The Williams Homeschool is back in session as of this Tuesday! Anyway, this Blessing of Unicorns herds fabulous essays from this past week on what it means for Christians to be a peculiar people, the case for the humanities (and reading!), manual training for all, motherhood and work, political parties and social issues, and new conversations about cultural Christians.
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Sho Baraka started this week as Christianity Today’s director of the Big Tent Initiative. You can read his reflections on “The Peculiarity of Christians.” A taste:
The word weird is being thrown around by politicians as if it’s an official political critique. Once that label is hurled at someone, they return to middle school ethics and recite the gospel of rubber and glue. Most people don’t want to be weird.
However, I can’t help but think of the strange predicaments that Yahweh has put his people in: Noah building an uncanny boat, Ezekiel’s dramatized prophecy, John the Baptist as a pre-modern hipster wandering the desert, and many more. It’s very peculiar for enslaved people to sing of God’s goodness and provision on plantations that attempted to designate them as worse than weird—inhuman.
Maybe to be set apart is to be weird and peculiar. However, many people have auctioned off their weirdness to cultural lobbyists for relevance and power.
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The case for the humanities: “A burglar who broke into an apartment in Rome on Tuesday night was arrested after stopping in the middle of the robbery to read a book about Greek mythology.”
As one does.
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Speaking of reading (in this case presumably not mid-robbery), Josh Hochschild offers excellent (albeit somewhat controversial) advice for how to read—especially, how to read philosophical texts. He would like you to (*gulp*) write in your books.
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Connie Goddard’s piece “Manual Training for All” this week in Front Porch Republic is excellent and pairs well with Aston Fearon’s “In Praise of Physical Work” for Plough.
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Alexandra Davis contributes words of wisdom to the on-going debate on the tension between work and family, especially for mothers: “Reframing the Work-Motherhood Tension.”
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Jake Meador’s critique of the short-sightedness of Evangelicals for Harris is worth reading. I also appreciated Ken Craycraft’s poignant analysis of the Harris-Walz ticket’s abortion extremism. A taste:
A Harris-Walz presidency would be noteworthy not simply for the extremity of their abortion and gender policies, but also for the fanatical zealousness with which they pursue them. With no close contender, theirs would be the most anti-life, anti-woman, and anti-family presidency in the history of the country. Unborn and unwanted newborn children would be exterminated. Women would be reduced to objects for the sexual satisfaction of men. Women-only spaces would be eradicated. And parents would lose authority over the medical care of their own children.
In a CNN interview on July 24, Massachusetts Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren declared that Kamala Harris’s “biggest accomplishment” as vice president has been the “way that she has rallied women . . . around this country on the issue of abortion, and just taken it home.” Harris was “the first vice president in history to visit an abortion clinic. Go get ’em!” she gushed.
Warren was alluding to Harris’s January 2024 “Reproductive Freedom Tour,” which included a stop at a Minnesota Planned Parenthood abortion mill that Harris disingenuously called a “health care clinic.” Harris was conspicuously accompanied at the abortion center by her now-running mate, Tim Walz, whose record on abortion is even more extreme than Harris’s.
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This week, TGC published Joe Carter’s detailed overview “Where the Political Parties Stand on Social Issues in 2024.” It’s very helpful in comparing/contrasting not only the two major parties (who both support abortion), but also considering such third-party options as the Solidarity Party (previously highlighted on this blog) and the Constitution Party.
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Cultural Christianity has been in the news—see, for instance, Madeleine Davis’s New Statesman article this week, “The Rise of Cultural Christianity: Why Religion is Thriving in a Non-Believing Age.” A taste:
Given this backdrop, what does it mean that so many people – 46.2 per cent at the last census in England and Wales – describe themselves as Christian? It’s a debate that has been reignited in recent months in the wake of some high-profile conversions, and paeans to the cultural value of Christianity, that have led some to forecast the return of the poet Matthew Arnold’s “sea of faith”. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s testimony, the popularity of Jordan Peterson’s therapeutic exposition of the Christian scriptures and the emphasis on the Christian foundations of the nation at conservative gatherings, bringing together politicians (like Miriam Cates, Michael Gove and Danny Kruger) and philosophers, are among the developments that invite questions that might have been regarded as the sole preserve of theologians. What is the nature of conversion? Who gets to call themselves a Christian?
Perhaps it makes sense that Richard Dawkins, a zoologist by training and committed atheist, should serve up with alacrity a clear-cut taxonomy of Christianity. “You can be a Cultural Christian, a Political Christian, a Believing Christian, or any combination of the three,” he wrote in a recent Substack essay.
At the risk of shameless self-promotion, I will note that I wrote a book about Cultural Christians in the Early Church (with some parallels to modern counterparts). In light of the more recent fascination with cultural Christians in the public sphere, I’m looking forward to talking about this topic with Tara Isabella Burton and Henry Oliver at an Interintellect online salon in a couple of weeks. You can learn more about this event here.
