The OTR Reader's Log for February, 2024

What moves the needle early in 2024?

Greetings from the brink.

What brink, you ask? The brink of insanity, perhaps. Or rather maybe just the brink of the Real, since you’ll find that when you loiter too long on its edges, you start to seem weird to the rest of the Online. Though you haven’t heard much from us of late, we have not been idle here behind the scenes at Old Time Religion. We are currently in the process of moving ourselves to the country, taking hold of nine acres and a house in need of major TLC. It amounts to a Herculean (with luck, not Sisyphean) effort by me and my little family to live more in accord with the Amish Moment that bears down upon us.

What is the Amish Moment, anyway? If you’re late to the party, or you just need a refresher, you can catch up on the concept with this posting from about a year ago. It has occurred to me that a precise explication of its imminence may be beneficial, lest anyone misunderstand and think that we are somehow calling for the eschewing of all modern technology and growing beards with no mustaches. So ready yourselves for a deeper dive in the coming weeks.

For now, however, please relax and enjoy this sampling of our recent reading. Since our recent suspension of subscription payments, any and all readers can now comment, so don’t be shy.

~ DMH

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— The Guardian reports on a new study that confirms what the skeptics have suspected all along: Human children learn better with paper than screens. This revelation poses quite the problem for modern society, however, since it seems any school worth its progressive salt has gone all in on expensive screen-based learning tools, so children can grow up as “21st century learners.” Nevertheless, it would seem this predictive engineering of education will have this effect, regardless of how damaging it actually is to the children.

— The Sexual Revolution is not dead, says Le Monde, but rather has hung on long enough to become so deformed that none of its early proponents would recognize or applaud it. This distortion is primarily because of smartphones, since the wonder devices have the power to eradicate any hint of boredom — in which we find the “pockets of unfilled time that can lead to desire.”

— This is not the fate for all young people, mind you, especially when the adults in kids’ lives guide them with fortitude and prudence. This appears to be happening up in Massachusetts at the Buxton boarding school, where students are barred from having smartphones on campus. The students aren’t forced into complete isolation, however, as the school actually buys a Light Phone for each student and teacher. One year in, the experiment seems to be going well. '

(On a personal note, I can’t recommend this shift enough. My family has opted for the aforementioned Light Phone, but there’s a reviving interest in dumb phones across the board. If you’re considering taking a similar plunge, here’s a helpful read documenting the surge and recommendations for the transition.)

— In this world of crumbling Christendom, it seems more and more disaffected but hopeful Western Christians are finding solace in the Orthodox Church. Ironically, many totter their way toward it via the enduring writings of a long-dead Anglican, C.S. Lewis.

— Paul Kingsnorth at

The Abbey of Misrule

welcomes the erosion, and believes “The West” must die if we hope to save our souls.

— In regard to another long absent favorite author, The American Conservative considers why Bill Watterson vanished. Unlike Lewis, who died all too early and at the height of his mental faculties, Watterson lives on in relative solitude and a semblance of peace, having been driven to it by the unbridled success of his comic strip, Calvin and Hobbes.

Bill Watterson, end-times prophet…

— In happier comic news, I had somehow missed that the ever-weird and irreverent strip The Far Side has made a comeback, even if the world it helped create and now comes back to may be weirdly boring.

Gary Larson, holy fool of the funny pages…

— Since I’m apparently just a glutton for the grotesque, I continue to regularly read

Mary Harrington

's evisceration of “Fourth Wave Feminism” and gender ideology. In this months-old piece, she takes the knife to Pulitzer Prize winner, Andrea Long Chu, a female-identifying man who wrote a book called Females, in which his central thesis, “Everyone is female, and everyone hates it,” encapsulates misogyny perhaps more perfectly than any male-identifying man ever could. An excerpt from Harrington:

But Andrea Long Chu is arguably following to its logical conclusion a trajectory embraced, indeed fiercely defended, by the mainstream women’s movement. For the contemporary culture of eroticised objectification Females encapsulates is inextricable from one of the keystones of contemporary female freedom: artificial contraception.

As the Catholic feminist Abigail Favale argues in The Genesis of Gender, legal contraception triggered paradigm shift in our understanding of sex and intimacy. With sex severed from the possibility of creating new life, it became normal to think of sex as “a recreational, rather than procreational, activity”. Women, meanwhile, are now thought of – and think of ourselves – as “naturally sterile beings” for whom “The procreational potential of sex is viewed as a switch that can be flipped, if desired, but whose default setting is “off ”.”

The fear occasioned by the alternative – normal female fertility – is evident in the routine contemporary framing of pregnancy, among young feminist women, as accident, calamity or even parasitic invasion. Chu’s Verso Books stablemate Sophie Lewis, for example, captures the body-horror view of pregnancy in Full Surrogacy Now, describing gestation as “a job that never stops, dominates your mood, hijacks your blood vessels and sugar supply, while slowly exploding your anatomy from the inside out.”

It’s a worthy read, if you have the heart (and stomach) for it.

— Ian Bogost at The Atlantic bravely states a conclusion many older Americans have been secretly feeling for a few years now — that the United States prematurely abandoned “the best home technology there is,” the landline telephone.

— Lastly, I really enjoyed reading about the vital effort to restore darkness to our night skies, and so, to restore our connection to the Creation and the stars with which our ancestors communed. I am hoping with our upcoming move the country, my own children can connect with the dark sky and the stars behind it.

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