The Weekly, June 17, 2024
Hi all,
When you edit professionally, you’ll always have the pieces that you just love and wish everyone would read. If I had to give a person one piece to sum up Mere O, I know what the piece would be: It’d be Justin Hawkins’s reflection on disability, ethics, and “accomplishment.” It’s Christian wisdom relentlessly and consistently applied to one of the most pressing issues of our day—and done in a way that helps us to see our neighbors more fully and affectionately.
Then there are also the pieces that linger with you, even haunt you in some sense. Onsi Kamel’s essay that we ran several years ago on immigration is that sort of piece for me. The conceit of the essay is basically: “what happens when America stops encouraging immigrants to become American?”
Onsi’s final paragraph still lingers in my mind:
My father has never made much of the fact that he is Egyptian. He is American through and through, with American tastes, an American childhood, and American political sensibilities. He wrote for his high school newspaper, rode dirt bikes and shot BB guns, and was a hobbyist photographer for a time; he didn’t even think it important that his children learn Arabic. My sister and I had a remarkably different experience. After 9/11, we were regularly subjected to jokes and bullying on account of our heritage, reinforcing our ethnic difference; after 9/11, members of my extended family, who had previously seen no conflict between their Egyptian heritage and patriotic American citizenship, ceased speaking Arabic in public.
What is the net effect of such small but deeply felt changes in the social standing of Middle Easterners? What is the net effect of an American right which engages in regular fearmongering about people from the region my family comes from? Of course, I can speak only for myself: by reinforcing my difference, the American right is becoming an agent of my alienation. As a patriotic American, my father has always viewed his assimilation as both successful and a great good. I am no longer so sure. Is that what conservatives want?
Part of what causes Onsi’s piece to linger with me is that I can see myself in it—I am the great grandson of Greek migrants who crossed over in the final days of Ellis Island, eventually settling in Boston. They were welcome, at least to a large degree. Then in 1926 my grandmother was born. After she married my Swedish Nebraskan farmboy grandfather in 1946, the two of them settled in Lincoln and eventually my great-grandfather followed his daughter here.
At every point, these children of Mediterranean Orthodox Christianity found that they could become American. It wasn’t always easy, of course, and the welcome was not universal or without ambiguity. But it was real. My great grandfather served in World War I and is now buried in American soil alongside other American soldiers and each Memorial Day his grave is marked with an American flag, just like those of the men buried next to him.
And so even as he held to elements of his Greek life, he also became American—and now several generations later I still very much value and care about my Greek roots, and yet I can imagine myself apart from them because that is what happens over several generations of becoming American—and I suspect he knew that would happen and had made his peace with it, probably even desired it.
This is a painting of him based on a photo we have from when he served in the US military:
It is one thing to look back at the moves of one’s ancestors, how they gave up Greece or Sweden so that you would become American and to know that you really could do the thing they sacrificed for you to do. That has been my story. But what if you look back at your family giving up their home only to now find that the thing they desired for you is not so accessible? Or perhaps you find that you don’t even necessarily desire it anymore? Then what?
None of that is to say we should have entirely open borders or that our current immigrant policies are fine and should remain unchanged. My point here is more limited, which concerns the attitude America takes toward the immigrants already here and what effect that attitude has on the immigrants themselves as well as their children.
What happens when America decides it doesn’t want migrants to become American, doesn’t want migrants to feel welcome or to feel as if there is a life for them here? The answer to that question is “we are now in the process of finding out.” And when I consider what the answers might be, I am fearful.
Books
I’m working my way through Miles Smith’s new book Religion and Republic and also started Philip Yancey’s memoir Where the Light Fell. Reading Yancey is like stepping into a time warp—everything about the world of his childhood just feels impossibly remote to me as I’m reading it from 2024.
Articles
Zephyr Teachout on tech and anti-child exploitation laws
Matthew Franck on choosing not to choose this November
Kirsten Sanders on claims that complementarianism is inherently abusive
Brad Littlejohn on immigration
Ross Douthat in conversation with J. D. Vance
Also read Douthat on the post-religious right
Matthew Miller on uncertainty
Larissa Phillips on farm camp
Freya India on the insufficiency of the therapeutic
Daniel Williams interviews Miles Smith about his new book Religion and Republic
Elsewhere
If you want a simple and highly enjoyable drink for hot summer days, I highly recommend the whiskey smash. The best thing about it is that the only bottle you’ll need is some kind of whiskey—preferably bourbon. You can drop $20 on a bottle of Old Grand Dad and make a great whiskey smash.
To make the drink all you need is:
2 oz bourbon
½ oz simple syrup
four lemon wedges
4-8 mint leaves
Throw all those into your cocktail shaker with some ice and shake vigorously—you’re wanting to use the shaking process to pound the mint leaves and lemon wedges so that you not only get lemon juice in the drink, but also the lemon oils in the peels and the oils in the mint. Then pour and strain into a glass.
Obviously this is also a very easy drink to customize—if this is too sweet, you could easily reduce the simple a little. If you want more intense lemon or mint, just add more wedges or leaves. Enjoy!
Thanks for reading!
Under the Mercy,
~Jake