The Weekly, April 22, 2024
Hi all,
Apologies for going radio silent for awhile. We’ve had a stressful couple of weeks.
Briefly, we found out a few weeks ago that two large gifts given to Mere O over the past nine months were not intended for us and needed to be returned. At the time, the funds we had to return represented 87% of our cash reserves.
Here’s the good news: We’ve already recouped nearly 47% of what we lost. So we’re feeling cautiously hopeful right now. Minimally, I can say that it feels really encouraging to see our readers mobilize in the way they have. If you’re invested in the work we do at Mere O, you can give a gift today to support our ongoing work of promoting Christian renewal through reflective, patient, faithful Christian media.
Books
I finished Nancy French’s Ghosted very quickly—it’s a fast read, though quite grim at points. It might sound counter-intuitive, but after reading it I found myself wanting to put this book in conversation both with Mary Karr’s memoirs and Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. The thread that runs through all three is growing up in a fairly chaotic poor white southern environment, although there are major differences—Karr is from the Texas hill country, Vance grew up in Appalachia, and French grew up in a family that was the first generation to try and start a life away from the mountains and chaos.
One thought that came to me as I read is that I think we need a way of holding together both these ideas: On the one hand, there are many ways in which America is a deeply remarkable nation. We have persisted in a system of democratic self-government for nearly two and a half centuries. We have managed to pass on our democratic values from one generation to the next and to incorporate a remarkable range of immigrant communities into our democratic way of life. And the outcomes of this success have often been very profound and good.
At the same time, reading these memoirs of poor southern white folks (whose family life is often far more chaotic than the poor black families I’ve read about from the same era) brought to mind a line that I first read a number of years ago and that I’ve never quite been able to shake. It’s from Endo’s Silence. It’s a scene where Fr. Rodrigues is meeting with a local Japanese government official and arguing about the status of Christianity in Japan. The government official tells Rodrigues that Japan is a swamp—and because it is a swamp Christian faith can’t take root there. The history of Japanese Christianity suggests that isn’t true, of course: there was a thriving and growing community of Christian believers there until local lords unleashed some incredibly brutal persecution on them. But the image of a nation as a swamp has lingered with me. And reading these memoirs makes me wonder if there is some sense in which America is a swamp.
Perhaps it is the tradeoff inherent in the democratic project. If you believe that all the members of a polity have the right to make claims in the public square about their life and desires and that those claims must be heard and taken seriously and often granted (but granted by the people, not a single government official or centralized governing authority) then there is some sense in which you are committing yourself to the idea that our democracy must be constantly renewed. Each generation must decide to take the work of self-government seriously—and if we are unable to do that, there isn’t really a Plan B to mitigate or control the energy that such a form of life is able to unleash. Or that’s what I’m wondering about, anyway. It may be that I’m mixing my reading of Eliot with my reading of these memoirs in a way that doesn’t really work. But it’s something that’s bothering me and often occupying my mind right now.
Articles
Ben Thompson on media, AI, and WALL-E
Monica Hesse on tradwives
Alastair Roberts on why he stopped reading political theology
Platformer on the creeping monetization of dating apps
David Koyzis on integralism
Elsewhere
I’ve made these carnitas a couple of times lately and they’ve turned out really well.
Two tips: First, if you’re making a larger batch, I’d still do them in a frying pan of some kind. The key to making this work is to have everything packed in a very snug single layer. That insures that all of your meat gets cooked evenly and exposed to the flavorful oil you’re confiting it in. (“Confit” means cooking a piece of meat in its own fat. So it’s similar to braising, in that the food is cooking slowly in a liquid for a long time. But with braising you’re using a water-based cooking liquid whereas when you confit you’re using the fat from the meat itself. For pork shoulder, this is a better method because the oil is actually a gentler cooking liquid than a boiling water-based liquid.)
Second, the meat is done when you can take a small piece, put it on a cutting board, and it begins to fall apart (while still retaining something of its shape) when pressed with a fork. So once you get it to this point, take it out of the oven, remove all your other solids in there—the oranges, onions, garlic, cinnamon sticks, and bay leaves—and use a slotted spoon to put the meat into another pan (or you could just put the meat in a bowl, clean out the pan, and put the meat back in the same pan) and crisp it up to whatever level you prefer on your stove. That will give you a really nice mixture of crispy texture with the more typical succulent texture you get with pulled pork.
What’s great about this recipe is that you can take 20-30 minutes to prep everything, throw it in your pan, and then you just leave it to cook in the oven for 3-4 hours. So you can put it together right after lunch, throw it in the oven, and have dinner ready around 5 or 5:30 without needing to do anything else with it over the afternoon.
Thanks for reading!
Under the Mercy,
~Jake