Evelyn Fawcett

Christian, Heart mom, Literature lover

[Commentary Magazine @Commentary]

“The physical attachment to our child begins at conception,” Crittenden writes. “Scientists have discovered that fetal cells migrate during pregnancy, taking up residence in the mother’s brain and organs—a phenomenon known as fetal microchimerism. These cells can remain in the mother for as long as she lives.… I find this infinitely comforting: Even after death, Miranda literally remains alive within me, her cells woven through my brain and blood.”

https://t.co/E1ELyLRwWm

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

God’s heart is torn apart by wars, violence, injustice and lies. But our Father’s heart is not with the wicked, the arrogant, or the proud. God’s heart is with the little ones and the humble, and with them He builds up His Kingdom of love and peace day by day. Wherever there is love and service, God is there. #ApostolicJourney #Algeria

[Evelyn Fawcett @shortnsaz]

Every time I pour a glass from my box, I hear Mr. Darcy's concerned voice, "A glass of wine..can I get you one? Truly, you look very ill." #gradingpapers

[Evelyn Fawcett @shortnsaz]

"Mommy, you look so beautiful in a graveyard."❤️

[Susan Wise Bauer @SusanWiseBauer]

I love this piece by Walt Hunter--both his reflections on how his students are now reading, and the changes he's made in the writing requirements for his course.

Generously excerpted below, but do use the gift link to read the whole essay.

**

I’ve witnessed the slow erosion of attention firsthand, too: students on computers in the back of lecture halls, then on phones throughout the classroom, then outsourcing their education to artificial intelligence. We know that tech companies supply the means of distraction. But somehow the blame falls on the young reader. Whole novels aren’t possible to teach, we are told, because students won’t (or can’t) read them. So why assign them?...I am now convinced that I was wrong to listen to the ostensible wisdom of the day—and that teachers of literature are wrong to give up assigning the books we loved ourselves. There may be plenty of good reasons to despair over the present. The literature classroom should not be one of them...

Two things became clear in the early weeks of class. First, the students were reading. They were reading everything, or most of it. I know this because I had them identify obscure passages, without notes, devices, or books at hand. Second, they were experiencing life in a way that was not easy outside the class and its assignments. They were expected—required—to give huge chunks of time to an activity, reading, that was not monetizing their attention in real time. They had, in effect, taken back their lives, for an hour or two each day. It turned out that American literature, which so often flirts with utopian fantasies of regaining control—hello, Walden!—could do precisely that.

To give the students time to read, I had to change the way they wrote. I axed the take-home essays I’d assigned before—this wasn’t a “writing” class, anyway—and assigned what I suspected were far more difficult in-class, timed “flash essays,” with prompts I gave the same day. No trudging back from the library with 10 pages on Woolf in the special season of Cleveland weather we call “stupid cold.” Long, research-based essay assignments had always worked well for the top students in the class, the ones who were already trained to write. But I’ve rarely seen, over the course of my career, the kind of development I hoped for in the majority of students whom I asked to write that way...

When we started Walden, plenty of students were turned off by Thoreau’s long-winded musings on the real-estate market in New England. Two classes later, Thoreau was a friend for life. His timeless needling felt timely: “We know not where we are. Beside, we are sound asleep half our life.” Despite his flight to the woods, Thoreau was more easily distracted than any of us—by birdsong, by a train whistle, by the sound of ice cracking. He could barely sustain a single thought without jumping to an unrelated idea. Walden is a book that freely indulges in distraction—not to dull our senses, but to keep ourselves awake, curious, delighted, enraged. Thoreau’s world sends us constant notifications, and by doing so, asks us to reject the “vain reality” where we have been “shipwrecked.” The iterative process of confusion, endurance, and incremental understanding is what literature professors teach when they assign whole books. This march toward understanding doesn’t have a great name other than reading. We need to help students grow into the difficulty of reading. The best way to do that is not to “meet them where they are,” a bromide that has become doctrine for higher education. We have to do as Whitman says instead: Stop somewhere ahead and wait for them to catch up...

[T]the whole notion of having to defend literature or the humanities in the first place may have us wrong-footed. It’s not only what you learn from reading Moby-Dick—notwithstanding Melville’s extensive knowledge of 19th-century whaling—but what you are doing when you are reading Moby-Dick. You are neither learning a transferable skill nor escaping from the world’s demands that you do. You are not word-maxxing or optimizing information for efficiency. You are engaged in a singular practice, one with its own primary justification.

**

https://t.co/frA2a7ChPc

[Evelyn Fawcett @shortnsaz]

As a 25 year teaching veteran, I can assure you I am completely familiar with the complex, multi-layered meaning behind, "very complete, pretty much." #memeworthy

[Sola Media @solamediaorg]

Ben Sasse:

"One of the weird lines @timkellernyc used to say is, 'I hate this, but I would never want to go back to the prayer life I had before pancreatic cancer,' which I thought sounded pretty weird. . .But then I felt, what a blessing that I'm saying, 'Lord, come quickly, Maranatha. Thank you for all of the different things that I used to cling to that right now seem really, really trivial because they're actually really trivial.'"

@BenSasse

[Evelyn Fawcett @shortnsaz]

I love being old enough to contemplate that Daniel Craig actually made Bond even better than Connery. #notheresy #bothGOAT #genbest

[Evelyn Fawcett @shortnsaz]

@malcolmguite God's hand in our lives is pain and beauty interwoven as grace❤️.

[Evelyn Fawcett @shortnsaz]

I read these pages to Cam the day before he journeyed to Heaven❤️.

[Malcolm Guite @malcolmguite]

For tonight's Spell in the Library we read the last pages of The Lord of the Rings, perhaps the finest ending to any book ever! https://t.co/jNOddemrNl

[Evelyn Fawcett @shortnsaz]

I think this might trump Manos Hands of Fate...

[Frank Conniff @FrankConniff]

If only...

[challies @challies]

"I am — and will never, this side of the resurrection, be more than — a creature of dust. I will rest content in my creaturely weakness." (Christopher Ash)

[Luke Burgis @lukeburgis]

Cf. the Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas in the 1970's, which was shut down because too many people were having religious conversions, merely from star-gazing, reciting poetry, reading classical literature, and being exposed to beauty.

[David French @DavidAFrench]

This is the best one.

[Evelyn Fawcett @shortnsaz]

The speech is very much worth reading!

[Robert P. George @McCormickProf]

This is an excellent, deeply morally substantive, speech by Pope Leo. He is addressing ambassadors from nations across the globe. (I'm grateful to @FeserEdward for calling attention to the speech.) https://t.co/0iwua5edV0

[Justin Taylor @between2worlds]

Christopher Nolan's Odyssey:
https://t.co/Ym6gZ5Oklw

[Nate Bargatze @natebargatze]

One dad. Three kids. Zero clue.

Watch the official trailer for my new movie #TheBreadwinnerMovie with Mandy Moore. The chaos unfolds exclusively in movie theaters March 13.

🔗https://t.co/MSWvt8HKtz
@BreadwinnerMov @SonyPictures @TheMandyMoore

[Rebecca McLaughlin @RebeccMcLaugh]

Happy 250th birthday to Jane Austen: one of the greatest Christian intellectuals of all time!

I wrote about her faith a few years back. It was absolutely not just cultural. In fact, in the family devotional she wrote for her & her sister (with whom she lived throughout her life) she prayed specifically that they would not to be Christians "only in name."
https://t.co/FNY1BqWln1

[bernard kennedy- 4 poetry collections @BernardKenned]

The Feast of Christ the King; a sonnet https://t.co/T1GyoqayrX via @malcolmguite