A few weeks ago, a Dappled Things subscriber sent me the following message:

I just received Dappled Things Volume 13, Issue 3 in the post. This is to say that this issue is one of my personal favorites. There seems to be something particularly inspired about its contents.

Reading it has been a soul healing experience.

So much so, that I simply needed to reach out to you to say, “thank you,” to you, your team, and all the talented contributors. May God’s mercy bring continuous provision and protection to Dappled Things and its ministry to persons through ideas, art and faith.

Sincerely,

Richard Alan Hadley

Needless to say, the message made my day, but not simply because it was so complimentary about the journal. Rather, it was the particular words that he used: “a soul healing experience.” Last year, I wrote in my annual letter that we live in an “anxious age,” but who could have predicted the anxieties that 2018 would bring for the Church and the world? The McCarrick scandal, the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report, the Viganò letter, and all the evidence of corruption, worldliness, and cowardice among the hierarchy, have left Catholics shaken and the Church looking much like the world around it: fearful, confused, and increasingly divided. In such a climate, it is obvious that we need voices fighting to restore to the Church her rightful moral authority, unity, and faithfulness, but it may be easy to overlook that we also need voices reminding us what we are fighting for. And that is why Mr. Hadley’s message was so encouraging to me, because it confirmed for me that we are accomplishing what we have set out to do: to create a space where the true, the good, and the beautiful, growing out of the bosom of the Church, can flourish into works of literature, thought, and art that bring God’s healing to the world.

I hope that like Mr. Hadley, you have noticed the increasing excellence of the material we have been able to publish this year, from the gorgeous art, poetry, and fiction, to our expended nonfiction and reviews sections. Our team of volunteer editors put in countless hours to make Dappled Things possible, but we can only continue this work with your support.

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Sincerely in Christ,

Bernardo Aparicio García
Founder & Publisher, Dappled Things

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‎”Dost thou understand? I love thee!” he cried again. “What love!” said the unhappy girl with a shudder. He resumed,–“The love of a damned soul.” —Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

I have gone on record many times (most recently here) to promote the particular genius of the horror genre as a tool through which Christians can confront the realities of evil and (when the genre is at its best) defy them through Christ’s love, either explicitly or implicitly. So, when I read the article “Now is a Perfect Time for Catholic Horror” by Stephen Wingate, in which he calls for a revival of the Catholic horror novel as a means of confronting the recent abuse scandals, I naturally agreed that he was on to something. But until such time as modern writers are able to produce work that engages the “difficult literary interrogation between Catholicism and evil… [and] provides a necessary look into how the church has become the horror for some,” we would do well to remember that Victor Hugo already gave us such a novel. More and more, it seems to me that The Hunchback of Notre Dame is a book for our times.

It may seem spiritually dangerous to turn to a novel that was once listed on the Church’s Index of Forbidden Books to help make sense of the current scandal,* but if we’re going to speak honestly about written works that pose spiritual dangers for Catholics, the Philadelphia grand jury report would be near the top of the list. In a world where the faithful have already been scandalized by villain-priests, there is no way to protect our souls from characters like Archdeacon Claude Frollo. We have already met such men in the flesh. We have seen the horrific effects of secrecy and denial; and if we owe it to the real victims to bring priestly crimes to light, we also owe it ourselves to revisit the prophetic novel that sought to do the same nearly 200 years ago.

When Victor Hugo wrote The Hunchback of Notre Dame, he was not “anti-Catholic,” as so many critics like to call him. What Hugo believed shifted radically and often during the course of his life, but at the time he published Notre Dame, he had not yet begun dabbling in spiritualism, nor embraced the kind of secular rationalism that characterized his later years. The Hugo of 1831 still identified with the faith of his baptism, even if he had become critical of the ways in which he often saw the faith abused among the clergy. It’s a spiritual space that many Catholics today will find achingly familiar.

However, the state of Victor Hugo’s soul when he composed Notre Dame is not only unknowable, but also irrelevant to a discussion of the work itself. The story is so powerful that it has endured across centuries and been translated into nearly every language of the globe. And what is that story but the interplay of light and darkness, faith and doubt, love and betrayal, within and through the Church?

