#bratten weiss

[tabernacleheart]

Sharing [my living] space with [inevitable insect] interlopers [is] not comfortable. [But such a] proximity to nature [can be] morally instructive... it [reminds] me to pause and reflect, consider whether my actions might do harm, and take time to mitigate that harm, even to a creature of no use to me, a creature tiny and alien and with no saving grace of fluff or cuteness.

[Saint] Thomas Aquinas believed that cruelty to nonhuman animals was immoral... because a person who made a habit of being cruel to animals would likely become hardened enough to be cruel to other humans too. [This presents] an important point about our basic moral dispositions. Once we become comfortable causing suffering in one area, we’ll probably have few compunctions about causing more suffering somewhere else. The ability to cause pain, especially pointless pain, hardens us. Working to create a culture that is more compassionate toward all living things ought to benefit all of us, humans and nonhumans alike.

Learning to pause and reflect before doing harm to another living thing is important for two reasons. First, for the sake of the living things themselves. Tiny beetles and weird worms may seem repellant to us, but that’s just us projecting our emotions onto them. They shouldn’t have to suffer just because we can’t control our own emotions. Theologically, an earthworm or ant may declare the glory of God just as much as we do— more, perhaps, because they tend not to wage war or wreck whole ecosystems.

Second, it’s good for us to have reverence for those mysterious little lives, going about their business, and to recognize even in their strangeness and foreignness a kind of beauty. We become better people when our response to that which is new or different is one of wonder and respect, instead of fear and loathing.

Rebecca Bratten Weiss

[bottlecap-press]

From Rebecca Bratten Weiss' chapbook, The Gods We Have Eaten, available from Bottlecap Press!

[arcticdementor]

The Christian Century is a magazine for the senescent liberal Protestant Mainline. When I heard earlier this month that it had published an article exposing the presence of white supremacists at farmer’s markets [UPDATE: Sorry, I forgot to post the link to the piece.— RD], I laughed it off as another example of the dingbat left policing the boundaries. It should not surprise anyone that unsavory people enjoy a delicious tomato as well as the next person. If a Communist or a neo-Nazi enjoys locally grown fruits and vegetables, I can congratulate him on his good taste in food while rejecting his politics. This is called being a grown-up. When this controversy arose in 2019 in Bloomington, Indiana, the adult mayor of that city resisted calls by progressives to kick allegedly white supremacist farmers out of the farmer’s market, saying that as long as the accused vendors were following the law, he was not going to play the role of thought police.

It turns out, though, that the article’s author, a vigilant progressive named Rebecca Bratten Weiss, identifies poor old Self as a gateway drug to the Ku Klux Kale:

…

“Polite Christian ethno-nationalism”? Golly. I wonder how the neurotic Bratten Weiss figures that. Then again, there doesn’t have to be logic for these people to make a vicious accusation like that. If they feel it — and they are always sniffing out wrongthinkers — it must be true. Do I even need to point out here that she clearly hasn’t read The Benedict Option?

Judging by her self-description on her website, Bratten Weiss has a rich inner life:

She has spoken at various academic and cultural events on topics ranging from Nietzsche’s aesthetics and Bronte’s feminism, to ecology in literature and vulgarity in religion.

Rebecca recently completed work on The Dirt, an eco-feminist novel exploring the impact of the fracking industry on a dysfunctional Ohio family.

She is also in the process of revising The Peacemakers, a speculative literary sci-fi in which women in a near-future matriarchy control men via advanced AI technology.

She is a member of the George Sandinistas, and one of the founders of the Muse Writers Collective.

…

I had never heard of this unhappy woman until a friend sent me her Christian Century essay last night. Apparently she is a Catholic who has a Patheos blog in which she writes things like this:

How surprising to learn that she used to be an adjunct teacher of English at Franciscan University of Steubenville. And she is some kind of ecumenist, as we learn from this 2019 essay. Excerpts:

Driving home with a load of hay, listening to Johnny Cash, wondering what I could burn as a sacrifice to Hecate, I start thinking that probably not many women on this road, driving truckloads of hay, and listening to Cash, are also contemplating witchcraft. Does this make me necessarily more interesting? Or is it automatically less interesting, because “being interesting” is a motive force for me? Not the only motive force, but maybe it taints everything it touches, so there’s a certain embarrassingly meta quality about all my love, or curiosity, or revenge.

Meta or not, the desire to burn something as a sacrificial offering is real. Thinking about burning is real. I have a truck full of a combustible material, and my truck is driven by combustion. I’m rumbling along on the cusp of a flame.

Bless her heart, I do not doubt it! More:

The internal combustion engine is insufficient for the goddess, however, and I have no intention of burning the hay. The questions about burnt offerings become pragmatic. Like, where to do it? If I start a fire in the back yard the kids will all come gathering around, asking if they can roast marshmallows. But I can’t just go wandering off into the neighbor’s field and start burning things (or can I?).

