Behold this week’s unicorns!
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Jon Schaff has thought and written a lot on this topic, and I appreciated his latest in Front Porch Republic: “Will No One Rid Me of These Meddlesome-Isms: Thinking and Rethinking Liberalism.” A brief taste, but you should read this in full:
I essentially reject liberalism’s anthropology. Part of that rejection is religious. I am with Newman that liberal theology inaccurately describes man, God, and the relationship between the two, including their relationship with God’s Church here on Earth. I am with Irving Kristol in giving two cheers to capitalism, but not three. The tendency of liberal capitalism is to value all things only by their economic value. Despite its good fruits, liberalism’s dedication to individualism and acquisition does tend to erode necessary pre-political institutions such as family and church, both ordained by God for man’s good. There are goods worth defending, such as the family or God’s creation, that might necessitate mandating economic inefficiencies. Unlike some who favor such pro-family or pro-creation (I’m with Wendell Berry in eschewing the term “environmental”) policies, I forthrightly acknowledge that such policies might make us poorer with all the attendant costs. But just like in our individual lives, sometimes we must make economic sacrifices for higher goals. I do wish liberalism’s most ardent contemporary defenders would recognize the ill effects of an undiluted liberalism.
Thus I think Patrick Deneen, whatever his faults, is correct that liberalism is at its worst when it is most itself.
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We have a review of Catherine Pakaluk’s fascinating new book coming (when else?!) the week before Mother’s Day. In the meanwhile, I enjoyed this interview with her in Public Discourse. Here’s one question and answer as a teaser:
Clara: Now I want to get to the heart of your project, which is to tell a story through interviews about why some women choose to have many children. You put this in economic terms—how are these women “quietly defying the birth dearth” making perfectly rational decisions?
Catherine: One of the things that has become clearer to me over time, especially since this group of women is such a hidden group, is that people misunderstand the basic motives for childbearing today. There is an implicit suggestion that religious motive is outside the relevant conversation, certainly the policy conversation, and hard to understand—something of a black box.
Why do people make the choices that they make? That’s something that economists think about a lot. We begin with the supposition that people choose to do something when it has more value to them than their perception of the costs. Such language is often caricatured and misunderstood. But a rationale of cost–benefit applies to human behavior very generally, not only in markets—especially when we see that the notions of “benefit” and “cost” are basic human phenomena of valuation and apply readily to non-economic decisions.
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Shelby Kearns on eldercare in Fairer Disputations. This is a gendered issue, as women tend to provide most eldercare to family members (just as they provide most childcare). It is overwhelming, and it doesn’t have to be this way. A taste:
In February, an elderly New Yorker had a medical emergency and was saved by an AI speaker.
This good news from the New York Post is bad news for the state of eldercare. With others expressing hope that similar devices will provide medical care and companionship for seniors, our reliance on AI is a grim reminder that we’re in the midst of an eldercare crisis.
Research from the University of Michigan shows that the majority of sandwich generation caregivers are women, a finding that holds true for caregiving more generally. Providers of eldercare dedicate “an average of 3.6 hours” a day to the task. In other words, the combined eldercare, childcare, and household chores performed by the sandwich generation equal a full-time job. Although most sandwich generation caregivers also work outside the home, not all can continue their paid work. 2021 survey data indicates that one in five “employees have had to quit their job to care for a loved one,” and other research shows that women quit more often than men.
Many women spend most of their adult lives as caregivers, and they need men’s help. Eldercare is a group effort, and male-female solidarity is especially important in the absence of state support for caregivers.
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Kayla Bartsch provides an excellent overview of the lyceum movement—old and new—in The National Review. A taste:
A successful republic requires each person to better himself and rise to the demands of citizenship. The Transcendentalists of Concord were particularly eloquent advocates of “Self-Culture” — in which every person strives to become his own teacher. Emerson taught that each individual possesses a “divine spark,” an intellect, a soul. Quoting the Parable of the Talents, found in the Gospel of Matthew, Emerson argued that each person — no matter how little or how great his share of natural gifts — can grow in knowledge and character.
This spirit permeated lyceums across the country. In the heyday of the Lyceum movement, roughly 1830–50, hundreds of lyceums met regularly in American towns and cities.
The good news is that there are many citizens laboring to revivify the Lyceum movement today. In just the last decade, a surge of new lyceums has expanded access to pedagogical environments and texts that foster freethinking people.
The article mentions the fabulous Catherine Project founded by Zena Hitz.
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If you have missed Jacqueline Doyle’s pieces in Current, you should go remedy that right now. And then you can read this interview with her in American Literary Review. Here’s a taste from the interview, explaining why Doyle loves writing creative nonfiction:
I love the fact that there are no rules in creative nonfiction! It’s so different from academic writing in that respect. I’ve always been a big fan of segmented (or collage) essays, which allow for fragmentation and juxtapositions without connective tissue. I often start that way and move around pieces and take out pieces as the essay develops… My segmented, ekphrastic essay about Joseph Cornell in Superstition Review, for example, had several different epigraphs as I worked through successive themes that were emerging: an emphasis on the subconscious (Gaston Bachelard), resistance to interpretation (Susan Sontag). Even when I remove them later, they can act as lodestars during the process of writing. I’m surprised to discover that I have a number of epistolary essays in my WIP The Lunatics’ Ball. The most recent evolved when I kept trying and failing to write something about Mary Todd Lincoln; I didn’t achieve the intimacy I wanted with my subject until I sat down and wrote a letter to her.
To me, attention to language and form, often involving experimentation, is what makes an essay literary. Sometimes form emerges as I write, particularly in essays based on personal experience, sometimes it emerges as I think about how to approach my material in advance, particularly in hybrid essays that combine research and memoir.
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Creative nonfiction and fiction blend seamlessly in journalist Sasha Vasilyuk’s debut novel about Ukraine’s horrors-filled twentieth century and, really, up to the present. Sasha used family history as the foundation of Your Presence Is Mandatory, out this week. I loved Sasha’s book (here’s my review at Plough), and thoroughly enjoyed Ruth Madievsky’s interview with Sasha. A taste from Ruth’s intro to the interview:
Two days after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Sasha Vasilyuk published a wrenching op-ed in The New York Times titled “My Family Never Asked to Be ‘Liberated.’” In the essay, she recounts urging her 90-year-old grandmother, a survivor of the Nazi occupation of Ukraine, to leave the sieged city of Donetsk. “Let them come and get me. I’m too old to leave,” her grandmother replies, before reciting an obscene poem she’d composed about Russian president Vladimir Putin. Ever since, Vasilyuk has been a preeminent critical voice on the collateral damage of Russia’s war on Ukraine. Her journalism, which uses family history as a lens on the war, captures the minutiae of how it feels to be living in historic times. Her debut novel, Your Presence Is Mandatory, is somehow even more gripping, flawlessly melding a page-turning fictionalization of true events with a darkly comic voice.
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I appreciated John Wilson’s reflections in response to my Cultural Christians book side-by-side with Nijay Gupta’s new book, Strange Religion. A taste:
Reading Williams and Gupta within a span of several months, and revisiting Frank’s book from last year, I thought about the ways in which “the early Church” has figured in various settings over the course of my own life. In the Baptist churches we attended when I was growing up, there was virtually nothing beyond the New Testament accounts, in which of course “the early Church” is shown, warts and all. In certain contexts, as I grew a bit older, I would encounter vague references to a supposed continuity between the early Church and the Baptists, who were said to have “recovered” or restored the purity of the gospel (no “saints,” heaven forbid; none of that foolishness). As I have explained before, I never learned Baptist history until I was no longer a Baptist.
From various sources over the decades—not least from our daughter Mary and son-in-law John, who became Catholic very soon after they were married and are the parents of our seven grandchildren—I have gained a deeper sense of Church history, including but not at all limited to the early Church. As an evangelical Christian, I feel a deep kinship with my fellow believers, Catholic and Orthodox and all the rest who share the faith that was kindled two thousand years ago. We know from the Acts of the Apostles, the New Testament epistles, and other texts that “the Church” here or there has always fallen short of what God desires for us, but we look forward to the restoration of all things promised in Acts 3:21. May it be so.