Friday Links
March 22, 2024
Entry of Christ into Jerusalem by Pietro Lorenzetti
The Value of Homemakers: Ivana Greco reviews Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be
Patrick Tomassi: Brideshead Revisited During Lent
After Lord Byron: Poetic advice for the modern poet (in couplets)
R. J. Snell: Courage to Engage the World: Thomism at 750
‘Dune: Part Two’ invites critique of our religious mythologies by Steven Greydanus
The Value of Homemakers: Ivana Greco reviews Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be
In Family Unfriendly, Tim Carney considers the many aspects of twenty-first century American life that make raising children difficult. The challenges facing American parents today are diverse and include zoning rules, travel sports, and social media. Any parent who wonders why kids today aren’t allowed to play outside with friends until the streetlights come on, or how kid team sports became such a black hole of time and money will be intrigued by Carney’s investigation of these issues. As a lawyer-turned-homemaker, I was most interested in the two chapters he dedicates to feminism and stay-at-home parents. These chapters are titled (respectively) “We Need a Family-Friendly Feminism” and “You Should Quit Your Job.” They do not disappoint.
Patrick Tomassi: Brideshead Revisited During Lent
Sorting out our many possessive, grasping loves, and redirecting them towards God is the objective of Lent asceticism. Charles Ryder, in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, is transformed by becoming friends with Sebastian Flyte. His love for Sebastian opens him up to a joy in life he has never known. Although their love is tinged with a possessiveness that eventually kills it, Charles is permanently changed. Their relationship raises a theological question: what is the nature of eros? Is it ultimately selfish and unworthy of a Christian, or is it the very soil without which grace cannot take root? In Charles’s spiritual journey, an answer is proposed through suffering and renunciation. It is through, and not in spite of his eros for Sebastian, and later for Sebastian’s sister Julia, that Charles is led to agape, self-gift, and so ultimately from agnosticism to the Catholic Church.
After Lord Byron: Poetic advice for the modern poet (in couplets)
Jason Guriel with an oldie but goodie (and couplets are always welcome).
R. J. Snell: Courage to Engage the World: Thomism at 750
Thomism is a tradition of thought, perhaps one of the three main options of the moment, at least in moral inquiry. But as is often noted, tradition is the living faith of the dead rather than the dead faith of the living. Tradition is not traditionalism, not a decadent version of stasis, nostalgia, fundamentalism, or dogmatism. Tradition, when alive and reasonable, has its own sources and reasons, can account for them in its own terms, but can understand other accounts and engage in some translation from those accounts, including incorporating truth from opposing views without losing inner coherence and integrity—all while answering objections and maintaining its explanatory force in the face of new data, new questions, new contexts. Tradition is handed on not as a dead and closed thing but in trust for others to steward, repair, develop, or augment, and sometimes that takes daring. Tradition is confident without obnoxiousness, bold without belligerence, and knowing without arrogance.
‘Dune: Part Two’ invites critique of our religious mythologies by Steven Greydanus
At the same time, perhaps reflecting the director’s mixed feelings about his Catholic upbringing, faith in Villeneuve’s Dune films is double-edged. While religion can function as a tool of manipulation and oppression, it can enable people to do the otherwise impossible, such as survive in the harshest regions of the desert planet of Arrakis. It’s no coincidence that it’s the “uninhabitable” south that we find the most devout Fremen, the ones waiting for a messiah figure. Faith can also be a force of resistance, as Florence Pugh’s Princess Irulen points out to her father, Christopher Walken’s Emperor, warning him against using military force against devout opponents: “You underestimate the power of faith.”