“Women would be reduced to objects for the sexual satisfaction of men.”
And here I was assuming Gilead was coming from the right!
Btw, I really like Jake Meador’s work most of the time, but this article is uncharacteristically sloppy. The details of the cases are too involved to get into here–those interested will need to go searching for them (not difficult)–but on the law Walz signed he relies on one article in First Things which claims “infanticide,” when it is nothing of the sort; on the Planned Parenthood fetal tissue case, he fails to note that PP in California was not found guilty of selling fetal tissue illegally, and the activist (David Daleiden) who claimed as much *did* break several laws in deceptively fliming PP. In fact, the Supreme Court in 2023 rejected that activist’s appeal of a verdict in a civil suit. Again, for the details, one will need to a lot more reading, but the evidentiary basis Meador lays down to support his judgments here is weak.
There’s more than one way to be a misogynist. The misogyny of the Left (which Meador is noting) is different from the misogyny of the Right. Both exist, however, and both have been remarkably on proud display in the presidential candidates’ remarks and in the policies they champion. I highly recommend Erika Bachiochi’s book, The Rights of Women (I reviewed it a while back: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousbench/2023/02/womens-rights-virtues-recovered-and-a-different-benedict-option-a-review-of-erika-bachiochis-rights-of-women/).
For more on infanticidal policies (which Walz indeed champions), read this powerful piece from Charlie Camosy: https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2022/04/81840/
This is a rather important topic, I think, so I hope it won’t be looked upon askance if we stay with it a little more. “Infanticide”–the deliberate killing of an infant (under one year old) child–is a species of murder, and illegal in all 50 states.
If a vice-presidential candidate–and by extension, the candidate for president that chose him or her–are advocating infanticide, that’s a truly momentous issue that all citizens should be very concerned about.
If we look at Charles Camosy’s article in First Things–the one cited by Meador, https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2024/08/vp-nominee-tim-walz-supports-the-right-to-infanticide and titled “VP Nominee Tim Walz Supports the Right to Infanticide”–we note that there are no quotes from Walz, or any other data specific to him. Camosy’s case is built on a Minnesota law–part of Minnesota’s omnibus health bill passed in 2023–that Walz signed into law when he was governor.
So the claim being made isn’t just that there’s a candidate for vice president who advocates infanticide. It’s that infanticide is already legal in Minnesota, not just for babies born after an attempted abortion, but for all infants. Indeed, it has been for more than a year.
This is, let it be acknowledged, an explosive development if true, and among other disturbing features is that the situation has been almost entirely ignored by journalists, and even more by legislators and the courts. One would have expected that such a profound violation of one of the bedrock principles of the American legal code would have received much more attention fork the many pro-life or conservative reporters, legislators, and jurists concerned with the topic. For some reason we are only hearing about it late in the summer of an election year.
As I said, Camosy only cites the Minnesota law of 2023 as evidence of his claim that Walz supports infanticide.
You can read the law as it currently stands here https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/cite/145.423#:~:text=An%20infant%20who%20is%20born,immediate%20protection%20under%20the%20law
and see the specific changes made in the previous statute here https://www.revisor.mn.gov/laws/2023/0/70/#laws.4.56.0
(To search for the law on the Minnesota pages find for “section 145.423, subdivision 1”)
Here is the law as it currently reads:
“An infant who is born alive shall be fully recognized as a human person, and accorded immediate protection under the law. All reasonable measures consistent with good medical practice, including the compilation of appropriate medical records, shall be taken by the responsible medical personnel to care for the infant who is born alive.”
Note that the requirements specified apply to any infant that is born alive, not just to those subsequent to an abortion. All such infants are defined as human persons and accorded the protection of the law. The law gives every newborn the same full human rights that other humans have. The omitted language from the previous law established an obligation to do whatever it takes to prolong life (life-sustaining treatment) even in hopeless cases–which we often do not do for dying adults.
“Life-sustaining treatment” is defined by the AMA as “any treatment that serves to prolong life without reversing the underlying medical condition.” https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/ama-code-medical-ethics-opinions-care-end-life/2013-12
Camosy and others appear to be arguing that a failure to mandate life-sustaining treatment, regardless of outcome, is literally infanticide–as he explains in the First Things article previously cited, “by infanticide, I really do mean aiming at the death of newborn infants.”
That is a real debate in medical ethics, of course. But it isn’t agreed upon in US law that all failure to pursue every available means to preserve life in every case is tantamount to homicide. If our position is that every state that doesn’t require such is “aiming at” murder, and that every politician who tolerates the current regime is an accessory, we should make that clear, and situate the specific acts of individuals such as Walz in that context.