The Top 5: Depression, migrant children & Buy Nothing Groups
Plus, our latest podcast episode on Christian Nationalism
Welcome to your weekly edition of the Top 5 articles we’ve read this week. Each week, we read dozens of articles in the hope we find essays and reporting that speak to big ideas, trends, future looks, and incredible human stories. We hope you enjoy our list, and do always let us know if you have a suggestion or a recommendation! Please also consider becoming a paid subscriber if this is one of those newsletters you open up all the time or look forward to each week. We also greatly encourage gift subscriptions!
The Top 5 articles for your week:
“The Mind in Pain” (Plough Quarterly)
Because “It’s hard to make sense of depression as a Christian because it’s hard to make sense of depression, full stop. No one can tell you what it is “really like” to be profoundly depressed. Writing about depression is necessarily retrospective: recording the experience in medias res is impossible. Depression is too paralysing. It precludes anything as constructive as writing. If you have lost all your mirth, you languish in corners, you mope, and cry (and shout and scream). But you don’t finesse prose. There’s something about depression that defies communication.”
“The Puzzling Gap Between How Old You Are and How Old You Think You Are” (The Atlantic)
Because “If you mentally view yourself as younger—if you believe you have a few pivots left—you still see yourself as useful; if you believe that aging itself is valuable, an added good, then you also see yourself as useful. In a better world, older people would feel more treasured, certainly. But even now, a good many of us seem capable of combining the two ideas, merging acceptance of our age with a sense of hope.”
“If you were rich, would you fold laundry?” (Substack - Inner Workings)
Because this essay is a reflection on what happens when you erase the “menial” stuff from your life and focus on doing “the good stuff.”
“Alone and Exploited, Migrant Children Work Brutal Jobs Across the U.S.” (NYT)
Because “Migrant children, who have been coming into the United States without their parents in record numbers, are ending up in some of the most punishing jobs in the country, a New York Times investigation found. This shadow work force extends across industries in every state, flouting child labor laws that have been in place for nearly a century. Twelve-year-old roofers in Florida and Tennessee. Underage slaughterhouse workers in Delaware, Mississippi and North Carolina. Children sawing planks of wood on overnight shifts in South Dakota.”
“The Battle for the Soul of Buy Nothing” (Wired Magazine)
Because if you know about “Buy Nothing” groups or you are a member of one, this is a long-form history of the group and it shows the challenges and problems for movements and ideas that take shape on the internet in a time of monetization.
ICYMI on Wear We Are
Episode 55: We Finally Talk About Christian Nationalism
The Morning Five: February 20, 2023
The Morning Five: February 21, 2023
A couple things from the Christian Nationalism episode:
I honestly didn't connect Christian Nationalism with violence, i.e. the conversation about violent extremism. Obviously Jan 6th and probably occasional mass shooters associated but that didn't seem to me to be the central point of talking about, analyzing, studying Christian Nationalism.
I think I have been more interested in how whatever you want to call the political/cultural ideas/movement affects the Church and congregations. And, pulling that thread a bit, effective ways for congregations and Christian leaders and teachers to disciple people out of the dangerous parts of it and also out of having that political/cultural idea/movement define their vision of Christianity. (Because it's obviously ineffective (counterproductive?) to just point directly at it and explicitly say it's not Christian.)... Similarly, how to mitigate and repair the very public expression of that political/cultural idea/movement becoming such a significant part of the (narrative surrounding the) public witness of the Church.