The original French title of the book is Notre-Dame de Paris; the cathedral is the title character and, arguably, the protagonist of the novel. The chapter titled “Notre-Dame” is devoted to the cathedral’s architecture, a song of praise to the building and a lament for the stupidities of man that, over the centuries, ruined certain aspects of its design. The cathedral is “a sort of human Creation, mighty and fertile as the Divine Creation, from which it seems to have borrowed the twofold character of variety and eternity.” This architectural depiction serves as a literalization of the church’s role in the novel; and not merely of the small-c church, Notre Dame, but also the capital-C Church, Catholicism. For Hugo, both are capable of bridging the gap between the temporal and the eternal, but man’s caprice has “brutally swept away” so much of what made them beautiful.

In the fifteenth century world of the story, the church still has most—but not all—of its grandeur intact. On the morning when the deformed child who will become known as Quasimodo is discovered in the porch of the church, Hugo is careful to tell us that this porch used to house statues of St. Christopher and Antoine des Essarts, a saint and a sinner, which had both been thrown down some fifty years before. Both saints and sinners have already become targets in the slow degradation of the Holy.

Yet the church is still intact enough to provide refuge for outcasts. The monstrous child exposed on the bed for foundling children is reviled by all the “good” Christians, but the young priest, Claude Frollo, chooses to adopt him. It is an act of true charity performed by a young man who has already taken on the guardianship of his baby brother after the death of their parents. This young Frollo is a rising star of the Church and a brilliant scholar. He names the foundling Quasimodo, which means half-made, “either to commemorate the day on which he found him [Quasimodo Sunday], or to express the incomplete and scarcely finished state of the poor little creature.”

Quasimodo Sunday is another name for the Second Sunday of Easter. It is taken from the opening words of the Introit, or Entrance Chant: Quasi modo géniti infántes, rationábile, sine dolo lac concupíscite, ut in eo crescátis in salútem, allelúia. This is a paraphrase of 1 Peter 2:2, and in the current English translation of the Missal, it reads, Like newborn infants, you must long for the pure, spiritual milk, that in him you may grow to salvation, alleluia. This translation has lost the sense of “half-made,” that we are not merely infants but incomplete beings, who can only be made whole by receiving the “milk” of Christ. But Hugo understands the Latin well; for him, it is only the half-made “apology for a human being” who is able to accept the Church’s invitation.

[Quasimodo’s] cathedral was enough for him. It was peopled with marble figures of kings, saints and bishops who at least did not laugh in his face and looked at him with only tranquility and benevolence. The other statues, those of monsters and demons, had no hatred for him–he resembled them too closely for that. It was rather the rest of mankind that they jeered at. The saints were his friends and blessed him; the monsters were his friends and kept watch over him. He would sometimes spend whole hours crouched before one of the statues in solitary conversation with it. If anyone came upon him then he would run away like a lover surprised during a serenade.

As long as he remains within the church, Quasimodo is happy. Yet the part of the church that makes him happiest—the bells which he is assigned to ring—also make him deaf. “Thus the only gate which nature had left wide open between him and the world was suddenly closed, and for ever. In closing, it shut out the only ray of light and joy that still reached his soul, which was now wrapped in profound darkness.”

It seems to me that Hugo isn’t quite consistent here. By making him deaf and closing the gate to the world, the cathedral has prevented Quasimodo from ever again being subject to the world’s scorn, or at least from hearing it voiced. He becomes even further encased in the church that has been “his egg, his nest, his home, his country, the universe.” Hugo wants to have it both ways: Quasimodo’s joy is both in the church and in the world to which the gate is now closed. But he is not clear about what light Quasimodo ever received from the world; the hunchback experiences nothing but abuse every time he leaves the church.

For Quasimodo, the cathedral fulfills Christ’s promise: Come to me, all you labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Father Frollo—who baptizes him, teaches him to speak, and gives him a purpose in life as the cathedral’s chief bell-ringer—serves the genuine role of a father. If the story had ended before either of these men ever laid eyes on Esmeralda, it might have been a happy tale.

In the years since he adopted Quasimodo, Claude Frollo has turned his scholarly pursuits away from theology first toward true science, then toward alchemy and sorcery. Rather than pursuing the Truth of God, he has idolized human knowledge, twisting the virtue of his keen intellect into a vice. The Claude Frollo who meets Esmeralda is a very different man from the one who first met the helpless child Quasimodo.

