This week’s unicorns consider mysterious Byzantine mini mosaics, translating ancient epics, Mike Cosper’s new book, women of the Superbowl, valorizing busyness, pregnancy as disease (or not!), and the language of flowers.
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Two Byzantine mystery mini mosaics at Dumbarton Oaks have researchers stumped (H/T Monica Klem!) A taste:
TWO MINIATURE MOSAICS, each the size of a Kindle and shrouded in mystery, depict 41 male figures. Researchers at Dumbarton Oaks, where the mosaics are part of the Byzantine collection, know roughly when they were made (the early fourteenth century) and about where (Byzantium, likely Constantinople), but not how, by whom, or why. Now, staff at Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard’s center for Byzantine, Pre-Columbian, and landscape studies, in Washington, D.C., are working to answer those questions. “The more we look at these objects,” says Byzantine collection curator Elizabeth Dospěl Williams, the more the researchers think, “Actually, we don’t know anything at all about them.” …
The pieces likely would have been displayed in a grand church, mounted within a large frame, and illuminated by candlelight. One represents St. John Chrysostom, haloed and wise, hand raised in prayer. The other depicts the Forty Martyrs of Sebasteia: Roman soldiers forced to recant Christianity or die.
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Stephanie McCarter (whose own translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses is nothing short of stunning) reviews Emily Wilson’s Iliad translation for the Pennsylvania Gazette. Read and savor.
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Marvin Olasky reviews Mike Cosper’s new book. A taste:
Land of My Sojourn is well worth reading, so I won’t provide spoilers concerning what specifically happens… I can say that the book is important for two reasons. First, it tells not only a Louisville story but a national one, with Cosper’s experience paralleling what happened in some other churches and Christian media. In his words, “Highly visible leaders in the large church I’d grown up respecting became bootlicking pundits, contorting both their spines and the Scriptures to provide apologetic to support their naked embrace of power politics. [Christian leaders] who refused to support Trump lost jobs, lost speaking opportunities, and began long seasons in the desert.”
Second, it tells what it feels like to be in a slowly developing professional crash…
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I’ve never heard of Marabel Morgan, but I do know for a fact that everything Andrea Turpin writes is fantastic, and this fab piece of hers this week is even extra so: “Women of the Superbowl: Taylor Swift vs. Marabel Morgan.” A taste:
Morgan had preceded publication of her book with Total Woman seminars. Du Mez recounts how in 1972 twelve Dolphins players’ wives attended one of Morgan’s Total Woman classes. The very next year the Dolphins became the first undefeated team in NFL history. They not only won the Super Bowl in 1973, but again in 1974. Morgan didn’t take credit, but other teams decided not to take that risk: Johnson notes that the Dallas Cowboys and the Green Bay Packers subsequently asked for the course for their own players’ wives.
I thought about all this while watching the Kansas City Chiefs play the San Francisco 49ers in the Super Bowl a couple weeks ago. Taylor Swift flew in from Japan, where she was conducting a leg of her wildly popular Eras Tour, to support Chiefs boyfriend Travis Kelce. And the Chiefs won.
Coincidence?
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Speaking of women, is pregnancy a disease, similar to, say, measles? So do two scholars advocate in a recent paper (to be fair, that’s also the assumption in the lingo American health providers, health insurance, and FMLA all use, but we digress). I appreciated Andrew Spencer’s response in TGC. Incidentally, one of the co-authors of the piece in question, Anna Smajdor, also advocated for Whole Body Gestational Donation a little over a year ago. You can find my response here.
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In her latest for Public Discourse, Dixie Dillon Lane asks an important question: “Why do we valorize busyness?” A taste:
Interested in economic production above all else, we have come to equate busyness with importance, value, and well-being, even as we sense somewhere deep down that this is not quite how life works. Should our production of economic goods really be the core of our social or personal worth? Is our productivity our reason for being, our best defense against accusations that we are merely taking up space? Human beings are not, in fact, engines, so what on earth are we keeping ourselves so busy for?
We all know the justifications we’ve used. In high school, we keep busy so that we can have a college application packed with activities. In college, we keep busy so that we can be attractive to graduate, medical, or law schools, or to the best employers. In graduate school, we work sixty-hour weeks so that we can get good professional placements later on. In our first post-graduate jobs, we burn the candle at both ends so that we can get tenure or make partner. Finally, we get that big promotion, only to discover that far from being finished, we are now at the peak of our careers. Now we are really busy! Just a few more years until we can retire!
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One publication that pushes back so beautifully against the very kinds of cultural assumptions that the above piece decries, is Plough. I was delighted to see in the new issue on Nature, this stunning essay from Tom Okie, “The Plants Can Talk.” A taste:
I loved plants. Like many of my friends I spent time at Nola Brantley Memorial Library, but I checked out as many books from the adult nonfiction shelves as I did from the children’s section – titles like Mel Bartholomew’s Square Foot Gardening, or Jerry Baker’s Flowering Garden. I joined a seed exchange I’d discovered in a magazine that, for reasons mysterious to me, was called Reminisce, and gained some elderly lady pen pals as a result. At one point in middle school, my garden portfolio included a vegetable garden; an herb garden; a sunny perennial border with chrysanthemums and false indigo; a shade garden with ferns and hostas; and – thanks to the herculean efforts of my slightly reluctant father in the red-clay subsoil of our backyard – a water garden: a tiny pond with orange and white shubunkin fish, a trickling waterfall, waterlilies, yellow irises, and at least one leech. (I was an ambitious but not very knowledgeable collector of aquatic wildlife.) In addition to bloodsucking worms, I also collected cuttings and seeds and other natural ephemera. My mother sewed me a vest with pockets and straps to hold the pill bottles I used for collecting seeds. And I wore it. I was a weird kid.
The language of the flowers – how did it go? That is what I want to know too. It seemed easy enough as a child. It is also, I have recently learned, a common tongue for many humans from many places and times. I was, as a nine- or ten-year-old, a member of that majority, the folks since time out of mind who have assumed that plants could talk.