.
And second, Julianne McCobin has a striking essay on IVF and Frankenstein in The Point Magazine.
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Also on pregnancy-related note, Dixie Dillon Lane reflects at the Institute of Family Studies blog on the importance of the recent discovery about hyperemesis gravidarum—a condition that affects a significant minority of pregnant women. A cure for this condition would be not just a quality of life matter for the sufferers, but is also a pro-life measure.
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Nijay Gupta is a first-rate scholar of the New Testament and has the gift for making the NT and the history of the early church accessible to general audiences (like in this forthcoming book). I didn’t know, however, that he was a convert to Christianity from Hinduism. So I appreciated this interview with Sean McDowell, all about Nijay’s conversion.
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Many thanks to Brian Scoles for recommending this short but powerful film, Teacups. A taste from the description of the film:
Teacups tells the incredible true story of Don Ritchie (1926-2012) who lived next to a cliff in Sydney, Australia that’s notorious for suicide attempts, and saved at least 160 – and perhaps many more – lives. The Australian actor Hugo Weaving narrates this animated film from the perspective of Ritchie, telling how he came to embrace a simple yet life-saving gesture to those in distress: extending a gentle hand and the invitation of a warm cup of tea at his home. Behind his voice, a blue- and red-tinted colour palette imbues the minimalist animations with both the coldness of desperation and the warmth of compassion.
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Matt Martens is a Reformed Christian and a trained lawyer. His new book, Reforming Criminal Justice: A Christian Proposal makes the case that the current system is unjust. Plough has an excerpt from the book, looking in particular at the injustices faced by the poor. This was one of the books that I got my husband for Christmas (I knew he would enjoy it too, so it wasn’t quite like buying a book just for myself), and I am looking forward to reading it this year.
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Here is a powerful reflection from Melissa Borja this week at the Anxious Bench, considering the demise of snow days, and what it means: The Snow Day as (Endangered) Holiday. A brief taste:
… the Snow Day is under threat. It is the victim of many forces: the relentless push for greater productivity, imposed even upon schoolchildren; the advent of Zoom and other new technology, which blurs the boundary between school and home; and the warming climate, which has increased temperatures and reduced snowfall. Ultimately, the culprit is capitalism. If capitalism created the conditions for the Snow Day to become a holiday, capitalism has also created the conditions for its demise.
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Last but not least, I may be the last writer around to jump on the Substack wagon, but here goes: I am launching a Substack to offer a space for conversations about Cultural Christians in the Early Church—including a slow read! Coming in March! It’s like a book club in your mailbox! In addition, I will use this to post weekly updates specifically on my book projects.
So, in case you are wondering: how would this affect this blog or anything else I am doing? It won’t. My publisher simply felt that my own newsletter would offer the best venue for book discussions and updates on that work. The Arena will continue to be what it so beautifully has been now for almost a year: an eclectic group blog that features the work of many thinkers (including book-related interviews!) and offers immediate commentary on news and culture items.