Elsewhere this week: Homeschooling and Current's list of 100 Best Books of 21st century

Labors of love

Photo by Kelsy Gagnebin on Unsplash

I’m excited to see two labors of love live today. By the way, I love the photo above, because this is what all my books look like. I don’t want to highlight/underline, so I use a lot of those lovely colorful sticky strips to mark all my favorite spots in a book.

1. Current’s list of 100 Best Books of the 21st century is live today! Many thanks to

   Lucy S. R. Austen
   Dixie Dillon Lane
   Abigail W. Miller
   Church Blogmatics by Beth Felker Jones
   and other writers/readers I admire who I don’t think are on Substack, but who kindly contributed to this list.

   Such projects are always quirky and eclectic, but this one turned out to be our kind of quirky and eclectic. I already have gotten several ideas for books to add to my never-ending list from reading others’ recommendations!

   If you check out this list, I’d love to hear how many books from it you’ve read, and what you think we should have included, but didn’t! After all, the last one is everyone’s favorite sport when reading such lists, and that’s okay!

2. In my new essay on homeschooling in Christianity Today, I’m arguing that it’s all about relationships—cultivating the family with joy. I’m not saying, to be clear, that homeschooling is the only way to make this happen. We know plenty of families who are close-knit, joyful, and connected—and they don’t homeschool. But homeschooling offers an easy route to make these connections possible for my family, because we’re together so much. A taste from my argument:

   The modern life is remarkably compartmentalized. We are family members at home, but all our other roles take us elsewhere, and we must perform them only in strictly designated spaces.

   Nowhere is this more obvious than in how we handle children and career. We live in a society that is family unfriendly and built on the religion of “workism,” which places work first and family a distant (and optional) second. These priorities require compartmentalization: Kids must go to designated places for kids so adults can go to designated places for work. The result is a grueling and isolating schedule for all, especially children.

   Such a neatly organized system sounds grand in theory—if you’re a robot. But this compartmentalization isn’t working very well for us humans. The results speak for themselves: Families are more stressed than ever, more overscheduled, more overwhelmed, less connected. Anxiety for people of all ages is through the roof—and it is especially harmful for our kids, as Jonathan Haidt and Abigail Shrier have shown in their respective recent books.

   But then, the compartmentalized life was never suited to human flourishing. We take this lifestyle for granted as a necessary byproduct of the modern age, but Christians—called to integrate our whole lives to the worship and service of God—should be particularly well-equipped to see that our lifestyle has gone very wrong.

   You can read the complete essay HERE.