This week’s Unicorns are ever so fabulous!
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Haley Stewart for Plough: “The Case for Not Sanitizing Fairy Tales” makes the case for striking that balance of not lying about the reality of dangers to children while showing them that parents will do their best to keep them safe.
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Lucy S. R. Austen’s excellent biography of Elisabeth Elliot is turning one year old this month (see this interview with Lucy about the book, her essay about faith and biography, and Mike Jimenez’s review of the book)!
But this week, Lucy wrote about something different—a guest post on reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace aloud to her family for Joel Miller’s Substack. A taste:
Maybe part of the reason this book lives in our cultural consciousness as the epitome of long is the title. War and Peace is about as all-embracing as Douglas Adams’s Life, The Universe, and Everything, or Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. And it was appropriately chosen. War and Peace follows dozens of characters over a period of fifteen years—before, during, and after Russia’s involvement in the Napoleonic wars—and reaches beyond its timeline with references to previous events and hints of things still to come.
Over the course of the story, children and young adults grow to maturity, take jobs, fall in love and out again, get married. Women and men who have been supporting households, military units, whole villages, pass into old age and find their sphere of influence drawing in. People die of childbirth, of illness, of wounds, of old age, of grief. Babies are born and nursed and bathed. Political powers wax and wane. Sunrise, sunset.
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My favorite American historian recently interviewed Miles Smith about his new book here at The Arena. I also appreciated Thomas Kidd’s interview with Miles about the book at TGC.
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Also, don’t miss these two pieces on exvangelicals and deconstruction at Mere Orthodoxy: Miles Smith’s review of two exvangelical memoirs and Jake Meador’s reflection on his own faith journey, and why he never left the church—even as he left the particular church in which he grew up.
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Dru Johnson recorded this thought-provoking interview with Jacob Onyumbe Wenyi on his new book on extreme violence and Nahum. An introduction to the interview explains:
The Democratic Republic of the Congo has been afflicted by war and violence. The people are not always ready for reconciliation, because they are busy seeking justice. Dr. Jacob Onyumbe Wenyi, a professor and a Roman Catholic priest of the diocese of Tshumbe (D.R. Congo), discusses his book on Nahum, Piles of Slain, Heaps of Corpses.
The violence in the book of Nahum connects directly to the experiences of people in the Congo. Dr. Onyumbe Wenyi explains how Nahum’s portrayal of a vengeful God and abhorrent war scenes can speak to severely traumatized communities.
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An excerpt from Robert Jensen’s forthcoming book, It’s Debatable: Talking Authentically about Tricky Topics. Jensen has been concerned for a while about the polarizing culture and is trying to offer tools for honest yet respectful conversations.
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Hadden Turner’s essay on summer for Hearth and Field is truly lovely.
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Front Porch Republic just added several new Contributing Editors this week, and you will see a number of familiar names in the mix, including Current/Arena writers Dixie Dillon Lane, Jon Schaff, Elizabeth Stice, et moi.
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Bret Devereaux, Greco-Roman military historian, has an intriguing piece on the newest Heritage Foundation’s “Index of US Military Strength” in The Dispatch: “Politicizing America’s Defense Capabilities.” A taste:
Is the U.S. military merely a marginal force? If you based your answer on The Heritage Foundation’s latest Index of U.S. Military Strength, you might be tempted to think our armed forces are in disarray. But since 2015, the Index has served less as a strategic look at American security and more as a crude tool to promote slanted media coverage. This year is no different.
The lack of a meaningful measure to compare the U.S. military to that of our adversaries plagues the entire Index. Dramatically, the report judges America’s nuclear arsenal as merely “marginal,” despite the country’s current roughly 3,000 nuclear warheads. One struggles to think of a situation in which that stockpile would be insufficient (to say nothing of how too large a force carries risks of its own).
The Index also glaringly overlooks Russia’s war against Ukraine in its assessment. The Kremlin’s full-scale invasion exposed the shocking weakness of the second-strongest American adversary and the destruction of much of its equipment and personnel. Yet these factors seem to have had no effect on America’s comparative strength according to the Index. Likewise, China’s economic woes have cast significant doubt on Beijing’s ability to build its military capacity indefinitely. There isn’t a hint of this weakness in the Index’s headline ratings either.
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Meanwhile, Roman military historian Michael J. Taylor rates top ten Roman battle scenes in movies, and this is everything. I mean it! Okay, he will probably ruin some of your favorite war flicks, but knowing the truth will be worth it.