The Weekly, October 30, 2023
Hi all,
I'm trying something different this week, which is that I didn't post on Twitter except for Mere O content and otherwise have saved all the stuff I would have done on social media in the past and put it into this newsletter.
If it gets to be too long, let me know and I can adjust.
This is still a bit of an experiment.
Reading
Books
Too many going at once, as usual. But here's a summary: I'm reading Shenvi and Sawyer's Critical Dilemma, finished Nelson's Theology of Liberalism (absolutely phenomenal, that dude is wicked smart), and just got Holland's Dominion and Scrivener's The Air We Breathe last week.
I'm also reading Kingsnorth's The Wake and Traub's biography of John Quincy Adams for pleasure. I have a pet theory that JQA is the solution to our liberalism woes. But I need more time to read and think on it before I'm ready to say more.
Articles
I spent a lot of time this week catching up on periodical reading, so that's reflected in the number of links below.
Here's some really cool news from my friends over at the Davenant Institute.
More schools are going phone-free in the US. Earlier this year I wrote about why churches should consider doing the same.
Israel Must Defeat Hamas and Then Get Serious About Peace by Jo-Ann Mort and Michael Walzer in The New Republic
Beyond a Clean, Well-Lighted Place: Absence as Evidence by Bryce Crandall in Solid Food Press
‘No’ to Trans, ‘Yes’ to Gay Marriage: Will This Be the New Normal? by Glen Scrivener in The Keller Center
Baudrillard in Gaza by Geoff Shullenberger in Compact
Ban Pedestrians by Addison del Mastro in Deleted Scenes
It Can Happen Here by Jeffrey Blehar in National Review
The crew at the Morning Dispatch summarized some survey data from Ryan Burge:
One of the narratives that one hears often in the abortion debate is that pro-life folks only care about babies until the moment they are born. The implication here is that these folks are conservative Republicans who don’t support policies that make life a bit easier for folks at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum. Well, is that really true?
I divided the sample into those who favored a proposal to never permit abortion and those who favored a proposal to always permit abortion. I calculated how they feel about a whole host of issues that run the gamut from fiscal to foreign policy. The narrative really falls apart in this analysis.”
Among those who would totally ban abortion, “67 percent favor debt free college. 77 percent favor paid maternity leave. 67 percent favor raising the minimum wage to $15/hour.
The share of Americans who are pro-life and want a smaller social safety net just isn’t that big. The idea that there’s just tens of millions of Americans who want a woman to have a baby then don’t support the government making it easier to raise that child finds no support in this data. Lots of pro-life Republicans do want to raise the minimum wage and offer some type of paid maternity leave. That narrative hasn’t really caught on in the larger discourse.”
Elsewhere
For most of the past nine years, I've worked remotely for some portion of my week. Since January of 2020, I've been full-time remote.
When you combine remote work with a family of six and a three bedroom house... it gets complicated. Some days it works fine and I love being at home. Other times I need to go somewhere. Sometimes that somewhere is a coffeeshop, which is fine, but other times I either don't want to spend any money or I don't want to get caught up talking to someone I happen to know who I see at the coffeeshop, which can cut into my time to work. Somehow it wasn't until the last few weeks that I hit on the obvious solution: public libraries.
For the last few weeks, when I've worked remotely I've found a public library around town and set up in a reading room there. It's been perfect. One local library is also right next to a nice trail network, so on some days I've taken a break during the day, thrown my bag in my car, and then gone for a walk on the trails. It's been a great change of pace for me and has allowed me to get some better work routines. It's also brought me back to my earlier days working in the research library at the University of Nebraska. I wrote an honors thesis and my first book in that library. So it's been a nice return for me as well.
Speaking of better work routines: We're gearing up for our end-of-year campaign with Mere O. If that goes well, it will set us up to make 2024 our best year so far with some more podcast offerings, more print issues, and a YouTube channel.
Toward that end, I'll be meeting tomorrow with a consultant with 30+ years experience building Christian non-profits to do some medium- to long-term organizational planning for Mere O. So would you pray that time goes well?
My dream for Mere O is that we would be a faithful, intellectually serious voice for public-facing Christianity and that we would resource Christian leaders with the ideas, books, and habits of thought they need to be faithful and effective. I'm hoping the time tomorrow can help set us up for a successful campaign and an even stronger 2024. So please be praying for that.
Thanks everyone. I hope y'all have a great week.
Under the Mercy,
~Jake