A New Season

Good things are growing.

When responding to emails, I’ve recently started to say “thank you for your patience,” rather than endlessly apologizing for my slow replies. So, dear reader, thank you for your patience.

Back in April 2022, after I left my job as editor of Public Discourse, moved to PA, and got pregnant with my now-16-month-old, I wrote about wintering and fallow seasons. My pregnancy with Rosie was really hard, and really humbling. I found myself slowing down and (re)learning that my worth does not come from what I produce.

In spite of the difficult pregnancy, this postpartum and newborn phase were the best I’ve experienced yet. I felt so much less overwhelmed and so much more joyful and grateful for the gift of this perfect, beautiful baby. When my other kids were little, I worked 20-30/hours a week. But with Rosie, I have found myself jealously guarding my our time together. She’s just such a delight, and I feel more keenly the passage of time. I don’t plan on her being my last baby, but as I get older, I’m not sure how many more times I’ll get to experience all of this. So I’ve been mostly fitting in my work at Fairer Disputations during naptime and after bedtime, keeping my workload under 10 hours.

But in the last couple of months, something has started to change. The seeds that have been quietly germinating for so slow finally seem to be ready to show themselves—and then to bear fruit. I’m feeling more sure of not only what I believe but also what I really want to say in my writing. So I’ve lined up some childcare and have some big plans in the works. I’m excited to tell you more as things develop in the coming months. But for now, I’m transitioning out of my quiet season of contemplation and starting to put some focused effort into building a larger online platform.

So far, I’ve mainly used this substack like an old school email list, sending (verrrrrrry) occasional updates about the things I’m publishing elsewhere. Now, I’m going to start using it the way it’s really intended—as a place to share substantial original writing, as on the blogs of yesteryear. As I start to publish more often, if you enjoy my posts, I would be so grateful if you’d share them with others and help me to increase my number of subscribers.

And if you’re stumbling on this post without having yet subscribed… what are you waiting for?? Use the box below! :)

So get excited for that. But first! One last old-school set of links to catch you up on the writing I managed to get done in 2023.

Can Fatherhood Cure the Modern Male Malaise?

In January, I had the pleasure of publishing an interview with Richard Reeves, author of the fascinating book Of Boys and Men. We had such a great conversation. As I noted, I think his view is ultimately missing something, but I also think it’s a huge step forward in our public conversation surrounding boys and men.

Here’s a taste:

RR: I think the disagreement between us is both bigger and smaller than it seems.

A mistake conservatives make is to say, “You see? These upper-class liberals have got traditional marriages, they should preach what they’re practicing.” I say to that two things. Number one is no, they’re not traditional marriages. You’re looking at it from the outside. You need to look at them from the inside. From the inside, I think it’s mostly about parenting. The upper middle class are modeling a new form of marriage, which I call the high investment parenting model. . . .

From a public policy point of view—and I agree that there’s no such thing as a naked public square—the moral message I want to send is the importance of responsible and engaged fatherhood. I want to underpin it in policy. I think I’ve got more actionable stuff I can do around that: around paid leave, around child support, around fatherhood intervention programs, etc. I think I’ve got stuff I can do on that. “Get married”: well, there ain’t much you can do about that. . . .

SS: I’m wary about taking intensive parenting as a model for marriage. I think this raises deeper questions about contraception and the way that technology changed the sexual marketplace and altered family formation.

Upper-middle-class couples now wait to enter into marriage until they want to embark on this intensive project of having their 2.1 or 1.9 kids—this ever-shrinking number of children. That feeds more into a highly individualized contractual model of what it means to be a family and what it means to have fulfillment and purpose in your life. Encouraging that model seems like it will continue to feed the problem of men being so utterly adrift.

Contrast that to a more organic yet transcendent vision of love and marriage, one that demands that you pledge yourself to one another for life. Children arise naturally from your love for each other. They might not all be perfectly planned, and there might be more of them than you expected. There’s a sense of richness and fullness in that vision, versus this intensively cultivated, parenting-centered vision of marriage, where you carefully plan to conceive only as many kids as you can afford to enroll in the best piano lessons and travel soccer leagues.

RR: My unromantic idea about a joint venture for the human capital formation in a pre-agreed number of children is the antithesis of what you’re talking about.

SS: This is where you’re saying: we’re both disagreeing less and more than it might initially seem.

RR: Right. And I think that yours is the right model of marriage. Obviously, I’m not saying I agree with everything you’ve just said, but this idea that it’s not just a contract . . . it’s just, I don’t know what that means for other people. This is the liberal in me coming out. I’m wary about presuming to know what it means for other people.

Feminism’s New Wave

Fairer Disputations kicked things off with a launch panel in January, in which our featured authors shared how they each came to embrace what we call “sex-realist feminism.”

In March, after a couple of months of curating articles around the web and sharing them in a weekly digest (subscribe here!), we started publishing original content. I kicked things off with an opening salvo, titled Feminism’s New Wave Is Here. Here’s how it begins:

We’ve forgotten what it means to be human.

Enchanted by the previously unimaginable degree to which technology has allowed us to transcend the limitations of our bodies, we’ve harnessed the power of science and the momentum of markets to transform our everyday experiences. We increasingly expect a frictionless delivery of everything required to meet our physical needs, and we often attempt to meet our spiritual and relational ones digitally, too. Hunched over our screens, we ignore both the tension in our shoulders and the people in our lives. Even though many of us are constantly connected, materially comfortable, and physically safe, many are also more isolated, anxious, and aimless than ever before.

It’s a bleak picture. Still, I think this litany of laments is worth reciting, because I want you to know what we’re up against. Fairer Disputations is confronting a profoundly mistaken idea of what it means to be human, and we’re fighting for a better one.

