Meanderings, 9 September 2023
Good morning, folks! We had a wonderful week at Northern this week, capped off with an afternoon and evening with Beth Allison Barr. A huge thanks to all the work of Kelly Dippolito who miraculously pulled all the details into a smooth and empowering event.
Bird enthusiasts are flocking to see flamboyances of flamingos popping up all over the eastern U.S. after they were blown in by Hurricane Idalia.
More than 150 of the pink wading birds have ended up in unlikely states like North and South Carolina, Virginia, and even Texas and Ohio, since Hurricane Idalia passed through the U.S. last week, experts told ABC News, describing the event as incredibly rare.
Idalia is the type of storm that bird watchers get excited for, "because you never know what kind of species it will bring with it," Nate Swick, digital communications manager for the American Birding Association and host of the American Birding Podcast, told ABC News.
Typically, the species that get blown in are ocean-going birds, such as tube-nosed seabirds and terns, Swick said. Flamingos, a wading bird, are the last species bird watchers would have predicted.
"No one really expected that flamingos would be the bird that Idalia was known for," Swick said.
Almost immediately after Idalia made landfall near Big Bend, Florida, on Aug. 30, birders began seeing reports of flamingos all over the state, Swick said. The reports soon extended all over the East, as far north as Ohio and as far west as Texas.
A couple months ago, I wrote the following:
My bias is that I believe that religion is a net positive for a functioning society. I’ve been clear about that for quite a while now. But there’s a huge caveat when it comes to that assertion. Religion is a net positive only when people actively engage in all the aspects of religious life - including regular corporate worship.
I think that if you look at the preponderance of the evidence in social science, it’s hard to argue that regular congregational attendance is a net negative for individuals and society. There are tons of examples of how it seems to improve mental health, generates feelings of tolerance, and provides opportunities for people to volunteer in their communities.
There’s another area in which religious attendance has been demonstrated to generate positive outcomes: interpersonal trust. This type of trust is pretty simple, really. It’s the idea that we can have some assurances that random strangers are not out to get us. Here’s how scholars have defined it:
The confidence in another person (or between two persons) and a willingness to be vulnerable to him or her (or to each other).
I don’t think it takes a huge leap in logic to say that a reasonable baseline of interpersonal trust is an essential part of any functioning society. Without it, we have The Purge. Everyone is always on high alert, thinking that someone is just looking for a chance to take advantage of them.
So, what’s the state of interpersonal trust in the United States over the last five decades and what role does religion play?
Last Spring, an editor from Elle — who I’d previously worked with on a story about the Women of QAnon — reached out with an idea for a very magaziney sort of stunt. Live a week as a #Tradwife, modeling myself on the women who’d amassed massive followings on Instagram and TikTok by preaching or just filming their “traditional” lives….and then write about it.
I averred, I dithered, I eventually figured out a way to write the piece without losing money. You can read it here in all its fancy magazine design glory. I generally accept assignments like this one because there will always be something fun and special about seeing your work in print (and accompanied by the work of a skilled designer). It’s also a good exercise for someone with my writing tendencies to deal with a ~1200 word limit.
But also! I have so much more to say! So what is follows is a sort of #tradwife notebook dump, very loosely organized in a way that will hopefully spark even more conversation.
First off, several different genres of #tradwife get lumped under the larger hashtag….
The biggest “boxes” of tradwifes are:
1.) Evangelical Christians living out some understanding of “biblical womanhood”
These women are proudly submissive wives, do not work outside of the home, and focus on motherhood (often with as many children as possible, aka as many as “God plans”). They might not identify as fundamentalist Christians but many/maybe even most are. They’re modest, “pretty” but not focused on “beauty,” quote a whole lot of scripture and talk about God’s will…and almost certainly homeschool. Many of these women also talk about leaving behind “troubled” pasts (and several have children from a first relationship before they found their “real” husband and came to know God’s plan for them, etc. etc.)
A subset of these Biblical Womanhood influencers are into being slightly more cool and slightly less matronly. I’d put YouTuber Morgan Olliges (who was featured in the Shiny Happy People documentary on the Duggars — which she and her husband immediately disavowed) in this category.
[Interestingly, Morgan does most of her content with her husband (on whether Taylor Swift is a witch…but also about purity culture, their marriage, why they didn’t like Barbie, etc. etc.)] …
2.) “God-loving” Mothers Who Are More Into the Aesthetics and/or Homesteading….
3.) Stay-at-Home-Girlfriends who are definitely not modeling Biblical Womanhood and would probably be embarrassed to be in the same article as #tradmoms (and vice-versa)….
