A digest of three things to help you engage with God, neighbor, and culture.
Going Home with Wendell Berry
An interview from The New Yorker
After years of feeling “existentially adrift about the future of the planet”, New Yorker staff writer Amanda Petrusich penned a letter to Wendell Berry and began a dialogue that resulted in this deeply wise and arresting interview, a small feast of wisdom about limitation, the meaning of neighborliness, “the evident parallel between the treatment of women and the treatment of the land”, and marriage. A preview:
When love comes round, it doesn’t always come and stay with the purpose of making you happy. As I see it, when we marry we give up romance by submitting love to the limits of mortality. The traditional vows seize love by the scruff of the neck and set it down in real life, in the real world.
Acclaimed for his essays, poetry, and fiction, Berry is one of America’s finest writers and is often considered a prophet of the modern environmental movement. True to form, however, Berry would dislike the words “environmental” and “movement” for their reductiveness. Check out the interview to see why and to get acquainted with the refreshing coherence of his vision.
Read “Going Home with Wendell Berry” at The New Yorker. For more from Wendell Berry, start with his 1972 classic The Unsettling of America for essays, Hannah Coulter for fiction, or A Timbered Choirfor poetry.
Gender Dysphoria
A conversation with the Pique Resilience Project
Danger Ramen is a podcast hosted by four young women who experienced Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD) in their teenage years and identified as transgender men. Now in their twenties, all four women have since detransitioned/desisted from transgender identity and are able to look back on their teen years with the clarity of hindsight. They’ve formed the Pique Resilience Project to provide support for young people experiencing ROGD and to help minimize the number of teenagers harmed by significant medical choices they might later come to regret.
In this episode, Dagny, Chiara, Jesse, and Helena explore their unique experiences of ROGD, and how non-medical intervention like binding of their breasts and medical interventions like hormone replacement therapy were urged by nearly everyone around them, including their medical doctors. This resulted in increased hatred of their biological sex and a dangerous chemical colonization of their own bodies.
“The more steps I took to transition,” Helena says, “the more I felt my body was wrong.”
This is the most illuminating hour of content I’ve found for understanding contemporary concerns about transgender identity and gender dysphoria, not just from a theoretical standpoint but in the lives of real people. The podcast contains some strong language and what may be an entirely new vocabulary for many listeners, but it is worthwhile listening if you crave some clarity on these matters or if you have some teenagers at home who are asking questions.
Listen to “Gender Dysphoria” on the Danger Ramen podcast through YouTube or SoundCloud. To approach these matters from a Christian point of view, check out Mark Yarhouse's Q talk or his book Understanding Gender Dysphoria: Navigating Transgender Issues in a Changing Culture.
The United States of Plastic
The Guardian
Recycling can feel like hard work, especially if your local municipality doesn’t come to collect recyclables from your driveway once a month. But it’s a good thing, right?
Well, yes. Which is why this recent globalexposé is particularly discouraging:
A Guardian investigation has found that hundreds of thousands of tons of US plastic are being shipped every year to poorly regulated developing countries around the globe for the dirty, labor-intensive process of recycling. The consequences for public health and the environment are grim.
The report details how in 2018, “the equivalent of 68,000 shipping containers of American plastic recycling were exported from the US to developing countries that mismanage more than 70% of their own plastic waste.” The odds are good that even your “recycled” plastics don’t get recycled.
One takeaway from this important story: let’s keep recycling, but let’s also be aware of just how much of this wonder-product we use. I've felt very convicted about this recently and promise you that once you start looking at your purchases and practices through the lens of plastic use, you’ll be shocked at just how much you could do without.
Plastic is an American addiction, yes, but the first step in treatment is realizing you have a problem.
Read "The United States of Plastic" at The Guardian. Be sure to check out their other extensive reporting on our global plastic crisis as well.
Weekly Miscellany
A few extras we couldn't fit in elsewhere
Andy is taking mental trips into the first century with N. T. Wright's Paul: A Biography and Edwin Judge's Social Distinctives of the Christians in the First Century. He is convinced that we/he have/has largely misunderstood Paul. He has launched a personal quest to remedy that sorry fact. Andy has also been doing some writing on The Bible Project's blog with a post on "the chaos monster" in the Bible and what it means that Christians are supposed to be "a new humanity." Andy's also has a new lecture up on the L'Abri podcast: Creatures of our Own Devising - A Critique of the Modern Self.
Phillip is looking forward to sharing new ideas and seeing old friends at this weekend's Nashville L'Abri Conference. Reading has been sparse recently, but he burned through Jake Meador's slim and wise In Search of the Common Good: Christian Fidelity in a Fractured World the week it came out and will be recommending it in all his conference talks. He's also excited that his little daughter will be baptized this weekend, marking her entrance into God's gracious covenant.
Current Thought Projects
Ideas we're mulling over long-term
Andy is at a crossroads as to what he should lecture on during the Autumn term at L'Abri. The two frontrunners are: (1) an homage to the work of the master of horror, Stephen King, or (2) a critique of the theology of Richard Rohr. If you have a preference, email.
Phillip has been thinking about the nature of good work, especially after reading the introduction to On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane. Because we live in a culture where "work" is usually categorized as "the stuff someone else pays me to do", some of the most important things – caring for our families, friends, and places – fall into a lesser category. He wants to rid himself of this thinking and help others do the same.