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A small update and a Merry Christmas!

Warm holiday greetings to one and all!

My family and I are in the midst of the Christmastide celebrations. Christmas Day began with a vigil service the night of the 24th, family and festivities on the 25th, and it hasn’t stopped. Yesterday was what our English and Commonwealth cousins celebrate as Boxing Day¹, which falls on the liturgical feast of St. Stephen, Deacon and Martyr. Boxing Day has nothing at all to do with fisticuffs… unless you went to my church, in which case our priest, in addition to eggnog and whiskey and meatballs, also brought a left-hand boxing glove after service and allowed all the children present to give their best left hook straight into his gut. St. Stephen caught his death of stones; and Fr. Tony? He caught these hands.

Assuming the day goes well and Fr. Tony isn’t peeing blood after his thorough beating, we’ll be back at church tonight for the feast of St. John, and again tomorrow for the feast of the Holy Innocents.

It is a moment dense with preparation for me. I am working on an essay that is due to a publication at the end of this week and still have some writing left before it’s ready. Going into the new year, my wife and I have home projects spanning 2024 that we will take some time to detail within the next couple days. I have spent the last 4-5 months at work laying the framework and building the infrastructure for a robust training program that extends beyond our field technicians to all employees, a labor of love that got our company president’s stamp of approval and the rollout of which begins first of the year. My church has asked me to be the catechist for this year’s group of 13 to 18 year old catechumens, preparing them for our bishop’s visit and the sacrament of Confirmation in April, a labor that begins the first Sunday in January. Add to that my duties as a husband and father, chores around the home, my daily prayers, my chickens and cats, and the other minutia of my life?

You could say I’m spread a skosh thin. Excited but stretched.

But I owe you a Christmas gift, dear reader, seeing as I haven’t published anything in a while now. And if it isn’t too presumptuous, the gift I present to you is a trio, not of frankincense and gold and myrrh, but of essays. Earlier this year I wrote these pieces at the request of a small publication. What began as a single essay quickly multiplied, growing another head each time I tried to slash it down, and due to their length, their number, and their density, the magazine politely declined them, saying they’d be a better fit for a different audience. As you might remember, I went to the Front Porch Republic Conference earlier this year. It occurred to me: what if I submitted these essays containing dozens of hours of reading and thinking, hours of conversations and interviews, and 7,500 words to FPR? Would they accept them?

Indeed, they would. After some helpful comments and edits from FPR’s Editor-in-Chief Jeff Bilbro, the essays were published across three Wednesdays this month, with the third and final piece published today.

In this newsletter I will link my Craft and Theology essays with short descriptions of each and encourage you to go read them on FPR’s website. Share them. Link to them. Leave comments in their comment sections. Poke around the other essays and authors and books on the Front Porch website. FPR has graciously allowed me to share my essays in their entirety with my subscribers here, so in the coming weeks I will send each one out to you in its own email.

For now, the summaries.

1. Craft and Theology: The Renaissance

In this piece, I introduce readers to the idea that our labor in the material world might have something to do with our thoughts about God. But how? I look to St. Francis of Assisi, Hugh of St. Victor, and Ivan Illich to help me explain the ways in which “the doctrines of handy-work” and the doctrines of God mutually support and illuminate one another.

It almost feels heretical to say that at the center of our religion, indeed our existence, is a God that can be wounded and broken, but this is precisely the Christian claim. We live in a world that can be degraded, and God entered that very degradation in Christ. So might there be a connection between what we do in the world and this world’s wounded God? What was St. Francis intuiting that might be instructive for our thinking on (the) matter? What does physically ordering the material world have to do with our thoughts and interactions with God?

2. A Renaissance is Upon Us

The second essay makes the acquaintance of several schools that are busy about the work of performing the marriage liturgy between Work and Theology. Or, more plainly, I introduce the reader to schools that are either focused primarily on theology or the trades, but require the other as part of their programming. They didn’t just stop at essay one and think, “Ah, what a splendid idea,” and then do nothing. Rather, they created entire curricula around this idea that work in the world and the God of this world might overlap, and therefore students ought to pay attention to those areas where they do.

It seems to me that all of the schools, regardless of particular emphasis, are aiming in the same direction: at the integration of entire humans–mind, character, spirit, and body. . . [W]ith the schools listed above, taking up a hammer, let’s say, is an embodied act that demands the recruitment of the interior life such that what its face is applied to is ordered rightly: both to spec, making it technically good, and to Jesus, making it liturgically oriented. Tech support and Our Lord ought to be pleased with our good work.

3. Craft and Theology: The Reason

In the final essay, I make a feeble attempt to answer the question, “Why is this happening now?” The schools I mention in the second piece, and many schools like them, have nearly all started in the last five years or will see their first students in 2024. Why? What caused this resurgence? What is the reason? There are so many that could be given, many of which have been treated at length—mostly economic and sociological—, but I focus on some philosophy and a possible theological understanding of the phenomenon.

We thought we wanted an easier life. We thought we wanted to be more comfortable, more often. We thought that in outsourcing the difficulties, frustrations, and exertions involved in learning skills and wielding them to earn our daily bread, we’d save ourselves time, time that we could spend in other, more enjoyable, leisurely pursuits. Perhaps we did want these things, but we weren’t ready for what it would cost us: our agency and, with it, our sense of identity. Now we have all the time in the world, and we waste it doomscrolling; umpteen hours per year freed up from physical toil only to be inflicted with crippling emotional toil; we gave up gripping tools and lost grip of ourselves.

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Thank you for your time and attention! I hope the holiday season is a bright and happy one for you. For those for whom it is not: each day gets a little brighter from here on out. Each day a bit greener. Each day closer to the warmth and life of Spring. Cling to the Light.

May all your labors be blessed.

1. Seems as though it’s gone the way of America’s Thanksgiving-adjacent holiday, Black Friday. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxing_Day