The Williams Homeschool is back in session as of this Tuesday! Anyway, this Blessing of Unicorns herds fabulous essays from this past week on what it means for Christians to be a peculiar people, the case for the humanities (and reading!), manual training for all, motherhood and work, political parties and social issues, and new conversations about cultural Christians.
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Sho Baraka started this week as Christianity Today’s director of the Big Tent Initiative. You can read his reflections on “The Peculiarity of Christians.” A taste:
The word weird is being thrown around by politicians as if it’s an official political critique. Once that label is hurled at someone, they return to middle school ethics and recite the gospel of rubber and glue. Most people don’t want to be weird.
However, I can’t help but think of the strange predicaments that Yahweh has put his people in: Noah building an uncanny boat, Ezekiel’s dramatized prophecy, John the Baptist as a pre-modern hipster wandering the desert, and many more. It’s very peculiar for enslaved people to sing of God’s goodness and provision on plantations that attempted to designate them as worse than weird—inhuman.
Maybe to be set apart is to be weird and peculiar. However, many people have auctioned off their weirdness to cultural lobbyists for relevance and power.
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The case for the humanities: “A burglar who broke into an apartment in Rome on Tuesday night was arrested after stopping in the middle of the robbery to read a book about Greek mythology.”
As one does.
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Speaking of reading (in this case presumably not mid-robbery), Josh Hochschild offers excellent (albeit somewhat controversial) advice for how to read—especially, how to read philosophical texts. He would like you to (*gulp*) write in your books.
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Connie Goddard’s piece “Manual Training for All” this week in Front Porch Republic is excellent and pairs well with Aston Fearon’s “In Praise of Physical Work” for Plough.
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Alexandra Davis contributes words of wisdom to the on-going debate on the tension between work and family, especially for mothers: “Reframing the Work-Motherhood Tension.”
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Jake Meador’s critique of the short-sightedness of Evangelicals for Harris is worth reading. I also appreciated Ken Craycraft’s poignant analysis of the Harris-Walz ticket’s abortion extremism. A taste:
A Harris-Walz presidency would be noteworthy not simply for the extremity of their abortion and gender policies, but also for the fanatical zealousness with which they pursue them. With no close contender, theirs would be the most anti-life, anti-woman, and anti-family presidency in the history of the country. Unborn and unwanted newborn children would be exterminated. Women would be reduced to objects for the sexual satisfaction of men. Women-only spaces would be eradicated. And parents would lose authority over the medical care of their own children.
In a CNN interview on July 24, Massachusetts Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren declared that Kamala Harris’s “biggest accomplishment” as vice president has been the “way that she has rallied women . . . around this country on the issue of abortion, and just taken it home.” Harris was “the first vice president in history to visit an abortion clinic. Go get ’em!” she gushed.
Warren was alluding to Harris’s January 2024 “Reproductive Freedom Tour,” which included a stop at a Minnesota Planned Parenthood abortion mill that Harris disingenuously called a “health care clinic.” Harris was conspicuously accompanied at the abortion center by her now-running mate, Tim Walz, whose record on abortion is even more extreme than Harris’s.
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This week, TGC published Joe Carter’s detailed overview “Where the Political Parties Stand on Social Issues in 2024.” It’s very helpful in comparing/contrasting not only the two major parties (who both support abortion), but also considering such third-party options as the Solidarity Party (previously highlighted on this blog) and the Constitution Party.
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Cultural Christianity has been in the news—see, for instance, Madeleine Davis’s New Statesman article this week, “The Rise of Cultural Christianity: Why Religion is Thriving in a Non-Believing Age.” A taste:
Given this backdrop, what does it mean that so many people – 46.2 per cent at the last census in England and Wales – describe themselves as Christian? It’s a debate that has been reignited in recent months in the wake of some high-profile conversions, and paeans to the cultural value of Christianity, that have led some to forecast the return of the poet Matthew Arnold’s “sea of faith”. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s testimony, the popularity of Jordan Peterson’s therapeutic exposition of the Christian scriptures and the emphasis on the Christian foundations of the nation at conservative gatherings, bringing together politicians (like Miriam Cates, Michael Gove and Danny Kruger) and philosophers, are among the developments that invite questions that might have been regarded as the sole preserve of theologians. What is the nature of conversion? Who gets to call themselves a Christian?
Perhaps it makes sense that Richard Dawkins, a zoologist by training and committed atheist, should serve up with alacrity a clear-cut taxonomy of Christianity. “You can be a Cultural Christian, a Political Christian, a Believing Christian, or any combination of the three,” he wrote in a recent Substack essay.
At the risk of shameless self-promotion, I will note that I wrote a book about Cultural Christians in the Early Church (with some parallels to modern counterparts). In light of the more recent fascination with cultural Christians in the public sphere, I’m looking forward to talking about this topic with Tara Isabella Burton and Henry Oliver at an Interintellect online salon in a couple of weeks. You can learn more about this event here.
