This week’s unicorns include poetry, prose, conspiracies, and valuing human life.
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Poets Joseph Bottum and Sally Thomas have concluded their NY Sun poetry column, and have started a new endeavor: Poems Ancient and Modern. A taste from their vision:
What we plan for our postings for Poems Ancient and Modern would seem mild and unexceptionable at any other literary moment â an act of critical abdication or even cowardice: merely plunging our hand into the vast sea of English verse, grasping a text, and hauling it to the surface.
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Speaking of poetry, this week at McSweeneyâs, this brilliant conversation between the poet W. B. Yeats and IT. A taste:
Oh, true, things do fall apart, but youâre not due for a replacement work computer (a 15″ MacBook Air, it says here) until next year, so letâs see if we can get the current system back up and running.
Well, I donât think itâs that bad. The center can hold, I think; this doesnât seem to be a hardware issue.
Does the error youâre getting actually say that anarchyâs been âloosed upon the worldâ? Because thatâs a pretty suspicious message, and weâve definitely seen an uptick in phishing attempts this month.
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Switching gears from poetry to prose. Joel J Miller penned a moving review of my favorite of C. S. Lewisâs writings â âTill We Have Faces. I was gratified to learn than Lewis himself considered it his best work. By the way, this book is Lewisâs retelling of a Roman story, about which I wrote here at the Arena a while back.
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A lovely read in NYT this week on Southern gas stations that double as restaurants, to the point where you canât tell: âAre they gas stations that serve food or restaurants that pump gas?â A taste:
When you stop for motor oil in Mississippi, you can also grab fried chicken on a stick. In North Carolina, you can buy a steamy bowl of pozole along with batteries and a five-pound bag of White Lily flour.
There might be shawarma next to the shotgun shells, or wedges of mild hoop cheese and packets of saltines for sale at the counter along with lottery tickets and pecan pie that the ownerâs sister made.
Documenting these independent Southern temples of commerce and community has become a singular focus for the photojournalist Kate Medley, who, like most kids raised in Mississippi, grew up eating at rural gas stations.
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Many thanks to Jonathan Den Hartog for recommending (and contributing to) this fun overview of the Illuminati conspiracy of the late 18th century and, really, the history of conspiracy theories in America: âEven Before the Revolution, America Was the Nation of Conspiracy Theorists.â
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Doomer Optimism podcastâs Ashley Fitzgerald had a fascinating conversation with Tessa Carman about Charlotte Mason, the unofficial patron saint of many a homeschooling family, including my own.
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As part of the research on my forthcoming book on motherhood, I read Dani Treweekâs book on something that we generally consider the opposite conceptâsingles in the church. But, I argue in the book, Jesus saw that to value mothers and unborn life required first and foremost valuing singles, those seen as the least significant of all people in the pagan world. I appreciated Daniâs reflections this week in response to a recent TGC piece on marriage and singles in the church.
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Speaking of valuing human life, one of the most powerful indictments of targeting civilians in war comes from Thucydidesâ Melian Dialogue episode. It is the focus of my latest at Providence Magazine: âFrom the Peloponnesian War to Putin.â A taste:
Tanks rolling over a border do not strike one as an auspicious start to diplomatic talksâespecially if done without prior warning or a formal declaration of war. But that is what happened in late February 2022, shocking all, but none more than Ukrainians. For what is the point of systematically ravaging villages, attacking defenseless civilians, torturing the elderly, and opening fire on cars with families trying to get away? And what is the point now, almost two years on, of intensifying attacks on civilians, of repeatedly bombing such obviously non-military targets as residential apartment buildings, maternity hospitals, and shopping plazas?
But then, what is the point of arriving at a small island with an army, without prior warning or declaration of war, and demanding unconditional surrender, even as said island had not been part of the war beforehand?
Might makes right is the oldest natural law there is in a world apart from Christianity. It is this law that governs the actions of war elephants on a rampage, catapults and other mighty machines threatening city walls, missiles launched into desperate cities under siege, and tanks crushing all under foot.