Esmeralda is a young gypsy dancer, physically as unlike Quasimodo as it is possible to be: lithe, beautiful, entrancing. Yet, like the hunchback, she is a lost child in need of a parent, a lost soul in need of succor. Esmeralda was stolen from her cradle to be raised among heathen strangers. But this time, Father Frollo cannot love the outcast enough to bring her into the church’s grace. Esmeralda stirs in him the same impulse toward love that Quasimodo did, but Frollo is no longer capable of anything but “the love of a damned soul.” He seeks not to shelter, but to possess; not to give, but to take. The Father has become an inversion of himself: no longer one who gives life, but one who takes it. Frollo is even able to acknowledge these changes:

And when, while thus diving into his soul, he saw how large a space nature had there prepared for the passions… he perceived, with the cold indifference of a physician examining a patient, that this hatred and this malignity were but vitiated love; that love, the source of every virtue in man, was transformed into horrid things in the heart of a priest, and that one so constituted as he in making himself a priest made himself a demon.

Frollo believes what we in the 21^st century will recognize as a common argument: that the Church’s insistence on clerical celibacy, the denial of natural passions, is the root cause, or at least one of the root causes, of clerical sexual abuse. Frollo believes this argument, but his story does not illustrate its truth.** Lust is hardly Frollo’s only, or even his primary, vice. He does not chase after every skirt he sees, nor are his sins primarily driven by the desire for physical gratification. Rather, Frollo punishes his body, often working without food or sleep toward his goal of transmuting matter into gold. Frollo’s sin is the same as Adam and Eve’s: he covets knowledge that will make him godlike. His desire for Esmeralda has less to do with sex than with possession, because she—like transmuted gold, or Eden’s apple—is beautiful, forbidden, and unattainable.

When Esmeralda rejects his advances, Frollo destroys what he cannot possess. He turns her over to be hanged for a crime she did not commit. But Quasimodo has learned well from his father, and he follows the example of the younger, better Frollo; he adopts the orphaned child. In the novel’s most iconic scene, he snatches Esmeralda from the gallows and gives her sanctuary in the cathedral.

[He clasped] her closely in his arms, against his angular bosom, as his treasure, his all, as the mother of that girl would herself have done… at that moment Quasimodo was really beautiful. Yes, he was beautiful—he, that orphan, that foundling, that outcast; he felt himself august and strong; he looked in the face of that society from which he was banished… the human justice from which he had snatched its victim; those judges, those executioners, all that force of the King’s, which he, the meanest of the mean, had foiled with the force of God!

But the image of the triumphant outcasts wrapped in the consoling mantle of the church is not to last. The church is still Claude Frollo’s domain. He is the first to assault Esmeralda’s sanctuary, and Quasimodo cannot bring himself to kill his father in her defense; Esmeralda must wave a blade at Frollo herself. Her gypsy friends come next in an attempt to save her, which Quasimodo mistakenly foils because he cannot hear them speak their intentions. Then the King orders the sanctuary violated for the sake of ridding his kingdom of the supposed “sorceress.” The church’s ability to protect the powerless proves to be fleeting. As the king’s army closes in, Frollo alone has the power to save the girl, and he offers her a choice: life as his lover, or the gallows. Esmeralda replies, “I feel less horror of that than of you.” She goes to her death rather than submit to his lust.

I can only imagine how many real victims might see themselves reflected in Esmeralda. How many came to the Church looking for refuge, only to have their pastors, bishops, or archbishops issue fresh attacks by ignoring or disbelieving their accusations? How many faithful Catholics have felt like Quasimodo, carrying our wounded brothers and sisters into the bosom of the church for protection, only to be scolded and threatened by the very men we looked upon as fathers? How many predatory priests have used their power to issue ultimatums as appalling as the one given by Frollo to Esmeralda?

Frollo is true to his threat. Esmeralda dies on the gallows. An enraged Quasimodo pushes Frollo out of the tower of the cathedral where the two of them have watched the execution, and though Frollo catches himself on a pipe, the hunchback refuses to save him. As for Quasimodo:

