This week’s Unicorns are ever so fabulous, as they consider what it would take to build a family-friendly city, how to foster free-range kids, building a culture of life, WWII and Ukraine, Bonhoeffer, summer beach reads, education isn’t about you, 55 years of Faith and Learning seminar at Wheaton, and the fortieth anniversary of the death of Foucault! Â
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Drawing on Tim Carney’s excellent book, Jim Dalrymple II weighs in on a topic near and dear to my heart as a parent of young(ish) kids: the family-friendly city. A taste to give you an idea of the extent of the problems many families live with right now:
To get to the nearest playground from my house, my family must cross four wide streets. Cars whizz by at 30 miles an hour, and—depending on the route—some intersections lack stop signs or marked crosswalks. Thankfully, we’ve avoided car crashes thus far, but we also live in one of the most walkable neighborhoods in our city. Other parents in our sphere have to contend with a lack of sidewalks, further distances, and faster and heavier traffic flows. It’s dispiriting to ponder kids ranging freely through the neighborhood while watching Cybertrucks and Hummer H2s pass like wrecking balls.
I will say: things are much better in smaller towns, but still, this all varies considerably based on neighborhood.
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Arena Regular Dixie Dillon Lane had a conversation about related topics with Serena Sigillito this week, building on her recent Public Discourse article “Free Range Kids and the Parental Compass.”
Deep Dive: Free-Range Kids and the Parental Compass (with Dr. Dixie Lane) – YouTube
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This week was the two-year anniversary of Dobbs, and this is a good time to bump up my favorite American historian’s essay “The Strategies Needed to Achieve a Culture of Life” in Church Life Journal.
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One of my favorite books of the year so far is Sasha Vasilyuk’s novel debut, Your Presence is Mandatory. I loved Paul Goldberg’s review of this important book for Jerusalem Post, as he brought out the connections that the novel draws between WWII and life in Ukraine now.
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Speaking of WWII, Dan was reflecting recently: what a pity that the two popular biographies of Dietrich Bonhoeffer on the market right now distort Bonhoeffer so extremely, each in its own way. There is Eric Metaxas’ biography of Bonhoeffer, which takes a rather militant approach to the theologian. And then there is Charles Marsh’s biography, which appears more interested in his possible homosexuality than anything else.
Well, I retorted, maybe more people need to read Laura Fabrycky’s Keys to Bonhoeffer’s Haus! I stand by this recommendation, and I see proof that great minds think alike: Haley Baumeister shares my enthusiasm for this book! Also, thanks to Haley for bumping up this oldie but goodie essay on the topic that Laura had written for Comment.
Laura has a brilliant piece in the newest Comment issue, by the way, currently paywalled—so subscribe or wait a few months.
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Evie Solheim wrote this really fun and thoughtful essay, “Why You Should Read the Classics This Summer” as an alternative, specifically, to the trendy and (sometimes) trashy summer beach reads. It was a delight to be interviewed for this piece, and I learned a lot from reading this final version—so many great book suggestions and ideas.
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Wheaton College marks 55 years of its Faith and Learning seminar for faculty. It sounds amazing—because it is.
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Carl Trueman explains something obvious yet too often forgotten in recent debates and protests: “Education is not about you.” A taste:
When I graduated in 1988, all graduands had to present themselves for inspection before the ceremony. Everyone had to be dressed in exactly the same way. We men even had to raise our pants by three inches so that the head porter of the college could make sure we were all wearing black socks. If you were sporting any other color or shade there was a simple and single outcome: You were not going to graduate. After all those years of reading, learning, and debating in classrooms and seminars with no holds barred, the graduation ceremony was to be one of remarkable and absolute sartorial conformity. We were about to belong, and our conformity was a way of expressing that this was so, and that we were grateful for what the institution had given to us.
The reason, of course, was simple: The ceremony was not about individuals expressing themselves. It was about individuals being finally allowed to join the institution. The university was not ultimately a platform for performance. It was a place of formation and, once it had appropriately formed us, we could be released with its imprimatur into the outside, adult world.
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Sohrab Ahmari in Compact this week on “The Bleak Genius of Michel Foucault” in honor of the 40th anniversary of the philosopher’s death. I found it an interesting read, certainly more appreciative than my view of Foucault, whom I see as supremely well-read but misguided and pretentious.