Weekly Links!

~ LINKS TO SOME INTERESTING READING & Watching, FOR WHAT'S LEFT OF YOUR WEEKEND ~

-"Not Writing for Writers": I enjoyed this post about how pursuing non-literary art forms help writers write better. Here's a snippet:

What amazes me the most is that I haven’t lost anything. I don’t have less time to enjoy the audiobooks and films and tv shows and social media I love. But I have incentive to be more purposeful about what I consume, because it has to be better than spending time with my thoughts. I’ve lost patience for the empty noise, I only want the good stuff.

-"On Signaling Versus Displaying Virtue in a Trumpian Age"


-"How the Order of the Beatitudes Could Change Your Life": I can't remember ever seeing this point made elsewhere, and it's a really helpful insight.


-"I Work from Home":  I'm enough of an introvert that I can't identify with much of this, but as someone who does work from home, I still find it hilarious.


-"Dear Supporter, There's So Much More I Wish I Could Tell You": a missionary friend of mine linked to this post, and (for what it's worth) as a missionary kid, I commend it to you.

Pray for the missionaries you know, folks. And then pray for them some more.


-"Ten Meter Tower": I could not look away from this. Weirdly fascinating.


-"C.S. Lewis Talks to a Dog About Lust": So helpful.


-"Why Our Son Doesn't Have a Smartphone"


-"I Was a Black, Female Thru-Hiker on the Appalachian Trail"



-"An Iceberg Flipped Over, and Its Underside is Breathtaking": really gorgeous pictures.


-"Which Paid Marketing Works (and Doesn't Work) for Books": I know this is totally inside baseball, but I like Rachel Aaron's blog (and recommend her book), and found this long meaty post really interesting.



---Finally, on a note of shameless self-promotion, it's almost Lent, and if you don't already have a copy of "Let Us Keep the Feast: Living the Church Year at Home," now is a great time to buy one! Cate MacDonald and Lindsay Marshall do a great job of showing you simple, meaningful ways to bring the church's celebration of Lent and Easter into your own home.

You won't regret getting yourself a copy before Ash Wednesday rolls around (March 1, this year.)---


I hope you have a lovely Sunday, full of worship and rest!

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell








This post contains Amazon affiliate links; if you purchase a book from this link, I receive a small percentage of the purchase price.  (See full disclosure on sidebar of my blog.)

Visiting Mission San Juan Capistrano

While Shirley was here, teaching us about praying using the Anglican rosary, I was over at her blog, talking about visiting Mission San Juan Capistrano (and sharing some pretty pictures!).  Come on over to Under An English Sky to read all about it!

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

Weekend Links: Ebola, Hermeneutics, and more

Some good weekend reading from around the web:

"AAFP Member Describes His Harrowing Experience Overcoming Ebola":

I remember very clearly saying to the nurse standing beside me while being treated for Ebola, "I can't breathe. I am sick. I have no reserve. I don't know how much longer I can keep this up." I was working really hard to breathe. I said, "I don't know how you are going to breathe for me when I quit breathing." (There were no ventilators available.) (Elwa Hospital) had only had one Ebola survivor up to that point and he had never been really sick. So everyone I had ever seen with symptoms like I was exhibiting had died.

"Hermeneutics with Samuel Johnson":

. . . meaning comes from the whole and informs each part. No individual bit, no matter how much you clarify it, can in isolation deliver the work's meaning.

"Finding Faith Through Liturgy":

Grandeur hooked me, but it wasn’t what made me stay. The initial mystique of traditional churches may enchant or repulse us — but we need to look deeper. The aesthetic of traditional churches appeals to me, but the substance behind it anchors me. It accommodates my doubts and eases my grief.

"Advent Books - Links & Recommendations" - This is a terrific list of resources put together by the folks over at Lent & Beyond, and well-worth checking out.

"Science Fiction at Its Best: 'Interstellar' Review" - I'm linking to this solely for this paragraph, which I love:

Good science fiction has never been about rocket ships and lasers, but about people. It’s about using alien settings to tease out the nuances of truth that we can’t look at head-on because they involve such quotidian realities that they fade into the background if we look right at them. Great science fiction though marries that universality with stories about grand ideas, meditations on who and what we are as a species and what our future holds. Good science fiction uses the trappings of the future to tell stories of the present, while great science fiction is one layer more: telling stories of the future that resonate in the present even as they map the future. The difference between the good and the great is the difference between simile and metaphor.

thoughts on traveling

photo credit: Betsy Barber

I tend to be a bit of a homebody; I like traveling while I'm doing it, but the idea of planning a trip rarely sounds attractive.