About a year and a half or two years after the events with which this story concludes, when search was made in the vault of Montfoucon… they found among all those hideous carcasses two skeletons, one of which held the other in its embrace. One of these skeletons, which was that of a woman, still had a few strips of a garment which had once been white, and around her neck was to be seen a string of adrezarach beads with a little silk bag ornamented with green glass, which was open and empty. These objects were of so little value that the executioner had probably not cared for them. The other, which held this one in a close embrace, was the skeleton of a man. It was noticed that his spinal column was crooked, his head seated on his shoulder blades, and that one leg was shorter than the other. Moreover, there was no fracture of the vertebrae at the nape of the neck, and it was evident that he had not been hanged. Hence, the man to whom it had belonged had come thither and had died there. When they tried to detach the skeleton which he held in his embrace, he fell to dust.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame is a difficult book for Catholics. It calls into clear relief the potential horrors of trusting a Church that is led by a man or men as corrupt as Claude Frollo. It is a lesson that we cannot afford to ignore, yet the book leaves us with very little hope. I choose to read the ending as an intimation that perhaps Quasimodo, Esmeralda, and Esmeralda’s mother (represented by the empty bag) have found union as a family after death, but it is also legitimate to read the ending as one of pure despair. According to the novel, a hopeless grave is the sentence the Church has imposed upon those who trusted her, whom she betrayed. I have no doubt there are many who believe it, and we ignore this conclusion at our peril.

Yet there is one element missing from the portrayal of the Church in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and it is the most important one of all. Jesus Christ is hardly mentioned, and certainly never active. If the cathedral itself is the protagonist, it is a very humanized cathedral. It has “borrowed the twofold character of variety and eternity,” but it remains “a human Creation.” It is endowed with characteristics of the divine, but not the Divine Presence Himself. Quasimodo communes with statues and bells, but he never receives the “pure spiritual milk” his feast day calls for. The true warning we ought to take from the book is not merely that sexually corrupt priests pose a significant danger to the faithful. We hardly need a novel to tell us that. The real tragedy of The Hunchback of Notre Dame is that Quasimodo places his faith in the Church as an institution, not in Christ, her head. No human institution—not even one established by God—can ever be worthy of such faith. Those stone saints whom Quasimodo befriended failed to do what all true saints do; they did not lead him to know and love the living Jesus. Quasimodo is, unwittingly, an idolater; the church is his god. If there is anything we Catholics must be clear about in the context of our current scandals, it is that we do not worship idols. We worship the One who suffers with and for us. It is Christ, not the clergy or the Church, who will save the Esmeraldas and the Quasimodos from their graves—and, in His mercy, He will reach out a hand to the Claude Frollos while they plummet, too.

 

* The Church removed The Hunchback of Notre Dame from the Index of Forbidden Books in 1959.

** I’m not convinced that Hugo believed Frollo’s argument that celibacy must, by its nature, corrupt the priest—or, if he believed it in 1831, he had certainly changed his mind by the time he wrote the unforgettable portrayal of Bishop Myriel in Les Misérables.

 

With the feast of Christ the King coming up, Graham Greene has been on my mind. His novel The Power and the Glory affected me deeply when I read it back in my late teens (I have an article coming out in Aleteia on Sunday about it). Greene is an interesting fella because he was a convert who never became a triumphalist. Instead, he went straight to “bad Catholic,” a title typically reserved for cradle Catholics. He was variously conflicted and doubtful, morally compromised and would swing wildly from manic bursts of energy into the darkest corners of the human psyche. Through it all, he was a great writer.

Many of his novels deal with Catholic themes – The Power and the Glory is about a priest – but he was by no means a Catholic novelist. This, to him, would have been absurd, making too small a thing of the divine, as if God is another character to be invented at the tip of his pen. Green writes, “There are leaders of the Church who regard literature as a means to one end, edification. That end may be of the highest value, of far higher value than literature, but it belongs to a different world. Literature has nothing to do with edification.” Edification, or the graces that propel us along the path of sainthood, cannot be the goal of literature, because sainthood is too great a reality to fit into the pages of a novel.

This, to someone like me who has a highly exalted view of the range and power of art to reach into eternity and mediate it, is a very challenging statement. When I read The Power and the Glory, it changed my life. Greene is saying, though, that sainthood, the true reality towards which his art gestures, will change my life in a far more thorough manner if I ever manage to grasp it.