I don’t fear these women. I fear the larger apparatuses of which they are a part — apparatuses that wield disproportional power over the way everyone lives their lives. I’m not scared of GrowingGoodings, in other words, I’m scared of the fucking Federalist Society. #Tradwife content is not cute or inspirational or harmless; it’s the handmaiden of the Christian Nationalist agenda. It’s regressive, anti-choice politics in a housedress offering you quick and easy morning glory muffins. Tradwifes are against childcare, against protections for women in the workplace, against any sort of policy or reform that acknowledges the way the vast majority of Americans' lives are actually organized today instead of how they, themselves, have chosen to organize them. They are AGAINST COLLEGE FOR WOMEN. And maybe I need to bold this? They see women as utterly beholden to the will of men.
Today we think of “cancel culture” much more broadly. While conservative purists may have invented highly effective tactic of cancelling performers and preachers who strayed certain ways, in the era of social media following and influencer culture, progressives also have quickly learned to call out and then boycott folks whose behavior and ideas they find reprehensible.
I’m not saying anything new here. People have the right to stop following or giving money to people they disagree with or whose behavior they don’t want to reward. “Shunning” is what it was called in the pre-modern world, and it is an extremely effective form of punishment. Humans are a herd species. We need each other and being ignored or excluded is incredibly painful. It’s meant to be. I’m not entirely opposed to this as a necessary activity in a world where our individual actions are perhaps our only areas of control and celebrity culture seeps in to all our actions.
However, I spend my days and weeks with 18-25 year olds. This is now the only world they know. And they have imbibed this sort of “purity culture” (on both the right and the left) so very thoroughly that they don’t know how to be part of communities that include people they disagree with and how to belong in a society where not everyone behaves appropriately or morally. They don’t know how to be part of a loyal dissent, or how to confront while staying present with a group over a long period of time. What I see going on is a cult of innocence.
The Rufous Hummingbird is magical. The male’s iridescent throat glows brighter than a shiny copper penny and like most hummingbirds, whizzes through the air curiously hovering right in front of humans who ponder them. The first time Mike Parr, president of the American Bird Conservancy, saw one, it was feeding on blossoms of a lemon tree in California.
“It was just one of those other-worldly sites. It was almost like a religious experience,” says Parr with awe and reverence.
“When they just turn their head and suddenly their throat catches the light – it lights up with this amazing color. It’s just magical, really. It just lights up like a beacon.”
They are one of the smallest hummingbirds at just over 3 inches long- but one of the feistiest.
They fly an astonishing 3,900 miles (one-way) from Alaska where they live in the summer to Mexico- one of the longest migratory journeys of any bird in the world compared to its body size, according to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
Californians enjoy them in the spring and Rocky Mountain residents in the fall as the birds feed on flower nectar and tiny insects in high mountain meadows, backyard flowers and hummingbird feeders.
But the Rufous hummingbird, like hundreds of other species, is teetering on the edge.
On the cult of (preferred) ignorance:
Imagine buying an expensive electric vehicle that has internet connectivity but deciding to disable it. That's what a business is doing for ultra-Orthodox Jews who own Teslas in order to ensure that the drivers and their passengers don't see anything on the internet considered immodest according to rabbinical standards. The intricate details are reported in one of the latest stories from Shtetl, a new website designed to provide an inside view and a critical look at the insular world of ultra-Orthodox Jews.
Secular news organizations and mainstream Jewish journalism sites do cover the Haredi community, but their access — as outsiders — is limited.
So, Shtetl bills itself as the Haredi Free Press. The term Haredi refers to Jews who follow strict Jewish laws and reject much of modern secular culture. Shtetl is a Yiddish word that refers to the small Jewish towns formerly found in Eastern Europe. …
Moster says the stories on the Shtetl website aim to present what's often missing in the Haredi press: stories about contentious issues such as corruption, white-collar crime and sexual abuse. One recent Shtetl feature details how Haredi Jews took over a village in the Catskills by claiming it was the primary residence of Jews who spend most of their time living in Brooklyn. Another, written by Hakimi, describes a series of anonymous ads for a family court judicial candidate in one of the Haredi towns in the suburbs north of New York City. The family court race is of interest to Haredi Jews because in some contested divorce cases the less religious partner expresses a desire to leave the insular Haredi world. …
Shtetl's "warts and all" coverage of the Haredi world stands in sharp contrast to the focus of Hamodia, a Haredi daily newspaper and website. In its section about the Haredi community, there are stories about the passing of Haredi rabbis, the vandalization of kosher restaurants in Los Angeles and videos of prominent rabbis delivering a dvar torah, a talk about the holy texts that includes anecdotes and stories used to introduce concepts.
"Journalism in the Haredi community is a different animal," says Rabbi Avi Shafran, the director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America, the primary representative of Haredi Jews in the U.S. "Their goal is to present accurate good news about the community and they make no bones about that. They don't claim to be journalistic in the sense of NPR or the JTA (The Jewish Telegraphic Agency) and they're not ashamed of that."
HT: LNMM
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