I think some of this is probably because I grew up traveling a lot. I was born in the States, but my earliest memories - my two or three toddler memories - are of Mexico, where my family lived while my parents trained to become missionaries. Then we moved to the sub-arctic of Canada, that snowy, scrubby landscape where all my young childhood memories live. And I have lots and lots and lots of memories of all the road trips between Canada and the States. Practically the whole western half of the States. A lot. With long stays in Oregon here and there.

So, that might be part of why I like staying home. I already have traveled. A lot.

I still like seeing new places, though, and I'm always ready to go to the mountains - any mountains. So I do still travel. And I want my kids - who aren't growing up as MK's - to know the world outside of their home city.

Still, travel doesn't feel like travel is a virtue, exactly, and I know some people see it that way.

And I can see why. Travel is horizon-broadening, pretty literally. I know that living in a different country - even one you think is as familiar as Canada or Mexico - can really change your view of the world. In a good way. Most MK's I know (as well as military brats and other former ex-pats), are both grounded and easy-going in a really particular kind of way. It's like we've lost enough and experienced enough that we know both what we really do care about, and what doesn't actually matter at all.

But travel has its limits. There's a virtue to staying in one place, too. Sometimes, when I hear people extolling the virtues of travel, and how experiencing all those cultures has made them better people, I think, Yes, but all of your experiences in these countries, with all these new cultures, are yours due to the virtue of people who stay in one place.

People who stay in one place. That's a group that makes up most of humanity, I think. Anywhere you travel, you're going to experience the culture of the people who actually live there. Who make their homes there. Whose grandparents have been buried there and whose children probably will be, too.


There's a virtue to travel. But what people would you meet when you travel if there wasn't anyone who stayed in one place?

I'm kind of glad I've had the chance to do both.

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

Weekend Links: Advent, Hobbits, Writers, and more!

"Experiments in Advent":

I admit that I may have ignored Advent for years because I didn’t like the idea of waiting for Christmas. As soon as the sun set on Thanksgiving I wanted immediate immersion in all things Christmas. Instant gratification. Get me the tree and the music and the happy feelings! This year, I decided to try waiting for Christmas. And waiting isn’t just sitting around and twiddling my thumbs. It’s preparing. It’s longing and yearning. It’s daring to hope that in the midst of darkness, Christmas is coming . . .

"Guatamala 1" and "Guatamala 2":

It was like this all day. Case after case, often found in a house full of barefoot children and poultry, of children with bad complications of relatively simple conditions. Congenital herpes infection. Ocular herpes. Blindness from a congenital cataract. So many things I had only read about– or, in the case of the fistulas, that I had to reason out based on my knowledge of anatomy, since I had neither encountered it before nor read it.

"Elevenses And Then Some: How To Prepare A Feast Fit For A Hobbit":

Each year, I swear I will never do this again.

And yet, for the third year in a row, I am preparing to host a day-long Lord of the Rings movie marathon – and cooking up a seven-course hobbit-themed feast, plus dessert, to serve my guests. Maybe it's because, like Tolkien, I too would like the world to be a merrier place.

"14 Ways to Tick Off a Writer":

7) Read ten pages of the author’s book. Realize that it’s absolutely not for you: you thought it was a zombie story, and it’s actually historical fiction about Alexander Graham Bell. Go on Goodreads anyway, and give it one star for not being a zombie story.

"Seeking Abortion's Middle Ground" (note, this one's old, but still very good):

A few years ago, quite by accident, I discovered an important piece of common ground. Something I wrote in a conservative think-tank journal was picked up and quoted widely. I had written: "There is a tremendous sadness and loneliness in the cry ‘A woman’s right to choose.’ No one wants an abortion as she wants an ice-cream cone or a Porsche. She wants an abortion as an animal, caught in a trap, wants to gnaw off its own leg."

"'The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug' Review: 'Pirates of the Caribbean' with Orcs":

Tolkien was a man who was deeply personally scarred by the world wars, and while his novels are not anything so pedantic as allegory, that world view of the miracle of democracies and their common men tearing down the great edifices of tyranny is embedded in every word of his stories.

The single most symbolic event in the failure of Jackson’s films to understand what the point of the story is, is the excising of The Scouring of the Shire. Citing budgets (on these billion dollar films) and time constraints (with extended editions several weeks long) is smokescreen for the reality that Jackson simply doesn’t know what the hell the point of that final chapter is. It drives home the decisions to invent hours of battle scenes at the expense of what was actually on the page.