Jessica Sequeira, in a really good piece titled, “Faith Noir: On Graham Greene and the Catholic Novel,” writes,

More than perhaps any other literary form, the novel depends on the prolonged contemplation—and often melancholy—of its author. But the Catholic novelist is more than unhappy: he writes as a way of knocking against the gates of heaven, to which he has been denied entrance. His writing is a transcription and translation of his despair. To make God a mere character is already a transgression, a source of guilt and shame; to write with sincerity about the evils in His world one must have struggled with His absence. “Being a member of the Catholic Church would present me with grave problems as a writer if I were not saved by my disloyalty,” Greene once wrote. “If my conscience were as acute as Francois Mauriac’s showed itself to be in his essay God and Mammon, I could not write a line.”

In other words, Greene not only doesn’t consider himself a Catholic novelist, but the simply thought that he might be one would paralyze his art. At most, he will write about the negative space, that which separates heaven from earth. He has a somewhat surprising ally in his quest to separate literature from edification and he quotes Cardinal Newman to make his case:

I say from the nature of the case, if Literature is to be made a study of human nature, you cannot have a Christian Literature. It is a contradiction in terms to attempt a sinless Literature of sinful man. You may gather together something very great and high, something higher than any Literature ever was; and when you have done so, you will find that it is not Literature at all.

Maybe the most Catholic sensibility of all is to explore the dark corners as yet unlit by sanctifying grace? In writing about sin, doubt, agnosticism, and depression, Greene confronts the separation of man from his maker, that space defined by self-doubt in which a broken man can become a priest, a serial adulterer throw himself on the mercy of the Church, or an agnostic find an awful, unspeakable truth when he kneels down before the ancient and precious ritual sacrifice that throws a ladder up to heaven.

I recently put up a piece over at Aleteia on some books that are going to become movies soon. I’m particularly intrigued by the effort to put Dante to the screen. It might be amazing or it might be a huge, glorious disaster. Either way, it’ll be fun to find out. I’m most excited, though, for that Catch-22 mini-series. Catch-22, in my opinion, is somehow an underrated novel. I know we’re all familiar with it and it does tend to be in the canon of high school lit, so in that sense, sure, it’s rated pretty highly, but as far as high school lit goes, it rises above many of the other options. For instance, it ages far better than Catcher in the Rye. Catch-22 manages to be both laugh-out-loud hilarious and intensely, seriously dark. If a film can capture both the hilarity and the pathos of Heller’s genius, it’ll be a show well worth watching.

There’s always some trepidation when a book is turned into a movie because there’s a good chance the movie will ruin it. That puts all us readers in an awkward position because we have to be the truth-speaking snobs and speak truth to power, like, “It wasn’t as good as the book.” and, “For the love of God can we stop with all the Little Women adaptations already because Winona Ryder already embodied the perfect Jo and at this point it’s overkill.” And then there is the inevitable Anne With An E situation in which the resulting interpretation of the novel is so messed up you seriously consider canceling your Netflix account as a protest and the only reason you don’t is because they just debuted Orson Welles’ final, insane movie that you want to see really bad.

Sometimes, book-to-film works very well:

Doctor Zhivago – glorious pacing and cinematography

The Leopard – everything about this film is perfection

The 39 Steps – Hitchcock can do no wrong

Apocalypse Now – A good example of breathing new life into a classic

Clueless – I’m not ashamed to admit that this adaptation of Emma is flawless

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Gene Wilder version, obviously

 

Sometimes it doesn’t:

The Remains of the Day – It tries so hard but really struggles with the subtlety and control of the novel. The ending in particular is not quite right.

Lord of the Rings – all the CG and attempts at expressing the huge imagination of Tolkien fall short. The length of the battle scenes is really tedious.

Dune – Multiple attempts are all bad but fascinating, especially David Lynch’s

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Johnny Depp version

 

What do you think? Should film-makers leave well enough alone, or is there a legitimate contribution that film can make in bringing the written word to life?

Not every occupation is capable of surviving modernization. The last lighthouse keeper of Capri is about to run out of time. “But as marine navigation tools and satellite automation have become more sophisticated, the need for lighthouses and their human operators has been virtually snuffed out. In fact, with the exception of seasonal volunteers and educational guides, there are hardly any lighthouse keepers left on the planet.”

Wondering how creepy music gets creepy? It might have something to do with the devil’s interval and the Dies Irae. “This demonic combo was taboo in medieval times, though there’s no historical evidence for the popular claim that it was banned outright. Indeed, the devil’s interval was still occasionally used—though, tellingly, only in the gravest of musical circumstances.”

