Blessing of Unicorns: the first of 2025!

This roundup has taken a few weeks off, as we traveled, visited with family and friends, and savored the many blessings of the holiday season (spiritual, emotional, culinary). The Williams crew, in particular, enjoyed visiting Dan’s family in Maine and also squeezed in a wonderful (even if all-too-brief) visit with the amazing Ivana D. Greco and her family!

So, the first roundup of Unicorns of this new year features Jimmy Carter tributes, reflection questions for recapping last year and planning for this new year, the writing life, John Wilson’s list of favorite nonfiction books of 2024, a 2,400-year-old stuffed animal, intensive parenting, family policy, and a response to ProPublica’s irresponsible blaming of pregnant women’s deaths on abortion bans.

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Jimmy Carter’s death at 100 has prompted a number of reflections and tributes. Here are just a few:

If you missed Current‘s rerun this week of Evan Kutzler’s wonderful essay (first published in 2023), you should read it: “Three Evenings in Plains”

My favorite American historian has written a book about the 1976 election, so he has been asked to write about Carter by several outlets. Here is his piece in Christianity Today about “The Evangelicalism of Jimmy Carter,” and his obituary in RNS.

Chris Gehrz published a tribute on “The ‘Surprising Greatness’ of Jimmy Carter.”

Finally, Thomas Kidd in The Dispatch on “Jimmy Carter’s Most Perplexing Legacy”

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Switching gears to the New Year: Tsh Oxenreider has an excellent set of discussion questions to ask family and friends as you reflect on this past year and plan ahead to this new one. Why do this? Because “It’s good to recognize the rewards and challenges from the previous twelve months before hacking out a plan for the next twelve.”

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I appreciated Karen Swallow Prior’s honest explanation of her feelings and reasoning about her writing life: In a nutshell, “It’s stressful.”

Some years ago—while teaching was still my full-time calling, but I was beginning to write and publish a lot more—my friend Nick asked me if I wanted to write full-time. I said no. Nick asked why not, and I gave two reasons. First, I loved teaching and couldn’t imagine not being in the classroom. (That’s something I no longer have to imagine, and it’s still hard to process.) The second answer was that I feared having to spend that much time in my head.

So, here I am. I spend a lot of time in my head. And it’s stressful.

I will say, my circumstances are very different, so my own writing life has been significantly less stressful than my previous academic life. I’m still coming to terms with how poisonous that secular university setting had become by the time I finally left. But also, as KSP’s reflection makes clear, career changes are stressful and take us a while to process in full. I look forward to her forthcoming book on vocation, which (I expect) tackles some of these topics in more detail.

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Speaking of books, John Wilson (who reads more than any other person I have ever met, guaranteed) published this list of his favorite nonfiction reads of 2024.

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Many thanks to Christopher W. Jones for drawing my attention to this news: Archaeologists have found a 2,400-year-old stuffed swan in Siberia.

The swan’s body is made from reindeer wool that has been processed into white felt, while the beak, eyes and wing tips are made from black felt. Reddish-brown felt was used for the “feet,” and the figurine is stuffed with reindeer wool.

The feet also contain wooden sticks that support the swan in an upright position. Curators at Russia’s Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, where it is on display, think these sticks were used to mount the swan on a wooden chariot found nearby, or perhaps on the top of a tent-like structure erected over the burial mound but which rotted away long ago.

According to the museum, the swan symbolized life in three spheres: air, land and water.

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Stephanie Murray has been going from strength to strength in her writing on parenting at The Atlantic–like in her first column of 2025, on the tradeoffs between intensive parenting and creating a “village” of fellow parents with whom to swap kids on occasion. I found myself nodding all the way through. While our parent swap experience has not been nearly as frequent or formalized, the mindset transformation is familiar. A taste:

The hovering, “intensive” approach to parenting that has steadily come to dominate American, and to some extent British, family life is simply incompatible with village building. You can try to micromanage your child’s care—whether they eat sugar, whether they get screen time, whether someone insists that a child apologize after snatching another kid’s toy—or you can have reliable community help with child care. But you can’t have both.

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John Shelton on family policy in The Civitas Outlook: “Getting Family Policy Wrong.” A taste:

The problems that family policy seeks to address are urgent, emergencies even, but panic often multiplies problems rather than mitigates them, as my grandfather once learned. Training aspiring helicopter pilots at a small airport in South Carolina, he taught them to calmly navigate simulated engine failure and avoid a catastrophic collision with the ground. On one occasion, however, the trainee panicked, pulled the wrong lever, and transformed the situation from simulated to actual crisis. Fortunately, the crash failed to kill the pair of them, though still leaving my grandfather with a painful back break and an extended hospital stay.

Policymakers should proceed under the same principle that guided the doctors attending to my grandfather post-crash: first, do no harm. Sound policymaking, like good medical practice, requires sober-minded realism. If policy levers never worked for other countries trying to reverse the birth dearth, we shouldn’t think it might work for us. Moreover, we should be alert to the serious tradeoffs that arise from many of these seemingly apparent levers. Simply because one of them is nominally about “children” or “family” does not make them the automatic best way to advance the cause of families. Even the most cautious version of CTC expansion—updating and indexing the credit’s value to compensate for Bidenflation—could conceivably leave families worse off if paired with aggressive tariffs as pay-fors, as has been repeatedly suggested for tax reform in 2025.

Family policymaking would do well to adopt more modest goals. If increasing workers’ wages and addressing offshoring industries is the goal, then there is an obvious blueprint in cutting corporate taxes and making the U.S. more competitive through deregulation. If Carney and others like Catherine Pakaluk are right that marriage and religion are the keys, then the government should bend over backward to avoid impeding these things with penalties and artificial disincentives.

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Finally, I appreciated the opportunity to write for Compact this response to ProPublica‘s series of stories in late 2024, claiming that “Abortion Deaths Lead to Preventable Deaths.” Not only are such headlines and articles dangerous, but I explain that these stories themselves have turned killers. A taste:

Some prophecies are self-fulfilling. When the Supreme Court issued its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson on June 24, 2022, power for regulating abortion was returned to the states, inaugurating abortion bans in some states. Prophets of doom warned that women would die. The prophets were right. Multiple women have died. According to such outlets as ProPublica, these women’s stories show “How Abortion Bans Lead to Preventable Deaths.” But is this true? What if abortion bans have not killed anyone after all? What if the real killer is still at large and poised to strike again?

Let us take a step back and consider two women whose deaths ProPublica has expressly blamed on abortion bans: Amber Thurman in Georgia and Nivaeh Crain in Texas. The writers who have covered these stories and assigned the blame are not medical doctors, and neither am I. The information available to us about these women and their deaths may be incomplete. I am, however, a historian who believes that the stories we tell have power—sometimes even the power of life and death…

Does it sound overly conspiratorial that doctors, journalists, and activists are using deaths of pregnant women for political gain? Yes. But that is also the strategy that comes through in Rachel M. Cohen’s post-election analysis of the issue in Vox: “Rather than pursue clearer federal standards around exceptions, advocacy groups are betting on abortion rights becoming more prominent as restrictions continue.” Instead of blaming abortion bans, it is time to acknowledge the incredible damage that the mentality of “abortion is healthcare” has done to women’s healthcare in this country. In this case, the prophets of doom have turned killers.