This week is Fall Books Week at Current! I invite you to go back and catch up, if you’ve missed it. In the meanwhile, here are this week’s Unicorns—unusual and magnificent reads to accompany your Friday morning coffee.
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October 15, according to tradition, is the birthday of Rome’s greatest epic poet—Vergil. Amit Majmudar’s ten-year-old piece on the second half of the Aeneid is, therefore, a fitting (re)read now. A taste:
A story about Virgil on his deathbed, possibly apocryphal, tells how he ordered his literary executors to destroy the Aeneid because it was imperfect; that he preferred that the poem die rather than go forth with a syllable out of place. Augustus himself, it is said, countermanded the order. The actual events on which this story was based have recently come to light, thanks to some newly discovered papyri from the still-ongoing excavations at Herculaneum. The papyrus in question is actually one of the missing books from the Saturnalia of Macrobius, which contains a generous amount of Virgilian commentary, and now has given us insight into Virgil’s second attempt at the last six Books of the Aeneid, as well as the events surrounding their destruction—and the reinstatement, by an imperial fiat, of what Virgil considered a failed first draft.
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My friend Ivana D. Greco (and her colleague Elliot Haspel) has been working for a long time on this report, now available from Capita: “Invisible Labor, Visible Needs: Making Family Policy Work for Stay-At-Home (And All) Parents.” Take the time to read this in full, but here is a tiny taste:
Most of all, stay-at-home parents want and deserve both societal respect and societal support. The title of this report comes from a stay-at-home dad in one of our focus groups, who told us: “I’ve done a lot of difficult things in my life. This is definitely the hardest, at least near the top, and it’s invisible. That’s the big thing.” If America is to be a truly inclusive country with a family policy that, as the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once suggested, “promote[s] the stability and well-being of the American family,”2 then the time has come to take stay-at-home parents on their own terms and to craft responsive public policy. This report is one part of a broader initiative to help the country do so.
Indeed, the so-called Mommy Wars between stay-at-home and “working” mothers are misguided. Understanding stay-at-home parents, and creating public policy that allows them and their families to flourish, should be part of a comprehensive approach to family policy. This is not an entirely novel idea: over the last 25 years, members of both political parties have put forth proposals to support stay-at-home parents, though most have been lost to the dustbin of public policy history.
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Miles Smith’s latest in Mere Orthodoxy is a powerful reflection on evangelicalism and politics: “Perdition.” A taste:
The theme of judgment’s regularity belies the fact that for 19th century Protestants, and particularly for Presbyterians, society’s near-constant moral unworthiness in the eyes of a thrice holy God formed an essential pastoral polemic. The awesomeness and totality of God’s judgments associated with nature’s power left humans awed by God’s power and their respective unworthiness. The tragedy of the Fall and God’s holiness come in to sharp relief at such moments. It is what prompts the mournful lament of the tragedy of human life in the Book of Common Prayer: “there is no health in us.” In our world we call these hard to understand providences “tragic,” with good reason.
Conservative Christians, particularly Protestant Evangelicals, seem comfortable with understanding natural disasters as tragic. Our understanding of tragedy is too limited though; natural disasters, disease–those are tragedies, we tell ourselves, because we are powerless to stop them. Anything we might have agency in, however, like politics, is often shunted out of tragedy and into the biennial justifications Christians use to justify voting for candidates–usually but not always Republicans–as the “right” thing to do. Right, in this paradigm, always being divinely blessed, rightly ordered, morally justified, etc. We can’t conceive that our own politics might be a part of an unstoppable mess that might be part of God’s judgment, because conservative Evangelicals have ceased to see themselves as worthy of God’s judgment. Big families, good Christian school or homeschool curricula, and ensuring our communities aren’t in close association with the hallmarks of Blue America leaves us all too convinced that we are worthy of heaven, instead of still being sinners in the hands of a holy God.
And so Evangelicals seem unwilling to think that our politics, even our conservative politics, might be essentially tragic. It is of a very different sort than the natural disasters visiting the southeast and the toll it takes on American life will be different. Even so, the 2024 presidential campaign is a type of tragedy.
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It was a delight to see Miles and many other wonderful historians at last week’s Conference on Faith and History. Oh, and while she’s not a historian, we were privileged to claim Karen Swallow Prior as one of us for a few days. Her plenary address, stemming from her most recent book, was excellent.
This year’s conference Program Chair (and next CFH President), Chris Gehrz, has written his reflections on the conference. In particular, he is thinking realistically about the future of the historical profession and, therefore, the future of such gatherings of Christian historians. Chris and current CFH president Lisa Diller have made it their mission to bring in more non-academics into the membership–e.g., high-school teachers, public historians, and writers outside the academy. I won’t lie–my continued involvement in the CFH since leaving academia is because of Chris, Lisa, and others like them, who have been so incredibly welcoming, reminding me that I do belong there.
