This week the Williams crew squeezed in a quick trip to Wheaton College for the annual Presbyterian Scholars Conference (if you missed it earlier, here’s an interview with Jeff McDonald, the organizer and convener). This was Dan’s third year attending, and the kids and I decided to tag along this time. 10/10, highly recommend.
This week’s Unicorns think about the election—but compassionately; and also essays on political misogyny, motherhood, and the 1,500th anniversary of the death of Boethius.
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Karen Swallow Prior in CT: “What Campaign Signs Taught Me About Being a Good Neighbor.” A taste:
When I was a teenager, the father of one of my classmates (who lived nearby) was running for local office on the ticket of the party my family never voted for. So I was surprised one day to come home and see a campaign sign for my friend’s father in our yard. But it turned out that my friend’s father simply had asked my father if he could place one of his signs in our yard, and my father had said yes. Being a hospitable neighbor was more important to my father than partisan politics or a campaign sign…
Often, when we talk about loving our neighbors, we are thinking in the abstract. Perhaps we are thinking about loving neighbors on a global scale—those who live far from us, whom we encounter on short-term mission trips and exotic vacations, or fill shoe boxes for at Christmas time, or learn about on missions Sunday when we put money into a special offering. And loving our neighbors can be all these things. But just as “all politics is local,” so, in a sense, is all neighborliness local, too.
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Daniel Darling’s in The Dispatch explains “Why Politically Engaged Christians Are Good for Our Politics.” A taste:
In fact, in their defense of themselves before a tyrannical Roman government, church leaders often made the case that the church’s very presence was good for society. One second century apologetic, Letter to Diognetus, outlines the Christian posture toward the world: “To sum up all in one word—what the soul is in the body, that are Christians to the world. The soul is dispersed in all the members of the body, and Christians are scattered through all the cities of the world. The soul dwells in the body, yet is not of the body; and Christians dwell in the world, yet are not of the world. The invisible soul is guarded by the visible body, and Christians are known indeed to be in the world, but their godliness remains invisible.” Christians were to be the “soul” of society, even while possessing little power.
What does this mean for Christians living in America, whose government is “of the people, by the people, and for the people?” It would seem difficult to live out the imperative to exiles (1 Peter 1:1-2) to “seek the welfare of the city (Jeremiah 29:7)” while not engaging, at some level, the opportunity to shape the policies that affect the flourishing of the city. Nor could Christians honestly obey the Great Commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves if—living under a government that affords all citizens the opportunity to do so—we refuse to use our voices and votes to influence the policies that affect our neighbors’ well-being. One might even argue that disengagement in the face of an unjust status quo is itself a silent affirmation of that status quo.
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On a related but more historical note, Samuel Goldman reviews Miles Smith’s Religion and Republic.
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One last political piece for this roundup: I thoroughly appreciated this from Erika Bachiochi: “The Dead End of Political Misogyny.” A taste before you read this excellent piece in full:
…however much we are right to worry about the decline in social trust, it has nothing on the coming civilizational reckoning represented by the growing cleavage between the sexes.
It’s not only that young women are increasingly telling pollsters that they don’t want to marry or bear children. For the first time in US history, women are voting as a bloc to politically secure that act of radical bodily autonomy that signifies the full eclipse of trust in men.
It is fashionable on the political right today to blame women, especially progressive women, for the nation’s woes. Women are said to have become too ambitious and concerned with worldly accomplishments, or too superficial and overly emotional to recognize the evident goods of marriage and the joys of children. The best way to save the West, a right-wing fringe insists, would be simply to strip women of their civil and political rights, to return them to such a state of economic dependency that they would have no choice but to subordinate themselves—and their unruly ambitions—to men, or at least to a single man.
This misogynistic masculinism is growing on the right, even as progressive women seek refuge in a female president who promises protection from The Handmaid’s Tale. But these men have lost the thread. It’s true that individual women on social media, or groups of them at political rallies or in h.r. departments, sometimes display the irrationalism that these male provocateurs claim is “woman’s nature.” But these extreme emotional tendencies speak more of the want of authentic liberal education and the moral formation that has always been needed to order the human soul. Meanwhile, men’s own tendencies of dominating insensitivity—exacerbated by the loss of the character formation once central to even primary education in the West—only drives women further away. If there is blame to cast around, why focus it on women (or men) as a class, rather than the system of progressive education that simply trains children to compete in the global marketplace—as consumers, no less than knowledge and service workers—eclipsing the traditional model that intentionally channeled our desires toward cultivating the virtues that both men and women need?
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On a related note: CT editor and occasional Current writer Kate Lucky reviewed my new book at CT!
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Finally, this week was the 1,500th anniversary of the execution of Boethius, the author of The Consolation of Philosophy and the last Classical Roman author. What do his life, death, and legacy mean today? Here’s a taste from my answer to this question:
October 23, 2024, marks 1,500 years since the death of Boethius, the troubled writer in question. A Roman aristocrat and prominent statesman before his dramatic fall, his political accomplishments mean nothing to us today. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, so have gone all political and military greats of ages past. Historians can continue to be impressed, but even they must be selective in bestowing their interests. Besides, most Americans can’t name all this young country’s presidents, much less political greats of other times and places.
By contrast, Boethius’ dialogue with Lady Philosophy, The Consolation of Philosophy, has had remarkable staying power. From its moment of publication on, it enthralled and encouraged readers through the European Middle Ages into the present. One sign of its significance is its well-accepted status as the traditional bookend of classical Roman literature—after Boethius, we speak of medieval writers, not Roman or late antique. Boethius, without knowing it, became a period, not a comma—the decisive end of one literary era and the beginning of the next.
This literary significance may seem a bit shrug-worthy today, but I contend that there is more. History does not advance in a straight line but in circles, Yeats-worthy gyres, each recalling and respinning another. This is as true of people as of the greater trends and sociocultural developments through which they live. And so what makes Boethius a particularly interesting and relevant figure for this moment, a millennium and a half after his death, is his unwavering commitment to intellectual honesty and to cultivating his own character even when falsely accused of treason—and ultimately executed based on these accusations.