Vasectomies, Talking to Kids about Dinosaurs, David Foster Wallace, Etc. (Friday Roundup 8-1-25)
Happy Friday!
Haley Baumeister caused a bit of a stir recently with her article on the normalization of vasectomies in Christian spaces. This, of course, is a deeply personal matter for many couples; but I have often wondered why Protestants don’t seem to have much to say about contraception. I’m certainly not endorsing everything she says in this article, but I found it compelling in many ways. I think a deeper moral understanding of the human body is something that we need as Protestants, and something that I hope to see more concretely in the Wesleyan world. I think I’m more on the side that something like a vasectomy is a matter for personal discernment, but the article is worth pondering:
Vasectomies abound in Protestant and broadly evangelical spaces. I’m sorry to be so frank, but it’s true and it’s strange.
(My husband and I have also come across quite the handful of Catholics who aren’t shy about saying so, either, oddly enough).
They are, for the most part, de-stigmatized.Matthew Lee Anderson estimates—and this sounds about right, based on observations and interactions—that 40-50% of men 38 and over in evangelical spaces have had the procedure done. Why is this? And why is it still “deeply immoral”?
Read “What Do You Say When Kids Ask About Dinosaurs?” by Tracy Sacancos. I thought this article was interesting, and pretty helpful (she also has a substack called God and Elements). I don’t personally subscribe to a young earth view of the universe, and think that requiring that is pretty harmful in an apologetic sense. But holding the doctrine of creation, the special nature of human beings, the fall of mankind, and the scientific account of the universe all together is a challenging thing to do. I appreciated Trasancos’ thoughts on this; and whatever you believe about these things, I think her arguments here are worth wrestling with:
First, do not teach them young-earth creationism. In my opinion, that is a failure to teach at all. It requires you to tell kids that a certain narrow group of self-appointed authorities are the sole authorities of both science and theology, and that is a dangerous corral to shove them in.
It may seem tidy and safe at first, but young-earth creationism sets kids up for, at least, confusion and, at worst, rejection of religion in favor of scientific enlightenment as they begin to crack open biology textbooks on their own. I do not even support teaching the controversy. (For the sake of balance, do not teach kids to be modernist heretics either.)
Instead, teach them how to dive into mystery. Use questions about dinosaurs as opportunities to explain how to sort difficult questions because life is going to be full of such demands. Tell them every question is not going to have one, single, final, definite answer because, frankly, we do not know everything. Teach them to think systematically by learning the complex details and to simultaneously integrate large amounts of information into a developing, whole picture. (Think jigsaw puzzle.)
This is a fascinating graphic on why our country is the way it is at the moment:
Read this article about David Foster Wallace. If you have never read him, I’d recommend starting with his essays; in many ways, he saw far ahead of his time:
One of Wallace’s greatest fears that he consistently echoes in interviews is that people are growing increasingly addicted to entertainment and decreasingly comfortable with themselves. Our ability to sit alone or commit our attention to a singular activity for an extended period of time has utterly dissipated. He explains in an interview with David Lipsky: “…as the Internet grows, and as our ability to be linked up…at a certain point, we're gonna have to build some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it's gonna get easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. Which is all right. In low doses, right? But if that's the basic main staple of your diet, you're gonna die. In a meaningful way, you're going to die.”
I just finished reading Children of Men by P.D. James. I saw the movie many years ago, but the book is much better. It’s a dystopian story about a pandemic of human infertility. No one is able to have children, and the book essentially explores what happens to the human spirit without children. It’s also a deeply hopeful, profoundly Christian book. So many good quotes from the book:
“Western science has been our god. In the variety of its power it has preserved, comforted, healed, warmed, fed and entertained us and we have felt free to criticize and occasionally reject it as men have always rejected their gods, but in the knowledge that, despite our apostasy, this deity, our creature and our slave, would still provide for us; the anaesthetic for the pain, the spare heart, the new lung, the antibiotic, the moving wheels and the moving pictures. The light will always come on when we press the switch and if it doesn’t we can find out why.”
…
“Without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruin.”
…
“On the whole I’m glad; you can’t mourn for unborn grandchildren when there never was a hope of them. This planet is doomed anyway. Eventually the sun will explode or cool and one small insignificant particle of the universe will disappear with only a tremble. If man is doomed to perish, then universal infertility is as painless a way as any. And there are, after all, personal compensations. For the last sixty years we have sycophantically pandered to the most ignorant, the most criminal and the most selfish section of society. Now, for the rest of our lives, we’re going to be spared the intrusive barbarism of the young, their noise, their pounding, repetitive, computer-produced so-called music, their violence, their egotism disguised as idealism. My God, we might even succeed in getting rid of Christmas, that annual celebration of parental guilt and juvenile greed. I intend that my life shall be comfortable, and, when it no longer is, then I shall wash down my final pill with a bottle of claret.”
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