"Pretty Girls Can't Do Public Policy" (Week 10-April)

incarnation & femininity; public Christian schools; fairy stories, eucatastrophe & Easter; the parent's party; the great commission & gender; teen boys as caregivers

Apr 20, 2023

Abby McCloskey isn’t the only young woman who’s been told public policy is a no-no. I’ve heard similar, and another friend in D.C. recounted a story to me just last week about how she chopped her hair off so that her policymaker bosses would take her seriously. Like McCloskey, though, I have hope that the GOP can still be the party of the parents, and specifically the mom. A couple weeks ago I wrote about the new abortion policy at the DOD and VA and whether Republicans and Democrats should join forces to make birth free in America. There’s little chance I’ll stop writing about policy anytime soon.

In the meantime, here are the ideas that have been filling my head and my conversations for the past few weeks. Since I’m prioritizing my other writing, it’s looking like this blog will come in monthly installments rather than bi-weekly. But maybe I’ll have a special edition here or there to highlight articles or ideas of particular interest. Feel free to join in the conversation in the comments below. And don’t forget to subscribe!

Reading

Books

Surprised By Oxford, Carolyn Weber — “Ahhh, teaching literature. A noble calling! For we are all stories.” I loved how this book took me back to the dreaming spires of Oxford, which captured my imagination (and my heart) as an undergraduate studying abroad at Magdalen College (C.S. Lewis’s own!).

Bible

Joshua, Judges, 1 & 2 Samuel

“The God of Gods is God, The God of Gods is God!” Joshua 22:21-22
“Jeshurun put on weight and bucked; you got fat, became obese, a tub of lard.” Deuteronomy 32:15-18
“In the time of Shamgar son of Anath, and in the time of Jael, Public roads were abandoned, travelers went by backroads. Warriors became fat and sloppy, no fight left in them. Then you, Deborah, rose up; you got up, a mother in Israel.” Judges 5:6-8
“The angel of God said, “What’s this? You ask for my name? You wouldn’t understand—it’s sheer wonder.”” Judges 13:18
“Hannah prayed: I’m bursting with God -news! I’m walking on air. I’m laughing at my rivals. I’m dancing my salvation.” 1 Samuel 2:1
“But then a black mood from God settled over Saul and took control of him.” 1 Samuel 19:9 — My new excuse when I’m in a bad mood for seemingly no reason.

