Weekly Links: some good reading from around the Web

SOME INTERESTING LINKS FOR YOUR SUNDAY AFTERNOON, SET OUT IN MY USUAL CATEGORIES OF FAITH, FAMILY, AND FICTION...

Faith 

-"Bible Basics: A Baby Believer Counting Primer": cool-looking Kickstarter from an fellow alum of THI.

-"One, Holy and Broken: Conflict in Christ's Church":

A church I attended suffered the pangs of conflict, and unfortunately, this was nothing new in my experience. As my wife and I moved around the country for graduate studies and then different teaching positions, four of the six churches we attended suffered deeply from conflict during the handful of years we were there (the other two were riddled by conflict before and after our time there). Based on our limited experience, to attend and participate in the life of a congregation, to be a member of a church is to participate in conflict.

Family

-"It's 'digital heroin': how screens turn kids into psychotic junkies": Important stuff. Particularly this bit:  

Once a kid has crossed the line into true tech addiction, treatment can be very difficult. Indeed, I have found it easier to treat heroin and crystal meth addicts than lost-in-the-matrix video gamers or Facebook-dependent social media addicts.

-And, to add to the category of What-I-Am-Going-To-Do-If-I-Ever-Get-Stupid-Rich: "Data Scientist Creates Fully Optimized Road Trip Map to Every National Park".

Maybe we can do a tenth of it every summer for the next decade ...?

Fiction 

-First thing to mention under the "fiction" category is a fun Twitter even I'm participating in this month: #WIPjoy! Founder Bethany A. Jennings calls it a month of "celebrating our works-in-progress and encouraging one another in our writing" and you can read more about it here. 

I'm having so much fun participating in it this month! And it's early in the month, so if you want in, there's still time. Just head on over to Twitter...

-"Mike Birbiglia's 6 Tips for Making It Small in Hollywood. Or Anywhere": Good stuff for any of my fellow creatives.

Have a lovely weekend!

-Jessica Snell

Links: Giveaway, Hiking Blind, Castle, and more!

First off, Michelle over at Liturgical Time is giving away a copy of Matt Redmond's The God of the Mundane. My review is here (TL;DR: I liked it), and you can go here to enter the giveaway!

The Blind Hiker: How one man used technology to conquer the 2,000-mile Appalachian Trail.

Throw Us a Curve, Castle:

I am told that the viewership of Castle skews right to the political right, so here is an idea: Let Beckett have a renewal of her (let’s say) childhood Catholic faith. Let her be the one person on television who is normal, but decides to obey the teachings of the Church. Let Castle wrestle with it . . . and decide she is worth a mass. Let them get married.

A meditation on the shocking idea that maybe we’re actually not just lazy whiners:

There is truth to the accusations that I’m ungrateful, spoiled, and lazy. No false humility here — I really do posses all those attributes to some degree or another. But it was simply not true to say that those faults alone were the cause of my suffering. I was struggling against a terribly difficult physical condition, and my body was running in the red zone for all of my waking hours. In those weeks when I was unaware of the reality of my situation, I worked under the incorrect assumption that my circumstances were normal, and that therefore the problems must come down to spiritual and mental character defects on my part. Not surprisingly, this caused me to be in a state of constant inner turmoil. In fact, it was reminiscent of the hidden angst that simmered silently within me when I was an atheist: whenever you live under false assumptions about reality, you will live in anguish. It may be buried and only pop up occasionally, or it may burst to the surface in explosions of acute despair, but whenever you try to jam a square peg of your perception of reality into the round hole of actual reality, there will always be friction.

The Early Education Racket:

If you are reading this article, your kid probably doesn’t need preschool.

Watching the Star Wars Prequels on Mute: An Experiment:

. . . . George Lucas has never really cared about dialogue; Paglia points out that he has been known to call it “a sound effect, a rhythm, a vocal chorus in the overall soundtrack,” of a film. The script is “a sketchbook” and he’s “not really interested in plots.” And to most of us that surely sounds like madness. But to George Lucas, who considers film to be an entirely visual medium, it’s exactly right.

 By that notion, one could eliminate the most problematic aspect of the prequels and watch them all over again for that visual experience. With the soundtrack playing, preferably, as the appointment of John Williams as the composer of these films was a very deliberate choice on Lucas’ part.

So, what do they look like? Well, here are some impressions from my own viewing….

