Having grown up in the 80s, under the thrall of exciting books like This Present Darkness, and many thrilling discussions about spiritual warfare and the malign power of the New Age, I have always tried to temper my inclination to see demons in every corner. It’s too easy, for the most part, to see something bad and attribute the badness to a spirit sitting there, trying to wreck everything. But lately, as the tempering quiet of Christianity recedes from the... Read more
I resisted as long as I possibly could, trotting over to Insta and looking up Ballerina Farm. All the flap about Sourdough Bread didn’t drag me in. All the long articles about the inherent racism of the tradwife phenomenon did not even pique my interest. No, the final straw was reading this piece by Mary Harrington about Lauren Southern and the listical approach to ideology and life. Ballerina Farm’s videos are beautiful, of course. In a world full of ugliness... Read more
Art by Aedan Kennedy @targambie on Insta I am a little bit embarrassed to admit that I have been quietly checking on H. Pearl Davis–on the X App, @pearlythingz–provocateur, and peddler of iniquitously questionable takes. I haven’t quite come round to listening to her podcast, so perhaps she is much more reasonable than she appears in a hundred characters or less, so take this with a grain of plausible deniability. Nevertheless, the tweets are bad–so so so bad. Pulling at... Read more
I’m wondering if it’s time to get rid of the word “culture” and replace it with something more interesting and true to reality, like “meme” or “miasma.” I use the word myself a lot because it’s so handy. But I am tiring of its elasticity and its ubiquity. Two weeks ago, I said something like, “no functional culture would countenance such a thing” and a lot of people became extremely angry. Then I read a book full of the terms... Read more
The best thing about getting older, as far as I can tell, is forgetting things. I am the mother of six children, and I can’t remember anything–their birth weights, where I left my keys, what I used to make them for breakfast, or what I did when they were wicked. This, I find, is a blessed kind of amnesia, affording me plausible deniability, the chance to be reminded by their narration of the past, and a sweet haze of affection... Read more
As many of you know, I’ve been irritated by Glennon Doyle’s mischaracterization of the concept of self-sacrifice ever since I read Untamed, however many years ago. The manner in which she twisted the idea of dying to the self for the sake of another as though it were a bad thing vexed me so that every now and then, I think about it again and become annoyed. This weekend I gained a small measure of understanding about why, indeed, and... Read more
It occurred to me yesterday that Easter is just around the corner. For some reason, even though it is so early this year, I had in my mind that it was a long way off. Plus, I have been distracted by watching too many reels on too many platforms. My current favorite is this person, who I found on Facebook, who cooks enormous amounts of food for her nine children and makes it look like the opposite of a chore,... Read more
I fully intended to blog yesterday, in spite of its having been a Catechesis Formation Weekend (which always leaves me worn out), but as usual, I just couldn’t get my act together. The fact remains, to my great annoyance, that I am a limited creature, lacking the capacity to do all those good works that I wish to walk in, whether or not they were prepared for me by God. I was especially annoyed by my pathetic mental and physical... Read more
I missed blogging yesterday because of a long training weekend for Catechesis of the Good Shepherd. My church is hosting a Level One Formation, for which people drive upwards of 3 hours one way to attend. We’ve been meeting Friday evenings and all day Saturday roughly once a month for about nine months (with a long break for the Summer and some snow cancelations) and have about two months left. Being able to host this Formation is a dream and... Read more
I’ve been meaning to get a copy of that book, How To Lie With Statistics, but am so backed up, it would take me ages to read it even if I had it to hand. Every time I wander past anything with numbers anywhere online, though, I wonder how I can even know if anything is even true. Are the numbers for real? This was the question upwards in my mind last week when I came across the headline over... Read more
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