There’s a barrel of monkeys, a murder of crows, and most relevant to the issue at hand, a blessing of unicorns. Behold this week’s fabulous herd!
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Susie Goldsbrough tells the take of the fabulous/grisly year 1929 in crime fiction—including Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers! A taste:
The year 1929 was unusually grisly. At a gloomy country pile an old man was stabbed to death with a slender, jewel-encrusted Italian dagger during a game of murder in the dark. In London, a box of maraschino chocolates laced with nitrobenzene mailed to a playboy baronet was mistakenly snarfed by a housewife who died in agony a few hours later. Then a famous explorer was discovered in the bath — dead and, doubly mysteriously, transformed into a woman. In the West End, while queuing for a ticket to a hit musical, a young man collapsed to the pavement, a stiletto dagger protruding from his grey tweed coat. And pottering about her garden in St Mary Mead, a fluffy-haired, deceptively scatty old spinster was about to poke her nose into a mysterious death at the vicarage.
This virtuosic (fictional) crime spree was not the work of a single madcap genius, but a whole gang of twisted minds whose work is collectively immortalised as the golden age of detective fiction. A striking number of them were women.
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Years ago, I remember asking a senior colleague at my then employer, a state university, why we didn’t have any child spaces on campus. She said: insurance forbids it as too costly (seriously, there had been a whole report done on campus on just how much insurance would go up if we had any child spaces!). This may be true, but there is another cost, and Leah Libresco Sargeant explains why it’s a problem that colleges are “baby deserts.”
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Holly Taylor Coolman’s essay for Church Life Journal about the first use of the term “parenting” is fascinating and kinda mind-blowing:
…a hundred years ago, the term “parenting” was unknown. The Merriam-Webster dictionary dates the first recorded use to 1918, and even then, the word was little known until about 1970, when its usage soared. We are left to wonder: what exactly were mothers and fathers doing up until that time? What changed? How could this most important work go unnamed?
Mothers and fathers have surely long been caring for their children, providing them with shelter and clothing, teaching them various skills and, in many cases, enjoying warm and affectionate relationships with them. Were they not “parenting”? The rise in the use of the term, along with the profound concern for doing “parenting” correctly, coincide with several fundamental cultural shifts, and these shifts give us a clue.
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Speaking of parenting, this from Stephanie Murray is required reading, I do declare. Increasingly more spaces and people in our society are unwelcoming to kids. A taste:
There is a cultural weight dangling from the yoke of modern American parenthood — one that is probably beyond the government to alleviate. The very same logic of self-sufficiency that rationalizes our anemic family policies — “Don’t have kids if you can’t afford them” — underpins our social expectations for children, and by extension, parents. It echoes in the grumbling about unruly kids disturbing the tranquility of public life and the censure of incompetent parents unwilling or unable to manage them.
Children are a personal choice and therefore a personal problem, many people seem to believe. Have as many as you want — just make sure they don’t bother the rest of us.
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Pope Francis has been a bit unpredictable at times, but his proclamation Dignitas Infinita (Infinite Dignity) is admirable and impressive. The Pillar has been covering it this week, and you can find there a link to the proclamation itself and responses to it from Catholic theologians.
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Mike Jimenez’s latest Anxious Bench post combines several of his loves: Barth, C.S. Lewis, and more. A taste before you go read in full:
One of the astonishing things about contemporary U.S. Christianity is the continuing popularity of C.S. Lewis. If you might have grown up in a Christian (evangelical) cultural bubble, then the fact that Christians read Lewis is not so shocking. For instance, it is almost guaranteed that if you attended Christian school then you probably read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (not to mention watched the film) or at least something from Lewis’s Christian essays (Mere Christianity probably the best bet). I am old enough to remember the old cartoon as my entryway to Narnia during a special chapel period at my Christian school (we unfortunately did not have better options back in the early 1980s-the same goes for Tolkien’s classics, even though my eleven-year-old son thinks the cartoons are fantastic). My family would visit the Christian bookstore quite often, and it was a guarantee that a whole shelf would be filled with Lewis’s books. With such an endless supply that means there was an insatiable demand.
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Last but not least, recently some sweet soul was scandalized on Twitter that Yale University Press had published a book about saints who FLEW—like, really flew?! Anyways, my favorite American historian reviewed this book, Carlos Eire’s They Flew, this week for Mere Orthodoxy. A taste:
Eire’s book is not for those who are looking for easy answers that will resolve the discomfort of confronting evidence that may not fit our paradigm. Those who are convinced that the supernatural is impossible will probably be frustrated with this book. Even Protestants who are open to the supernatural but who have not given much credence to Catholic miracles – especially miracles associated with a soteriology that is at odds with key Reformation tenets – may find that this book challenges their assumptions. But for those who are open to the seemingly impossible and who are ready to come to terms with their own biases, this book raises some provocative questions. We might come away from the study with more questions than answers – but also perhaps gain a new humility about our own assumptions and perspective. And in the process, we’ll be treated to a lot of strange and wonderful stories about supernatural feats that we might never have even imagined before. After all, Eire reminds us in the final sentence of his book, “They flew!”