Articles / Essays

Planting Pivot: From Church to Christian School, Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra, The Gospel Coalition — “Denney loves that growing spiritual sensitivity among students. He loves conversations with dads who want to break long cycles of generational brokenness. He loves anticipating how this education will change the trajectory of generations in the future.”
CS Lewis's literary legacy: 'dodgy and unpleasant' or 'exceptionally good'?, Sam Leith, The Guardian — “Philip Pullman, whose His Dark Materials trilogy presents as a sort of anti-Narnia, regards Lewis's religious writings as "bullying, hectoring and dishonest in all kinds of ways", and the Narnia books as actually "wicked". He says: "I find them very dodgy and unpleasant – dodgy in the dishonest rhetoric way – and unpleasant because they seem to embody a world view that takes for granted things like racism, misogyny and a profound cultural conservatism that is utterly unexamined.””
- Related: The Republic of Heaven, Philip Pullman, The Horn Book Inc. — “And it has the terrible defect of libeling — one might almost say blaspheming against, if the notion had any republican meaning — the physical universe; of saying that this world is just a clumsy copy of a perfect original we can’t see because it’s somewhere else. In the eyes of some Christian writers, of course, this sort of Platonism is a great merit. C. S. Lewis, at the end of the last book in the Narnia series, has his character the wise old Professor explaining: “Our own world, England and all, is only a shadow or copy of something in Aslan’s real world.””
Perspective: How teen boys can bridge a gap in elder care, Leah Libresco Sargeant, Deseret — “There’s another natural, but under-appreciated affinity between ages. More elder care should be taken on by teenaged boys. Aging seniors often need physical support, which may go beyond what their adult children and caretakers can provide. Teen boys need to be needed, and they need examples of how they can grow into someone that others can depend on.”
He’s Not Jesus, but He Plays Him on TV, Tish Harrison Warren and Jonathan Roumie, The New York Times — “I said, “It would be amazing if God healed your son. I, unfortunately, don’t have that gift as far as I know, but I would love to pray for you and your son if that’s OK.” And I prayed, thanked them, and hugged her son, and they seemed like they were so happy. I turned around and I broke down into tears. Because I couldn’t fulfill that expectation. There must have been, deep down, some kind of disappointment. That was one of the hardest encounters for me.”
On Fairy Stories, J.R.R. Tolkien — “It is the mark of a good-fairy story…that however wild its events, however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to child or man that hears it, when the “turn” comes, a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears, as keen as that given by any form of literary art, and having a peculiar quality.”
- Related: What Easter Has to Do With Fairy-Stories, Jokien with Tolkien on Substack — “According to Tolkien—who coined the term in his essay “On Fairy Stories”—a ‘eucatastrophe’ is “the consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn’ (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale)” (“On Fairy Stories,” The Tolkien Reader, 86). This ‘good catastrophe’ gives “a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief” (Ibid.).”
- Also related: The Narnian, by Alan Jacobs — “Tolkien himself is not interested in fairies, and not much in the kind of stories that are usually called fairy tales, but he is passionately fascinated by Faerie itself, a place, a world that sometimes overlaps with Britain but is fundamentally other than it… Faerie proper depends for much of its character on the gentleness of British landscapes… That homeliness is painted nowhere better than in Tolkien’s writings about the Shire… I have seen [Faerie portrayed] nowhere better than in Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.”
The Cure Found in Beholding, Strahan Coleman, Ekstasis Magazine — “If the whole world teaches us that we’re just a product to be harvested for marketing by big corporations, if social media tells us we have to be beautiful and clever to be liked, then how on earth could we imagine that God just takes pleasure in us as we are?”
The GOP Failed Millennial Moms Like Me. But It Needs Us Now More Than Ever, Abby McCloskey, Politico — “He had gray hair and wire glasses and asked what I wanted to work on. I said women’s economic opportunity. He chuckled and shook his head and said something along the lines of That’s cliched; why do women always want to study women’s issues? And then he lowered the boom: ‘Because of how you look, no one’s going to take you seriously in policy. You should get a job in communications instead.’”
What Republican Parents Really Want, Patrick Brown, The New York Times — “The research should make one thing clear to conservative politicians: It’s not George W. Bush’s Republican Party any more, and their policy preferences should shift accordingly.”
- Related: The Pro-Family Agenda Republicans Should Embrace After Roe
Woman in God’s Image, Zachary Jones, Law & Liberty — “For Abigail Favale, professor in the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame, the doctrine of Christ’s incarnation is inextricably linked with her understanding of sex, womanhood, and femininity.”
Rick Warren: The Great Commission’s ‘Go and Teach’ Applies to Women, Russell Moore Interviews Rick Warren, Christianity Today — “Now Baptists—Southern Baptists—like to call ourselves “Great Commission Baptist,” and we claim that we believe the Great Commission is for everyone, [that] both men and women are to fulfill the Great Commission. Well, not really—you don’t believe that, because it says there are four verbs in the Great Commission: “Go, make disciples, baptize, and teach.” Women are to go, women are to make disciples, women are to baptize, and women are to teach, not just men.”

Poetry

Read it aloud, I dare you.

Pied Beauty, Gerard Manley Hopkins

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Glory be to God for dappled things –
   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                                Praise him.

Writing

Should We Make Birth Free?, WORLD Magazine, by yours truly
The Fate of Unborn Millions, WORLD Magazine, also by me
The Girl’s Guide, Evie Solheim interviewing — you guessed it — me
Author’s page, WORLD Magazine — more articles coming soon, including one on Phillip Pullman and C.S. Lewis (as evidenced by my extensive reading on the two and Tolkien over the past month)