I’m revamping the Friday link-drop. Rather than four articles, I’m going to share one web article, one journal article, one podcast or video, and one primary source (some visual, textual, or natural artifact from the past that historians can use to interpret that past). Let me know what you think!
Article - Pandemic Homeschooling
Several readers were home educated or home educators, so this may be of interest. Suzy Weiss, in a guest post for Common Sense, wrote a great report on pandemic homeschooling. After accompanying students and parents through a bewildering series of pandemic challenges and adaptive responses, Weiss speculates:
While the hoodie-sporting-Ivy League drop-out embodied the tech mogul of the early 2000s, next-gen innovators may not even bother applying to Harvard in the first place. They may not have a transcript to apply with. In the not too distant future, prospective employers may skip the old question “Where did you go to school?” in favor of “What did your parents teach you?” Generation Alpha — those born after 2009 — will learn not in the old institutions but in repurposed apartments, backyards and garages, public libraries, museums and dairy farms.
It’s an intriguing proposition. You can read the rest of the piece below.
Journal Article - The Trouble with Wilderness
This week the journal article is technically a book chapter. In 1995, environmental historian William Cronon wrote “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” It’s a masterpiece of environmental history. Every once in a while I go back and read it. After analyzing how humans have thought about “wilderness” in the past, Cronon suggests that we should:
abandon the dualism that sees the tree in the garden as artificial—completely fallen and unnatural—and the tree in the wilderness as natural—completely pristine and wild. Both trees in some ultimate sense are wild; both in a practical sense now depend on our management and care. We are responsible for both, even though we can claim credit for neither. Our challenge is to stop thinking of such things according to set of bipolar moral scales in which the human and the nonhuman, the unnatural and the natural, the fallen and the unfallen, serve as our conceptual map for understanding and valuing the world. Instead, we need to embrace the full continuum of a natural landscape that is also cultural, in which the city, the suburb, the pastoral, and the wild each has its proper place, which we permit ourselves to celebrate without needlessly denigrating the others. We need to honor the Other within and the Other next door as much as we do the exotic Other that lives far away—a lesson that applies as much to people as it does to (other) natural things. In particular, we need to discover a common middle ground in which all of these things, from the city to the wilderness, can somehow be encompassed in the word “home.” Home, after all, is the place where finally we make our living. It is the place for which we take responsibility, the place we try to sustain so we can pass on what is best in it (and in ourselves) to our children.
Beautiful, isn’t it? The full article is available here.
Podcast - Jeff Cavins and Satisfaction
I thoroughly enjoy Jeff Cavins’ podcast. It feels like a warm conversation over coffee. In last week’s episode, Cavins asked: “Am I satisfied with God?” For those of us who are religious or Catholic, that may not really cross our minds that often. But what does satisfaction look like? How and why are we dissatisfied? What does that say about our relationships with God and the world? What does that say about our priorities? Here’s a bit from Cavins:
If we see satisfaction in life as something that we have to generate, then maybe it is simply a race for the finish line. But if we are created to share in the life of Jesus, or divinization, to be satisfied with God, then we can only receive this satisfaction from Him. And this satisfaction is not only temporal, in this life, but eternal.
You can listen to the episode here, or wherever you listen to podcasts by searching for The Jeff Cavins Show.
Primary Source - The Virtual Louvre
Many museums went virtual while the world locked down. One that I particularly enjoyed was the Pet!te Galer!e from the Louvre. I’ve never been to Paris, so this was a delight. Obviously a virtual gallery pales by comparison to an in-person tour, but it’s a great way to explore curated art collections.
While digital galleries give us access to painted and sculpted primary sources, they themselves are also primary sources from the coronavirus pandemic—traces revealing that, when faced with global lockdowns, sometimes we turned to art.
You can visit the gallery here.
That’s it for this week.
Have a great weekend!
See you Thursday.