Creating a Sub-Genre by Accident: Georgette Heyer’s The Corinthian:

Georgette Heyer wrote The Corinthian a few months after the tragic death of her brother-in-law, a close friend, in one of the early battles of World War II, and under the terrible fear that her husband would soon be following his brother into battle, and that her own brothers would not survive the war. She worried, too, about other family friends, and feared that the war (with its paper rationing, which limited book sales) would make her finances, always straitened, worse than ever. She could not focus, she told her agent, on the book she was supposed to finish (a detective story that would eventually turn into Envious Casca) and for once, she avoided a professional commitment that would earn her money, for a book she could turn to for pure escape. Partly to avoid the need of doing extensive research, and partly to use a historical period that also faced the prospect of war on the European continent, she turned to a period she had already researched in depth for three previous novels: The Regency.

In the process, she accidentally created a genre: The Corinthian, a piece of improbable froth, is the first of her classic Regency romances, the one that would set the tone for her later works, which in turn would spark multiple other works from authors eager to work in the world she created.

Love of the Local - or how I finally admitted to being an Angeleno

"AngelenA"? Probably more correct, but nobody says that here in the City of the Angels.

Actually, it isn't the city of the angels, it's the city of Mary. Originally it was named after "La Reina de los Angeles." (My friend Jim recently wrote a beautiful and creepy meditation on that name.)

And I've lived here for over twenty years now. That's weird to admit, because I still think of myself as a missionary kid - as the girl who grew up in the sub-Arctic and got only got to visit her home country in the summer.

But even though smelling snow in the air is still enough to bring back a flood of memories, scents that spell home now are jasmine flowers and eucalyptus leaves, arid heat and ocean breeze.

Writing home
The last book I wrote was set here in California, and I loved writing about my adopted home state. The higher my word count got, the more I realized that I love where I live.

It's not an adoring sort of love. I admit that the Los Angeles basin doesn't have the heartbreaking beauty of the New Zealand alps (though you should see the high Sierra) or the comforting green peace of the Oregon coast (though you should walk Carbon Canyon's ridges just after a thunderstorm's cleaned the air).

But it's a love born out of familiarity. In terms of Lewis' "Four Loves", my love for my home is storge, the sort of love you can't help having for someone you've known for years, whether you like him or not.

I know what blooms when. I know we have summer for half the year and squeeze fall, winter, spring down into six short months - and some years only four or five. I know that the sky is boring and smoggy most of the time but that if you catch us on the right day we have a snow-capped mountain view that rivals Denver's. I know that the miles of concrete and asphalt are endless, but not as endless as sea, and you can sit on the beaches here and never tire of the view of grey-green waves pounding the sand.

I love Los Angeles.  It's true that I love it because I know it, but there are worse ways than that to love.

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

The No-Backyard Backyard

We moved to a condo this summer, and so lost our backyard. Now, we gained so many other things in this move that you shouldn't be sad for us about that, but it did leave me with the puzzle: how do my kids play outside now?

Well, eventually, I think that answer is going to involve going to the park more often, when we've got kids old enough for kicking a ball around a field and such. But since we're talking about preschoolers, the answer has been: we're making our patio as yard-ish as possible. Here are a few of the ways that we're doing that:
Sand is the first and biggest one. This has taken the place of our old backyard mud hole, where the kids played for hours with shovels and trucks. Now they have a big tub of sand they're allowed to scatter all over the patio, and they play with that for hours with their shovels and trucks. When they're done, I just sweep it all up and put it back in the tub. (The tub, of course, has a lid, to keep the neighborhood cats for using it as a litter box.)

Water play is another big one. They're allowed to fill their sand buckets with water and take them outside, to splash, to play kitchen, to get as wet as their little hearts desire.

Toy dinosaurs find room to roam, both on the concrete of the patio, and in the jungle of nearby landscaped plants.

The makeshift bridges in the picture above are my latest and favoritest no-backyard backyard development. The lumber was sitting on our patio, and the kids started taking it out and using it for balance beams. I suggested they put it over the nearby concreted-in ivy patch, and a game of building bridges was born.

That highlights one of the most important strategies of the no-backyard backyard, I think: using what you have. We happen to have a concreted-in ivy patch, perfect for board bridges. You might have something else. Use what you have.

What else do we have? A built-in audience of little sisters, curious to see what their older siblings are doing:


peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell