This week’s unicorns are as wild and eclectic as ever.
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Jeff Bilbro gives much needed advice for “How to Find a (Real) Christian College” this week in Christianity Today. A taste from this piece that every parent and college-bound high schooler should read:
If virtue without skill results in ineffectual warm fuzzies, skill without virtue results in careerist consumerism. Hence, Christian education ought to offer not merely a training in skills but also a criticism of those skills and the formation of the discipline and wisdom needed to use our skills in love. Without such charity, credentials and skills become means of satisfying consumer appetites.
Clearly, no Christian college brands itself as offering degrees in the service of consumerism. They make the decisions they think they must to keep their doors open. Yet the result is that far too many institutions give lip service to Christian moral formation while organizing themselves around a consumerist vision of education.
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John Wilson has this delightful reflection on “Books by the Bed,” reading things at hand. A taste:
On both sides of our bed upstairs, there are books. Wendy has a standing bookshelf against an interior wall, next to the head of the bed (the entire Brother Cadfael series, which we both love; lots of poetry; books in a range of genres by Wendell Berry; the three volumes of Kristin Lavransdatter in Tiina Nunnally’s translation; devotional books; and more). I have a series of stacks more or less level with the bed and running alongside it, with a narrow “passageway” by means of which I get in bed. From bed we can look to the right to the large windows facing west (where, for instance, in the wee hours, we sometimes watch the moon set).
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Karen Swallow Prior tells so beautifully the story of Cicely Saunders, the founder of the modern hospice movement. A taste before you go read this stunning piece in full:
In 1948, a 40-year-old patient with an incurable cancer named David Tasma asked Saunders during a bout of sadness as he faced impending death, “Can’t you say something to comfort me?”
Comfort: That was the question. It was also the answer.
Through her experience with this patient—along with the years of education, research, and practice that followed—Saunders came to understand that those who are dying need comfort, not only to alleviate their physical suffering, but also to meet their unique emotional, spiritual, and social needs. The terminally ill need total care for what Saunders called “total pain.”
And along the way, Prior tells, Saunders came to faith:
Just as the first hospices were religious in nature, so, too, Saunders’ religious faith played a key role in her life’s work. Saunders’ childhood home and upbringing were not at all religious. Nor did Saunders seem to be seeking any kind of religious experience at first. In fact, du Boulay notes in her biography that, after reading George Bernard Shaw in grade school, Saunders declared herself an atheist. But in 1945, after she’d returned to Oxford to become an almoner, Saunders befriended Christian classmates who also happened to be evangelicals. It was also around this time that Saunders’ parents were going through a painful separation. When she accompanied these evangelical classmates on a holiday, Saunders found herself reluctantly taking them—and their faith—seriously. As she later described it, “The switch was flipped.” Saunders went all in. According to du Boulay, she read C.S. Lewis and Dorothy Sayers, met Charles Williams, and joined the Socratic Society at Oxford, C.S. Lewis’ gathering of atheists and Christians. Eventually, she became a member of John Stott’s church, All Souls, in central London.
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Arena/Current friend and relation-by-marriage (to the indomitable Dixie Dillon Lane) Christopher Lane has a lovely essay on “Limitless Wishing and Its Discontents.” We all just naturally want so many things, and some of them (books!) are good things. But all this wishing just isn’t so good for us. A taste:
Is there anything to be done about our disordered wishing? About our middle-class appropriation of the poor milkman Tevye’s daydream? About our coveting of money, power, and a life free of work? More specifically, are there any practices that might help us to embrace limits more consistently?
Perhaps we need nothing more and nothing less than a continual return to the Gospel, via all the means already available to us. We could start with St. Paul’s reminder that “covetousness . . . is idolatry” (Col. 3:5).
My favorite paragraph, the one that made me both chuckle and, alas, feel seen:
Cost and physical storage space aside, most of us get about 4,000 weeks here, all told. Many of us, far fewer to start with and still fewer left. If a lottery eliminated my spending limits, I could read or use but a fraction of what has ever been on my Amazon wish list. Perhaps only a fraction of the books I already possess. (I do hope I’m wrong in telling students that we will drag up Mount Purgatory all the books we buy and leave unread.)
