This week’s unicorns include maggots on a plane (better or worse than snakes on a plane?), how to co-exist with squirrels, oldest lipstick ever found, Flannery O’Connor, marriage penalties, toxic productivity, the future of the humanities, and the second anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
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Over at Washington Post, Kate Morgan exhorts us “to peacefully co-exist with squirrels,” and all I can think about is Tim Larsen’s own squirrel essay here at Current from two years back.
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Got any air travel coming up? This story about maggots falling from the overhead bin on a passenger on a recent flight should help get you in the right state of mind to face it all. TL/DR you just never know what someone brings in their carry-on. Could be rotting fish loosely wrapped in newspaper. And if you’re a Roman historian reading this, I know you’re thinking the same thing I’m thinking: was the culprit planning to make garum?
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4,000-year-old lipstick found in Iran! Contents similar to modern formulae, researchers noted. So if you were ever wondering if this stuff you’ve been carting in the deepest recesses of your purse since your college days ever expires—nope, it’s still good for another four millennia or so.
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Last month, Katy Carl reviewed for Current Jessica Hooten Wilson’s first edition of Flannery O’Connor’s unfinished novel. If you enjoyed the review and/or the book, you will appreciate this interview with Jessica on the process of working on this first edition, reconstructing O’Connor’s vision of a novel. It all goes back to Dostoevsky. A taste:
When we look at writers of the past, there are two approaches when it comes to assessing their blindnesses. If we look at Dostoevsky, for example, he was anti-Semitic and had no problem with his anti-Semitism. We still want to read Dostoevsky. We’re not going to take that part of who he was when we read him and uplift it—that’s the part that we can cut away from and say, “That was blindness. That was wrong.” But his insights into the nature of suffering and immortality are timeless, so let’s hold on to those things. Let’s find the gold that is there and get rid of the dross. That’s one approach.
Then look at Flannery O’Connor in parallel. She does not uplift racism the way that Dostoevsky uplifts anti-Semitism. She found her white society’s views as problematic. She would always write very candidly in her letters, for example, about Dorothy Day, “I hope that to be of two minds about some things is not to be neutral.” She’s really struggling with the fact that she wants to uplift Day’s charity and moves toward equality and integrated racial fellowship. But at the same time, O’Connor is asking, “Who is Day? Is she coming down from the north and interfering with us? Why can’t we do things gradually?” To which most of us today would reply, “Because it’s been long enough. There is no gradual integration.” So we can see that problem in O’Connor’s life, but she admitted the ambivalence.
Crucially, O’Connor doesn’t write in a way that downplays Black Americans. The characters who do see Black Americans as unequal usually get slapped in the face by how wrong they are. If they are dehumanizing other people, they get what’s coming to them. I think we need to ask, “Did O’Connor think racism and segregation were a good in society?” We have to be able to discern these things in her work and handle them with nuance and generosity. When people are certain about exactly what’s right or wrong in every circumstance, there’s an arrogance there that can feel dishonest. Compare that arrogance to O’Connor’s style, which to me seems to be constantly seeking that her art be above her own human limitations. I find it refreshing to see someone able to admit their faults and try to move through them to a higher place in their art.
What I found in O’Connor was a necessity to actually practice what you believe. She regularly says that your beliefs, your words, and your deeds should be one. Very Kierkegaardian, in that sense. O’Connor holds up a mirror to the reader and asks, “In what ways are you being two-faced? In what ways are you being a hypocrite?” And look at what can happen in the world around you if you are not actually walking the talk, so to speak.
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In the midst of all the new books and studies that show clearly the benefits of marriage, there are problematic government-mandated penalties for the poor and the disabled who do get married. Leah Libresco Sargeant examines these in her latest for First Things. A taste:
In traditional marriage vows, husband and wife promise to care for each other “in sickness and in health, till death do us part.” But when one or both of the intended spouses are sufficiently sick or disabled, the United States government is the unwelcome wedding guest who offers a reason why these two should not be joined in holy matrimony. One of the cruelest marriage penalties in America’s tax and benefits regime is reserved for the most vulnerable—the poor and disabled.
Supplemental Security Income (SSI) is a safety net for low-income Americans who, due to age or disability, have a limited ability to work. Unlike a parallel program for disabled Americans (Social Security Disability Insurance), the monthly stipend offered by SSI is not contingent on a previous work history. Though about 7.5 million Americans receive SSI payments, for half of them the payments are not enough to lift them above the poverty line.
SSI beneficiaries are subjected to intensely restrictive, non-inflation-indexed asset caps. A single person can’t have more than $2000 in savings or other semi-liquid assets, and a married person can’t have more than $3000 of joint assets. If a husband and wife were trying to be prudent and hoped to build a stable life without the safety net of SSI, they’d be cut off from support well before they could build a reasonable emergency fund.
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This from LuElla D’Amico about “How to Deal with Toxic Productivity in Work Life” is sobering and significant. Very well worth reading in full! Encouraging exhortation at the end:
Mother Teresa’s words can serve as a litmus test, based on love, to evaluate how we are comporting our work lives. Are we driven by love and freedom, or by fear and enslavement? If our work lacks love, if it lacks a gaze toward others, it is a breeding ground for toxic productivity. As such, we, and those we care about, lose out on the love our work ought to take into the world to transform it — and us — for the better.
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I appreciated the chance to write about the future of the humanities for Law and Liberty. A taste:
Let us consider this provocation: what if the future of the humanities lies in Christian colleges—and colleges I would term Christian-adjacent in their mission, like St. John’s College? And what if this means recognizing something distinctly premodern and, most importantly, transcendent about the value of the humanities—their role in shaping human souls and character to produce people and citizens who are not only more ethical and devoted citizens in a democracy, but are also more fulfilled, joyful, and loving? Such valuing of the humanities cannot happen at state universities, divorced as their missions are from matters of the transcendent, the care of souls. But in Christian colleges, this can and should be the mission.
In his much grimmer take on the future of Christian colleges, James Patterson divides American higher education institutions into two categories: “struggling mission-driven or formerly mission-driven colleges … and high prestige, secular colleges and universities.” I agree that the vast majority, indeed, fall into these categories, but my suggestions here, based on two mission-driven colleges that are flourishing, is that there is yet a third option. In the case of Grove City, the flourishing of the humanities alongside an engineering program reminds us that a strong humanities focus in the general education curriculum can coexist and flourish alongside the kind of professional training that so many colleges are eager to add.
In this age of AI scandals and plagiarism-prone college presidents, we need colleges that will teach students to be full persons—priceless image-bearers whose souls, just as much as minds and bodies and earning potentials, matter. The humanities are integral to this goal, and Christian colleges and others like them, with a mission dedicated to forming whole persons, are the best poised for the task.
Jay Green had something different this week at Current on Christian colleges. We wrote our respective pieces without knowing that the other person was writing something along these lines. I do find valuable Jay’s exhortation to Christian colleges to think about what it truly means to be a Christian college.
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Two years ago, by an eerie coincidence, I was teaching Marci Shore’s The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution, a book on the Maidan revolution, mere days after Russian tanks rolled over the border beginning an invasion that seems to have no end in sight at the moment. I commented that March on Putin’s heritage of lethal incompetence.
It is discouraging to be witnessing this two-year anniversary, Amanda McCrina notes at Current today. If you are struggling to understand what is going on, I recommend reading the rest of Amanda’s essays here at Current.
Also, read Siobhan Heekin-Canedy’s essays on Ukraine here at Current and at Providence Magazine. Oh, and while she will continue writing for Current and other magazines (stay tuned for a review later this spring!), she is launching a Substack: Olympian Essays.