In what is apparently not a piece of satire, the Vatican is releasing a Pokemon Go type app… but, you know, for Jesus. “Rather than chasing after Pikachu and Squirtle, the Vatican version involves collecting saints and other Biblical figures by answering philosophical questions about them. One hypothetical query on the app’s website is ‘Who said “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”’ (Hint: it was Jesus.)”

Male politicians these days sure have a lot to say about women. Backwards women everywhere are chastised to listen up and learn, for the men are here to help. We have knowledge and have come to your assistance. For instance, who can ever forget this amazing moment where Justin Trudeau mansplains to a woman the acceptable way to use gender inclusive language and then smarmily comments on how we can all learn from each other.

To that wonderful moment that set feminism back fifty years, French President Emmanuel Macron essentially told Trudeau to hold his beer so he could roll up his sleeves and get to work. This is his masterpiece of condescension from a recent talk at the Gates Foundation: “I always say: ‘Present me the woman who decided, being perfectly educated, to have seven, eight, or nine children.”

For his encore, maybe Macron can sit all the ladies down and explain to them where babies come from.

To be fair, education does have a correlation to smaller family size (or does it?), but the way Macron phrases his comment is so tone deaf that it deserves further comment. The implication is that only ignorance would cause a woman to choose to have children, and once we educate our poor, barefoot women and get them out of the kitchen, they’ll knock off all the breeding and start being more successful and rational like men out in the real world. Childless, or at least with a severely restricted family size – for that is the only rational choice – they shall be set free to put their education to good use.

I have questions, in which the above-mentioned comments may or may not be implicated:

Is it true that an educated woman would never choose to have a large family?

What value would an education, particularly a liberal arts education, have to a stay-at-home mother?

Is the education a waste if a woman doesn’t use it to earn money?

After falling into contemplative thought and pondering with all my might, it became painfully obvious to me that I am not, in fact, a female and thus have precious little perspective. Fortunately, we here at Dappled Things find ourselves surrounded by highly successful, educated women who happen to be mothers. I spend all my time ranting and raving on the internet while they’re essentially creating lasting works of creative genius. Maybe they’re a bit smarter than me? I’m going to get out of the way and let them speak:

Giving birth and nurturing children affirms that people’s value in the world isn’t reducible to their economic contribution. Pursuing higher education affirms this, too. Both choices have the potential to place women around the world in solidarity with each other. Equating large families with poverty and disempowerment does a disservice to women of all classes and economic levels everywhere.

– Katy Carl, Editor in Chief

Global Goal – Fewer children everywhere

I will use a French word so it cannot be mistranslated: largesse. Education encourages a largesse of the mind, expanding our horizons, helping us to develop an insatiable appetite for knowledge. But motherhood encourages a largesse of the heart and soul. It helps us develop an insatiable appetite for our own betterment so that we can live as good examples for our children, and an insatiable appetite to help our children become their very best selves. The largesse of motherhood is the largesse of love. Any education that taught us to put limits on our ability to grow in love was a very poor education, indeed.

– Karen Ullo, Managing Editor

The modern world values higher education to the extent that it leads to higher earnings, but thinking of wealth only in terms of dollars (or Euros) is of limited usefulness. How many mothers, when asked what their greatest treasure is, would respond “my retirement account?”

– Katherine Aparicio, Associate Editor

Speaking as a father who very much loves my six children, I can say that giving the fruit of my education to my children is the most valuable use to which I have put it. If anything, most of my reading is wasted in a world of practical application where it’s buried under pressing economic concerns and lack of space for personal contemplative progress. Education, particularly a liberal arts education, prepares us for a life well-lived. It’s an act of love, an act of faith in a world that is worth knowing more intimately. Our interaction within it, our exploration of it, our wonder before the mystery of it, opens up a whole new, undefinable, transcendent space. It naturally follows that I would not only want to gain an education to be a good father, but that my education has propelled me to actually become a father, because education itself is an expression of love. It’s as if the world is a precious jewel and I get to hold it up to the light and point out to my children all the ways the refraction leads us back to the single, inexpressible source of beauty.

Maybe education, at least the right sort of education, will actually increase the desire for children?

Go back the original article I linked to and look at all the pictures of happy, successful women with their precious families. Maybe, just maybe, these women are smart and thoughtful? Maybe they’ve made their life choices from the font of wisdom they’ve acquired through their education? As one of the women comments, “consider yourself schooled.”