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Anna North considers “The Failed Promise of Egg Freezing” for women. A taste:
Eggs, embryos, freezing, thawing, shots, ultrasounds, thousands of dollars — it’s a lot for patients to navigate, often without much guidance.
For example, there’s no single regulatory agency overseeing fertility centers in the US, as NBC has reported. That means no one is ensuring that patients are given a clear picture of the effectiveness of procedures. A lack of oversight also allows companies to use sales pitches that experts say are misleading, like an Instagram ad for Extend Fertility that claimed, “When you freeze your eggs, you #freezetime.”
North’s piece shows the dehumanizing and limiting nature of modern girl boss feminism. Marketed as a liberating measure that gives women freedom by extends their childbearing clock, instead egg freezing shows that too many women who would have really liked to get married and have kids simply didn’t meet a partner early enough. Egg freezing is, more than anything, an act of desperation and mourning for a life one wishes she had. And it’s insanely expensive, takes a toll on the woman’s body, AND there are no guarantees of success (North tells all kinds of hair-raising stories in this piece).
So much for freedom.
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Over at his blog, historian Peter Thuesen reviews Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario, and explains how reading this book became for him “The Biggest Reason Not to Elect Trump”:
There are many reasons not to vote for Donald Trump. Until this week, I wouldn’t have known where to begin. Then I read Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario (2024). It’s hands down the most terrifying book I’ve ever read, and it reminded me of how high the stakes are in the 2024 election. Though Trump appears only in the endnotes, my inescapable conclusion from reading the book is that we must never again entrust the nuclear codes to a man so erratic and morally anchorless.
In Jacobsen’s scenario, American intelligence correctly identifies two North Korean ICBMs headed toward the United States, prompting a massive U.S. counterattack. But Russian analysts misinterpret the radar signals from the retaliatory barrage as missiles directed at Russia. A general nuclear war ensues. Within just 72 minutes of the initial North Korean attack, 1,000 Russian warheads rain down on America as the United States unleashes a similar firestorm on Russia. Hundreds of millions of people perish. When the fires die down, nuclear winter envelops the globe. Jacobsen quotes Nikita Khrushchev: “The survivors will envy the dead.”
The scariest thing, however, is left unsaid by Jacobsen. In her telling, the American president and his advisors seem properly aware of the gravity of their responsibility and wait to launch a counterattack until the last possible minute. But what if a less levelheaded individual were president? And what if he lacked the benefit of experienced and knowledgeable advisors? Such a situation increases the possibility the president could set off a nuclear war even in the absence of a preemptive strike on the U.S.
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A review of my Doktorvater’s new book on democracy, The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives. A taste from Jill Patton’s review:
Josiah Ober, a Stanford professor of political science and of classics, and co-author Brook Manville make that hopeful point in The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives, in what turns out to be a riveting romp—no, actually—through thousands of years of Western political history. (Honestly, slogging through 1,500 years of British history boiled down to 50 pages felt tough, but the gripping Athenian and Roman sections more than made up for the sacrifice. Consider it a civic compromise.)
They start with a spare definition of democracy: “when extensive, socially diverse bodies of citizens govern themselves, accepting no ruler except for one another.” Such an arrangement is possible only when people decide they’re better off bargaining with each other than fighting and enter into a win-win deal, giving something to get something, in what the authors define as a civic bargain.
Through four examples—ancient Athenian democracy, republican Rome, British parliamentarianism, and American constitutionalism—the authors show why and how democracies came about and where they failed, at times or ultimately.
It’s worrisome that military recruitment is down, as is participation in civic organizations. It’s worrisome that political parties have a stranglehold on the civic narrative.
But America has already confronted one of the greatest threats to the system: scaling up its citizenship, a challenge that doomed Athenian democracy. Now it must deal with rising inequality and the precarious state of civic friendship, two conditions that led to the downfall of Rome in the late first century BCE.