Really, hospitality of all sorts was the theme of the conference and the weekend! As I described it elsewhere, we came home from the conference with full brains and full hearts.
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LuElla D’Amico proposes to redeem gossip this week in Front Porch Republic: “The Art of Good Gossip: Unexpected Lessons about Virtue and Community from Little Women”:
… gossip is derived from the word godsib, first spoken in AD 1014, as a mixture of the words god and sibling. Basically, the original idea of gossip formed around the concept of a godmother or godfather, or one who formed a spiritual relation with someone else—a god sibling. God sibling became gossip. Gossip eventually came to mean a close friend, then, with whom one shared a spiritual bond, a friend as close as family and one whose closeness was known to have historically been tethered through that sacramental act of baptism where one made a covenant with God to look after that other person. Eventually, gossip came to be known as the performative act indicating friendship, or the conversational practices occurring between friends. Gossip, therefore, forms the ecology of friendship, if you will. Specifically, it is the bond denoting a unique friendship, its special relationship with God indicating even moral conversation and relationship, a far cry from what we think of when we consider gossip today…
Indeed, the conversations that happen in Little Women among friends, including between the March sisters and between Acott and her audience, become a training ground for what I consider to be “good gossip.” I define this “good gossip” as occurring when moral codes are learned: it is God’s language that connects friends together and creates bonds that are simultaneously long lasting and spiritually fruitful.
The first chapter of book two of Little Women is aptly titled, “Gossip.” Between the publication of books one and two, actual gossip about Alcott and her characters abounded.
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Lucy S. R. Austen gave a lecture at Wheaton College, “The Actual True is the Sum of All These”: Archival Materials and the Life of Elisabeth Elliot (you can read about the lecture at this link, then scroll to the bottom of the page for a link to the video of the lecture).
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Tal Howard’s latest at the Anxious Bench, “America’s Other Universities,” considers the contributions to our society and democracy of the very diverse mid-size and small American colleges and universities that don’t appear in the news headlines. A taste:
America’s experiment in ordered liberty has, in fact, generated a rich tapestry of smaller and mid-size private colleges and universities—a notable contrast from many other countries, where higher education is a predominantly statist enterprise. A significant subset of these schools reflects a specific religious origin—largely Protestant or Catholic, but Eastern Orthodox, Jewish, Mormon, and Muslim in a few cases. Each has a different story to tell, but many arose from a desire to marry the biblical injunction to love God and neighbor and the Socratic injunction to know thyself and pursue truth—the animating idea behind the liberal arts.
Many schools are grappling with existential challenges that threaten their future. While some may view this as a natural evolution, dismissing the loss of these institutions is shortsighted. Their unique voices contribute not only to their religious communities but also to institutional diversity, the American voluntary principle, and the moral foundations vital to our republic and the common good. Schools like Samford (Baptist), Thomas Aquinas (Catholic), and Valparaiso University (Lutheran) possess distinct traits and callings that enable them to address gaps in public life that other institutions often overlook.
… one finds programs and opportunities on these campuses unlikely to be found at Harvard Yard or in New Haven. Take Berea College in Kentucky, where students do not pay tuition but work—often doing manual labor—for their education under the motto “God has made of one blood all the peoples of the earth.” At Catholic Loyola University in Maryland, first-year students in their Messina program take a unit on the “Good Life,” seeking to define the concept not in terms of “material goods and possessions,” but by “a sense of belonging, spiritual fulfillment, and the attainment of knowledge.” Honors students at evangelical Gordon College in Massachusetts seek to bring faith and learning together “by cultivating a tradition-informed and morally reflective sense of personal vocation by reading and discussing classic texts, drawn from Christian and other intellectual and spiritual traditions.” Plato, Augustine, Dante, Luther, and Shakespeare continue to be included in the curriculum—uncanceled.
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Okay, backing up to a bit earlier in Junior’s educational journey. Sara Butler Nardo writes about teaching kids to read: “Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Boring Lessons.” It’s really a book review, and it’s a fascinating and highly entertaining read.
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I’m looking forward to Joel J. Miller’s book in progress–and nearing completion. He leads a highly organized life—this much is obvious from his consistent and ambitious reading and writing schedule. In his latest post, he explains how he’s kept on schedule with writing his book. Overall, I realized, it’s very similar to how I’ve approached my own book writing. I usually chunk things out, count back from the deadline, and figure out micro-deadlines I have to hit to meet the overall deadline for a book or another larger project.
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Speaking of books, this Tuesday was book birthday for Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic! It’s been a delight to see it in the hands of readers. Also, I love the excerpt from the book—about the plight of widows in the ancient world—that Plough chose to feature. And here is another excerpt, in Public Discourse.