Books, essays, podcast episodes, and more that I think are worth your time, plus recent cultural news that I’m paying attention to in the month of August…
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TV Series: The Bear
We finished the fourth and final season of The Bear. It wasn’t my favorite season, but I will say I deeply appreciate this show’s refusal to flinch from the messiness of the humans it portrays. No one is perfect. So many things could—and do—go wrong. People yell at each other and miss out on connections and hurt each other and screw up. And still, there’s so much beauty and love and redemption available for each and every one.
New York Times: “The App Bringing Disabled Daters Together”
A dating app for people with disabilities both seems like a great and needed way to meet people and also an unfortunate view into the reality that people with disabilities are often rejected by the typical population using other dating apps. Keep reading…
Sermon: “The Practice of Attention”
Whenever I share a podcast/sermon with all my friends and family, I realize I should share it here too because it is just that good and worth listening to. So, here you go: this sermon about The Practice of Attention (and the way we can train our attention to experience joy amidst anxiety and love amidst sorrow and hope amidst fear) got me thinking about how I can cultivate habits of gratitude that aren’t toxic positivity and live with more resilient hope.
Exploring My Strange Bible Podcast: “Life and Death in Genesis 1-3”
AND I also really appreciated Tim Mackie’s explanation of where our cultural concepts of heaven and hell come from. Hint: most of them are not from the Bible. For example, he notes that heaven and hell are never paired together in the Bible. Rather, heaven is contrasted with earth throughout. He also suggests that the Bible sees both heaven and hell as states of being that begin on earth, pathways we either continue to walk down or choose to turn away from. It’s fascinating stuff that has everything to do with reimagining the good life.
Every Child Belongs Podcast: “How Disability Changed My Understanding of God : Amy Julia Becker”
It was so fun to talk with Kim Botto about disability, belonging and belovedness on both the abstract and the nitty-gritty level. I especially loved thinking about how we can help typical teenagers maintain or begin friendships with kids with intellectual disabilities and about how my own perspective on God has changed over the past twenty years of having a child with a disability in our family.
Non-Fiction: The Case Against the Sexual Revolution by Louise Perry.
I heard Perry talk with Ross Douthat about this book a few months ago, and I am glad I followed up by reading her book in full. Perry considers herself a feminist, and she writes from the perspective of evolutionary biology rather than religious conviction. All these things combine in such a way that she returns to a more conservative/traditional sexual ethic in which she sees pornography as bad, marriage as good, and sex as something that involves more than consent. For anyone trying to move toward a sexual ethic that involves recognizing who we are as humans—mind, body, and spirit—and not just as bodies divorced from emotion and spirituality, this book offers a needed critique of our current era, though I wish she had done more to suggest how we move forward toward a more just and loving way.
Conversing Podcast: “The God of the Unfinished”
I wish Walter Brueggemann was still here to talk in person about reimagining the good life, but I’m also grateful for this conversation with Mark Labberton as they talk about what it means to be human in a world that is forgetting our humanity.
Good Faith Podcast: “Andy Crouch: Defending the Human Mind In an AI World”
I loved this conversation between Andy Crouch and Curtis Chang. I was especially grateful for the reminder that silence between humans can be a powerful form of loving, faithful presence, in contrast to silence between a human and a machine or media source where the silence is the same as absence. Embodied love cannot be replicated, and I need this reminder over and over again in our increasingly disembodied world.
Substack Live: How to Go On: Amy Julia Becker on Parenting, Disability, and Perseverance
I had a great conversation with Myles Werntz about how to endure/keep going in hard seasons of life and parenting.
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Amy Julia Becker desires to challenge assumptions about the good life, proclaim the inherent belovedness of every human being, and help us envision and build a world of belonging where everyone matters. Amy Julia invites people to reimagine the good life through her writing and speaking on disability, faith, and culture. She is the author of several books, including To Be Made Well, White Picket Fences, Small Talk, and A Good and Perfect Gift. She is a guest opinion writer for national publications and hosts two podcasts: Take the Next Step and Reimagining the Good Life. Becker is a graduate of Princeton University and Princeton Theological Seminary (MDiv). She is a member of the Disability Ministry Network and the Alliance for Disability Justice and Ethics in Reproductive Genetics. She lives with her husband and their three children in western Connecticut.
