Miscellany: Songs of a Secular Age & Ephesian Artemis
Plus, the requisite grab bag of books, TV, and movies.
Welcome to Three Things.
We’re a monthly digest of three things to help you engage with God, neighbor, and culture. But this is our monthly Miscellany where we (Andy and Phillip) tell you what we’ve been reading, thinking about and working on.
With the imminent arrival of Baby 3, two major preparatory changes are in order for the Johnston household: a third car seat and a dishwasher. Between Christa and Phillip, the latter will free up approximately two hours a day. Their four-year quipped at dinner last week, “When we get a dishwasher, it will be a new life for us.” To which the two-year old exclaimed, “Then the baby will jump for joy and sing!” Not just the baby.
Reading: The most mystifying passage of the Bible for Phillip has long been the latter half of 1 Timothy 2 (“She will be saved through childbearing”, etc.). No explanation has ever made sense other than that Paul is addressing a local problem in Ephesus related to the temple of Artemis, a renowned goddess of midwifery, from whom new Christians would struggle to turn away. It’s always seemed a stretch, but now the argument has been laid out in near watertight fashion by Sandra Glahn in Nobody's Mother: Artemis of the Ephesians in Antiquity and the New Testament. What a book — and with a powerful concluding interpretation of the text. He’s also discovered a picture book called Elsie Piddock Skips in Her Sleep that has been a joy to read the girls. Skipping rope, fairies, the nearby Sussex countryside and the fight against enclosure in the early twentieth century; what’s not to love?
Watching: In the rarest of occurrences, Phillip has been to the cinema not once but twice in recent days to see some 2023 Cannes Film Festival winners: Anatomy of a Fall and Fallen Leaves. The first is a French courtroom drama with a zinger of a plot: a woman is suspected of her husband's murder, and their blind son faces a moral dilemma as the main witness. The setup in the opening sequence is a thing of beauty and, as one critic puts it, “one of the key pleasures of the picture is its uncertainty – the niggling doubts that remain, and the sense that a crucial piece of the puzzle is tantalisingly out of reach.” The other film is a Finnish romantic comedy, which Phillip didn’t even know was a thing. After watching it, he’s still not quite sure.
St. Louis seems to be the land of book clubs, in my limited experience. When the Patton family moved here in the summer, we were quickly invited into various book clubs. Some places bake brownies for new neighbors; St. Louis bakes book clubs. Andy is currently reading the Lord of the Rings series with “The Sensitive Boys Book Club.” The name is as apt as it is hilarious. Things get personal. Tears are shed. Toasts are raised to great books late into the night. It’s the best.
Reading: A grab bag of genres: Bandersnatch by Diana Glyer, Primal Hunter Book 8 by Zogarth, The Coddling of the American Mind by Haidt and Lukianoff, The Hell Divers series, and Atomic Habits by James Clear.
Listening: Andy has been developing a Songs of a Secular Age playlist inspired by the work of Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylor. Taylor wrote a whopper of a book called A Secular Age that chronicles the movements toward secularism in the last 500 years. Jamie Smith wrote a (much shorter but very worthy) companion to the ideas of the book called How (Not) To Be Secular.
Also—through the aforementioned book club—Andy came across The Tolkien Professor. If you ever wished for over 500 episodes of deep dives into Tolkienien lore, be glad. Your wish is granted. Start with “On Wingless Balrogs and Tom Bombadil” or the introduction to the Silmarillion series.
New from The Darkling Psalter (Andy’s poetry and Psalm project): The full series of seven poems on faith, hope, love, grace, loss, time, and memory and a new rendition of Psalm 3.
New from Pattern Bible: (Andy’s Bible + theology Substack): An Impossible Conversation: Jesus and the Woman at the Well (Part One).