Blessing of Unicorns: Snow, secularist violence, winter poetry, Commonplace launch, and the love of family reading

One Unicorn could be just a figment of your imagination. Herd several together, and you get a Blessing of Unicorns upon your day. Here’s this week’s fabulous–and fabulously wild–herd.

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The Williams family adores snow—we really, really love it. So imagine our disappointment last year, when in our first Midwestern winter we only got one big snow and a few very minor ones (as in, melt within a day or two types). But this winter has been wonderful on the snow front!

And so, I enjoyed this photo essay at Common Good Magazine: “The Real Churches of Winter Wonderland.” The churches featured include First Baptist Church of Valdez, Alaska. Valdez is “the snowiest town in America,” with its average annual 330 inches of the fluffy stuff. Okay, that might be too much even for the Williamses.

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Historian Tal Howard announces two new publications! Here’s more about his new book, Broken Altars: Secularist Violence in Modern History, coming in March from Yale University Press:

A popular truism derived from the Enlightenment holds that violence is somehow inherent to religion, to which political secularism offers a liberating solution. But this assumption ignores a glaring modern reality: that putatively progressive regimes committed to secularism have possessed just as much and often a vastly greater capacity for violence as those tied to a religious identity. In Broken Altars, Thomas Albert Howard presents a powerful account of the misery, deaths, and destruction visited on religious communities by secularist regimes in the twentieth century.

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The Winter issue of New Verse Review has arrived! It’s a delight–BYOC (brew your own coffee) and enjoy.

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Speaking of coffee, I’ve written about my love of this life-sustaining beverage back in December. I enjoyed this nice companion piece of sorts this week by Dennis Uhlman: “The Hope of the American Republic: Local Coffee Shops.” A taste:

The coffee shop I am working from today is a small establishment in downtown Columbia. Situated near the University of South Carolina, it is a common gathering place for students throughout the year. Often, they gather in large groups to hang out and sip coffee, but today is the week of finals and the mood is more serious. The coffee shop is also near several local churches in the city of various denominations. On most days, a dozen or so pastors slip through the doors to set up shop in what has become their unofficial office of sorts. Like any good community gathering place, this coffee shop breaks down barriers. Baptist pastors, Presbyterian pastors, engineering students, and art students learn each other’s names in a way that would be unlikely in any other sort of social arrangement. On one side of the coffee shop, a group of local business leaders meet to discuss funding for their next project. Sitting at the back table, two older folks are chatting over espresso. In an American moment characterized by division, the republic is alive and well on this December day in a Southern city.

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This week saw the launch of a new online center-right magazine, Commonplace. What is it? Here’s the description on the magazine’s site:

Every political movement needs a home for the development and advancement of its ideas and coalition. Commonplace is that home for the New Right, building and sustaining a durable conservative majority that emphasizes the importance of family, community, and industry to the nation’s liberty and prosperity. Through conversations and commentary, reporting and analysis, Commonplace focuses on what matters in America—the economic, political, and cultural concerns that shape the trajectory of the American experiment and the experiences of ordinary Americans.

Here’s a taste from Robert Bellafiore’s piece “A Good Word for National Libertarianism”:

With the election behind them, conservatives can release all the pent-up tension that comes from uniting around a common cause and go back to fighting amongst themselves. Within bounds, such fighting is all to the good. Nearly a decade in, the New Right still has serious internal divisions it must work out if it is to succeed over the next four years and beyond. Post-election, it still needs to confront these divisions head-on.

…as conservatives make their plans for the Trump administration and beyond, they should not dismiss National Libertarianism too quickly. The disagreements between the two camps are real and considerable, but there are also real and considerable affinities between the best forms of libertarianism and National Conservatism that distinguish both from the dying mainstream Right of recent decades. Seizing on these affinities and making common cause where possible, without ignoring divisions elsewhere, will be necessary if those who welcome the realignment are to make the most of it.

To begin, it’s not quite right to present National Libertarianism as spawning from some petri dish within a PR agency, without any history to speak of. National Libertarianism’s name might be new, but it is best understood as an attempted revival of the “Old Right,” the pre-World War II coalition of anti-interventionists and New Deal skeptics. While never quite a full-blown movement—with perhaps the exception of the America First Committee’s opposition to involvement in World War II—it captured a coherent-enough suspicion of FDR’s expansion of the federal government, and a sense that the old American ways were under threat from radical domestic reformers.

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This beautiful essay by Maureen Swinger in Plough isn’t from this week—or this year, even—but it is a timeless reminder for the new year: take time to read to your kids. This is always time well spent. A taste:

When mom invented Uncle Wiggily Dinners, we were living near a university hospital so we could figure out Duane’s seizures. He was three, nonverbal and non-ambulatory. My dad worked twelve-hour days and my mom homeschooled, cleaned a ramshackle three-story house, cooked on a how-did-she-do-it budget, and managed all Duane’s care and therapy. She sewed and mended practically everything we wore. She asked neighbors if they were planning to use the apples on the forgotten trees in their yards, and canned rows of jars for the winter. I literally don’t know what she didn’t do.

She also passionately believed in books. When the call went out, we raced for the kitchen, snagged our indestructible bowls of mac ‘n cheese, then lodged ourselves and our blankets in any odd corner of the living room – the block box, the fireplace mantel, the windowsill. Someone curled up on Duane’s mat, dodging occasional flying kicks. Mom’s secondhand copy of Uncle Wiggily’s Storybook kept us all riveted as the elderly rabbit gentleman experienced hare-raising and hilarious adventures in his magical woodlands. We didn’t even grumble (too much) when it came time to wash dishes and haul ourselves and our blankets off to bed.

After we’d eaten our way through that book, the next dinner call went out for the Hundred Acre Wood. From there, it was a veritable smorgasbord. Some of the adventures got too scary to be faced from the far-flung reaches of the room. We ended up all together on Duane’s mat as the guards closed in on the pheasant-poachers in Danny the Champion of the World. Fingers locked around each other’s arms as we navigated Mio, My Son’s “Blackest Mountain beyond the Dead Forest.” Mom cruelly closed the book on Flight of the Doves’ cliffhanger chapter endings, ignoring the desperate pleas to “Read on!” which were also heard when she shared favorite childhood stories from her Swiss heritage and there was a brief pause in the action. (We did not fully appreciate her off-the-cuff translating abilities.) Sometimes the gap in translation lengthened, and we looked up to notice she’d fallen asleep. But “Read on!” the merciless cry went up.