“The Weekend Wanderer” is a weekly curated selection of news, stories, resources, and media on the intersection of faith and culture for you to explore through your weekend. Wander through these links however you like and in any order you like. Disclaimer: I do not necessarily agree with all the views expressed within these articles but have found them thought-provoking.
“If Men Were Angels: A conservative case for gun control” – Dominic Erdozain in Comment: “Richard Nixon did not like guns, and he resented the power of the National Rifle Association. “I don’t know why any individual should have a right to have a revolver in his house,” he said to aides in May 1972. ‘Can’t we go after handguns, period?’ The NRA would be against it, as would the gun makers. But ‘people should not have handguns,’ he insisted. ‘Guns,’ he always said, ‘are an abomination.’ He was not alone. In 1973 his attorney general, Elliot L. Richardson, introduced the final report of the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals as ‘the most important report on crime control ever compiled in this country.’ The centrepiece of this document was the demand for the criminalization of handguns in America. A total ban on these instruments of terror, urged Russell Peterson, chairman of the commission and a former Republican governor of Delaware, was long overdue. These men were not zealots waging war on the American heritage. They were Republicans anxious to save lives, conscious of a difference between regulated and unregulated firepower. For those who have grown up hearing that firearms are an American birthright, it is hard to appreciate how unprecedented and politically contrived our current norms of gun ownership are.”
“Holy Week in Jerusalem: a pilgrim’s description from around 380 AD” – Egeria at the Renovaré blog: “Somewhere around the year 380 AD, a Spanish-Roman woman named Egeria (or Etheria) took a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Egeria traced Jesus’ journey to the cross along with fellow worshipers, pausing at key places (“stations”) for Bible readings, prayers, and hymns. Her letter to friends back home detailing the experience is the oldest known description of a pilgrimage and gives us a little window into early Christianity and the birth of Holy Week liturgical practice.”
“REVIEW: In Thought, Word, and Seed” – Melanie Springer Mock reviews In Thought, Word, and Seed: Reckonings from a Midwest Farm by Tiffany Eberle Krinerin Current: “Thoreau came to mind repeatedly while I was reading Tiffany Eberle Kriner’s new book, In Thought, Word, and Seed: Reckonings from a Midwest Farm, as Kriner’s retreat to the woods echoes Thoreau’s relocation to Walden Pond. Of course, Kriner’s decision to homestead on a farm outside of Chicago with her husband and children differs from Thoreau’s solitary escape. Still, she explores her world with a keen understanding of place and of literature in ways similar to Thoreau’s own well-studied observations. Kriner writes beautifully about our complicated relationship to nature and each other, limning themes similar to those explored by Thoreau. Despite these similarities—and my own long-standing grudge against Thoreau notwithstanding—I found In Thought, Word, and Seed a remarkable essay collection, and one sorely needed in a world beset by fragmentation, conflict, and despair.”
“A Letter from Karl Barth to Dorothy Sayers” – Alan Jacobs at The Homebound Symphony: “On 7 September 1939, a week after the Wehrmacht invaded Poland and thus began the Second World War, the great theologian Karl Barth wrote, in German, from his home in Switzerland to a woman in England. ‘You too must be shocked by the events of our day,’ he wrote. ‘But I am happy that this time England did not want to let another “Munich” happen, and I hope also for the poor German people that now the end of its worst time (which I have witnessed intimately) has at least begun.’ Tragically, war had returned to Europe — but the hapless policy of of appeasement was over, and now the end of Hitler, and of Nazism, could, however dimly, be foreseen. But to acknowledge the war was not the purpose of Barth’s letter. Rather, he wanted to ask this woman for permission to translate two of her theological writings, and also to seek answers to a few questions about the texts.”
“The wisdom of not knowing: The information age feels like an all-you-can-eat buffet. I’m stuffed” – Heidi Haverkamp in The Christian Century: “I love church potlucks. There is grace in sitting down at a table with people known and unknown and making awkward, good-natured conversation, grace in the abundance of a single folding table that offers me lasagna, enchiladas, ham sliders, macaroni and cheese, fiesta chicken, pasta salad, black bean salad, couscous salad, fruit salad, eight kinds of bar cookies, apple pie, and a chocolate sheet cake. Who can resist trying a little bit of everything? I always put too much on my plate. So I thought I’d love going to an all-inclusive resort: food and drink around every corner, all the time, for free. It was like a church potluck had exploded. The choices were beautiful and dizzying: seafood bars, pasta bars, potato bars, taco bars, salad bars, sandwich stations, omelet stations, carving stations, grill stations, cookie tables, ice cream, Jell-O, puddings, cakes, and as many watered-down cocktails as we could drink, all immaculately styled. At first it was a thrill. Then it got dull. Then it got weird. It all started to look like junk. In much the same way, it used to be fun to look for the answer to any question I ever wondered about, at any moment, on the internet. But in the last couple years, answering all my own questions has gotten tedious.”
“Remembering T. S. Eliot” – Micah Matrix in Chronicles: “Friends and foes of poet and critic T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) have commonly understood him as a traditionalist par excellence—either the 20th century’s greatest traditionalist or its most lamentable one, depending on one’s view. For friends, he was a Burkean conservative who defended the ‘moral imagination’ of high art and who disdained what he referred to in a memo as the ‘Surrealist racket.’ For foes, he was a reactionary who lacked either the courage or constitution to write further experimental verse after he published the century’s most famous experimental poem, ‘The Waste Land‘ (1922), and retreated instead to his office at the publishing firm Faber & Faber, where he made grandiose, self-serving statements about the function of literature. The novelist Cynthia Ozick expressed this second view in unusually blunt terms in a 1989 New Yorker essay, ‘T. S. Eliot at 101.’ She wrote that Eliot was nothing more than ‘an autocratic, inhibited, depressed, rather narrow-minded, and considerably bigoted fake Englishman,’ whose ideas caught on ‘temporarily’ in America but were quickly replaced ‘by the formation of natural tissue.’ Eliot had abandoned America to become the high priest of an abstract pan-European culture and an enemy of ‘democracy, tolerance, and individualism.’ She concluded that his influence had waned considerably since he died, and should wane further still. The real Eliot—the Eliot that is worth remembering—was nothing like Ozick’s caricature. He was certainly guilty of the occasional ex-cathedra pronouncement, but to read him at length is to encounter a nuanced mind at work.”
Music: The Prayer Chain, “Mercury,” from Mercury
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Matthew Erickson 