Elsewhere this week: Book interview at Deseret News

Recovering a vision for treasuring all image bearers

Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic will be out on October 15th! It was a joy to speak about this project and how it came to be with Mariya Manzhos from Deseret News, and you can read the interview here. A taste from our conversation:

Deseret News: Tell me more about your decision to leave academia to be home with your children. It seems like a very difficult decision to make. Why did you do it?

Nadya Williams: It was difficult. In academia, if you walk away from a tenured, secure position, you’re told you may never get it again. My university had a new president and suddenly I was in a department of like 50 faculty instead of 20. My job became really miserable and it made it a lot easier to walk away and see the priorities. I asked myself: Do I want to be in a soul-sucking job or do I want to be with my children? We had already been homeschooling — my husband is also a professor. No one was sleeping ever, but it was worth it.

It sounds cliche, but I had this realization that babies don’t keep and they grow up quickly. And — yet another cliche — I thought about what priorities in our lives are eternal priorities. I turned 40 and I began asking: What am I doing with my life? What is most valuable and what isn’t? All of these things kind of came together to combine to this ultimate realization that I can make better decisions for my family and for those eternal priorities. And in that context, walking away from a miserable, secular, academic job made the most sense.

DN: You write in your book about “the problem of devaluing motherhood and children in every sphere of modern life.” How did we end up here?

NW: There are seeds of this in the 19th-century industrial revolution — the idea that you are what you produce and the idea of machines that never need to sleep and rest. Then, suddenly these expectations are being applied to everybody, including women and even children — the idea that you are just a worker and that’s all that matters.

Another important seed is the movement around birth control and abortion rights. I keep thinking about it in relation to technology and what (the British writer) Mary Harrington has written about the birth control pill being the first transhumanist technology. It’s fascinating to think about the idea we’ve created, perhaps without most people realizing it, that a healthy body is a body that cannot have children. Egg freezing, too, is being advertised to young women as a form of self-care — it’s another example of this idea: You’re a good factory worker, so get back to work and don’t have babies now when your body can do this, but freeze some eggs so maybe when you’re 40, you can think about it.

There is the idea of valuing a human life in economic terms, whether somebody’s life is worth it. It’s very crass and it keeps extending into a variety of settings and it adds up to this glorification of work: If you’re not working, if you’re not contributing to the GDP, then you’re not worth anything to society. And so in that regard, suddenly anyone who is not a perfect person is going to be worth less, or worthless…

DN: What can we learn from early Christians about valuing human dignity and life?

NW: It’s fascinating to look at the ancient world before Christianity and the parallels that we have now with the increasingly post-Christian society. For example, in the book I look at Julius Caesar and how he talks about the Gauls as the enemy. It’s such unimaginable cruelty — the idea of some people who are worth more to him dead than alive. So today, when we look at the conscious language in talking about the worth of certain people, it centers around the question of do you bring something to society or not? Is your life worth living? And that language a lot of times comes up in conversations about disability, screening for disorders like Down syndrome.

I’ve been really disturbed by what is emerging in Canada with the expansion of the Medical Assistance in Dying law. This kind of callous language around life that shows a lack of valuing of it. And that is what the early church had that was so revolutionary that we don’t even realize anymore — this idea that every single human being is priceless in God’s eyes, regardless of whether you are a man or a woman, healthy or sick in any way, whether you’re able, as a result, to contribute to the GDP, regardless of your socioeconomic status.

If you are interested, you can read the full interview at Deseret News.