Working on FD has been such a gift. You can check out a few highlights from our first year here.

The Evangelical Imagination

I’m Catholic, as most of you probably know. So reading Karen Swallow Prior’s latest book was fascinating for me. It’s a deep-dive into American Evangelical culture and an exploration of its historical roots (many of which derive from the Victorian period).

Now, I’m not a total stranger to the evangelical world: I was homeschooled, after all, and the first “real concert” I attended was a banging collab featuring Joy Williams, ZoeGirl, and (my fave), SuperChic[k], complete with sponsorship by Brio mag and calls for those who were not yet saved to come forward and dedicate our lives to Jesus. Even so, I learned so much reading this book, and I loved talking with Karen about it. She even deals with some themes that connect with the work I do at FD:

SS: You mention the Angel in the House. There’s been a lot of interesting scholarship and commentary lately tracing how the modern gendered division of labor and the division of public versus private came out of the Industrial Revolution and then how feminism was a reaction against that.

But I had never thought about the evangelical side of all of that. You talk about how, in England and America, because of the evangelical influence, domesticity took a new place in the social imaginary, rooted in the conception of the home as a source of virtues and emotions, which were nowhere else to be found, least of all in business and society. Here, again, we have certain values being reinforced in the architecture of the home, which promoted privacy and gendered uses of rooms within homes. That is just really fascinating to me.

Could you tell readers a little bit about how evangelicalism played into the emergence both of companionate marriage and this conception of “true womanhood”?

KSP: Because evangelicalism is not defined by a particular doctrine or denomination, it is much more susceptible to being influenced by the culture. We obviously see that today, but it was true back then as well.

It was the evangelicals who, in the middle to late eighteenth century, extolled the idea of the companionate marriage, which I think is a biblical idea. Basically, evangelicals said that the purpose of marriage, besides having children, was for a husband and wife to equip and support one another in ministering as Christians to the church and the world. And that’s what good, suitable companions and spouses would help one another to do.

That’s a biblical idea, but it was in stark contrast to the prevailing idea of marrying for political allegiance, or gaining wealth, or joining properties, which was largely the basis of marriage for those of any means before evangelicals recovered a more biblical purpose. However, this biblical vision of marriage was then used by economic and social and political forces of the age to deepen and make more rigid the roles of men and women both in the home and in society. That served the Industrial Revolution well, but it also ended up being confused and conflated with what a biblical Christian marriage should look like.

We could take so many examples of the interplay between evangelicals and the larger culture and see the same thing.

SS: It was so interesting for me to read this book as a Catholic. I kept being struck by how many of the things you pointed out as important strands in evangelicalism have been taken up by the contemporary Catholic Church. I would argue that they were already implicit in sacred scripture and tradition, but that the Church was perhaps not doing a good job of articulating them or popularizing them. Especially since Vatican II, there’s been a lot more explanation of the role of the laity, for example, and an articulation of the theology of the body, a sacramental vision of reality, and how those things play into both marriage and the relationship between the sexes, more broadly.

Your book left me with a much greater appreciation of the interplay between Protestant and Catholic culture and theology. It seems like evangelicals, by pointing out things that the Catholic Church was not doing well or not teaching clearly, may have prompted the Church to delve more deeply into what scripture and tradition really did say on these topics and then to promote that teaching more broadly.

Maintaining Margin

Although I no longer run the show at Public Discourse, I am still on the editorial board, which is why I get to talk with so many interesting people for PD’s monthly interview series. I also get to help plan content and solicit essays, including this excellent long-form contribution by Ivana Greco on government support for homemakers.

As Ivana points out, with the mass entrance of women into the workplace, many of the formal and informal community institutions that were formerly maintained by homemakers have withered away, leading to a widespread loss of social capital.

I wrote a response to her essay, thinking through how we can rebuild some of those networks of mutual aid, even without a critical mass of moms who fully exit the paid labor force.

I want to underscore Greco’s point about the ways in which homemakers build social cohesion. But I’d like to complicate the picture a little bit, urging couples to think creatively about the best way to structure their division of labor. It’s true that many women would leave the paid workforce and become stay-at-home moms if it were financially feasible for them to do so. But, in my view, that’s not the only—or the most likely—way to rebuild the networks of social connection that were once maintained by a nation of homemakers.

Rather, the key principle here is that of margin. On both a social and individual level, we should structure our work in ways that leave margin for relationships, allowing us the space to respond to the unpredictable needs and gifts of the people we encounter in our homes and communities.  

Soon after publishing that essay, I teamed up with my good friend Patrick Brown (who’s the best out there when it comes to family policy, and has his own newsletter) to continue the conversation over at FD. We’ve been helping edit each other’s work for years, so it was fun to officially co-write something.

Here’s the gist:

We can do two things at the same time. First: we can and should elevate the essential, hidden work of the home, encouraging both men and women to embrace parenthood while acknowledging the uniquely intimate connection between mother and child. Second: we can and should build political systems that give parents the freedom to craft the arrangement that works best for their particular families. Some—perhaps even most—mothers want to share their gifts and talents with the world through some form of paid work. Policymakers should make it easier for them to do so, opening up alternative pathways to the totalizing, male-normative ideal of career progression that has dominated our culture for so long.

I’m thankful for the freedom I have to lean in and out of the paid labor force in different seasons, flexing in response to the needs of my family. I’m excited to enter into a period of more focused writing work.

And I’m so happy that you care about these topics—motherhood, work, vocation, family life, sexual difference, feminism, sacramentality, and on and on—too. Thanks for being here.