Then there’s the question of what to burn. Something I value, or something I hate? Which would Hecate prefer?

If I get the answers wrong, who knows, some solid citizen might call and have them send the firetrucks after me, and then it’s pretty awkward if I’d opted to burn, say, the testicles of some Nazi dudes who just happened to be scampering across my backyard at the right time. When I just happened to have my scythe handy. Oops. Now I have this whole conflagration of testicles to explain.

Even if it’s what Hecate wants, the fact is, when you’re castrating Nazis and burning their balls as an offering to ancient Greek goddesses, people tend not to be very understanding. They’re all “oh, the incivility!” Or “this is why Trump keeps winning.”

Now I’m worried that I went too far there, talking about castrating Nazis. Now I’m worried that I’m not interesting or edgy, but instead the kind of person from whom you instinctively back away.

…

Anyway, as is often the case with censorious progressives, the witchy Bratten Weiss misses the irony of her condemning right-wing farmer’s market types for their exclusivity, in an essay in which she appears to claim that farmer’s markets should be zealously defended as a safe space for progressives and fellow travelers. Down with fascist eggplant! In fact, she hates localism itself, if localists are anything other than progressives:

…

Uh oh! People like Bratten Weiss ruin everything. When I wrote Crunchy Cons back in the mid-2000s, I was delighted to draw attention to people like the fundamentalist Christian family in north Texas who raised meat organically because they believed that was the best way to honor God’s Creation. There’s a quote in the book from the patriarch who says how surprised he was to discover that he had more in common with some hippie organic growers than he did with fellow Christian Republicans who lived a more conventional suburban life. Funny, but these folks weren’t threatened by the progressives who shared their love of organic, small-scale agriculture, and neither were the progressive small farmers threatened by them. They found common ground, and even solidarity. I guess Bratten Weiss, who is two tics away from a gran mal seizure, would want to cut the balls off the fundamentalist family’s sons and sacrifice them to a pagan goddess or something.

Bratten Weiss may be a Catholic, but she is definitely a Puritan. I was recently talking with a wealthy conservative white Catholic friend from the South who was explaining to me his discovery of the value of localism. He and his wife bought some land in the historically black part of their town, and are using it to help their black neighbors build community. They let black folks and others use the land for a farmer’s market, and for meetings between black community leaders and the local police, to build closer relationships (he showed me a photo on his smartphone of a recent gathering). He told me that even as relations between the black community and police in other parts of the country have grown worse, they have strengthened in his town, because it turns out that a lot of black people there don’t hate the police; they just want better policing. He talked about a woman black pastor in his town who makes this work of community-building possible. And he talked about long-term plans to restore what was once a thriving commercial sector of black-owned businesses.

My friend said that he has grown disillusioned with national politics, and now focuses on building up localism. This guy is very conservative. I’m guessing that his black woman pastor friend is … not. But they work together because they both want to make the town they share into a better place for them all to live. If Bratten Weiss showed up in their town, she would no doubt do her best to drive these two apart to purify the movement. People like that — and we have them on the Right too — are so exhausting. They are the kind of people from whom you instinctively back away. Unfortunately, they hold a lot of cultural and institutional power right now in America. Which is a big reason that we are in such a mess.

[the-perks-of-being-black]

[revmeg]

The tomatoes are red like gems or poison.  You don't notice until suddenly there is another something inside of you, and it is grieving, because it can never eat tomatoes in September again, or touch the bodies that it loved, or even take a proper shit... You feel so sad for it, the lost thing. Then you realize you never swallowed a ghost at all and it was just you all along.

from “In The Garden” in Talking to Snakes by R. Bratten Weiss, p. 10

[sirenmouths]

writing roundup:

POETRY:

ON THE SEVENTH DAY GOD SAYS: WHAT YOU’VE GOT IS VIRGIN CHARM & A KNIFE IN YOUR POCKET by Katie Condon

Nashville by Tiana Clark

Chrome by Paul Tran

Ghazal for White Hen Pantry by Jamila Woods

Bigly, Two Headed Slake and the mulatto is a serpent palindrome by Xandria Phillips

Poem in Which the Writer Sees Himself in an Old Textbook, 1943 and Ode to the Belt by sam sax

From the Desire Field by Natalie Diaz

The Body of García Lorca by p.e. garcia 

Ode to Hushpuppy & Peripatetic by Joy Priest 

Not Because You Have To by Emily O’Neill Black, Poured Directly into the Wound by Patricia Smith

Notes on the Below by Ada Limón

Brothers by Omar Sakr

Women’s Work by Natalie Scenters-Zapico

Love Song to the Man Announcing Powwows and Rodeos by Kenzie Allen

How To Get Over by t’ai freedom ford

After My Mother Calls by Jeremy Clark

Afield by Rita Dove

Cattails by Nikky Finney

enough food and a mom by francine j. harris 

In the Language by Shane McCrae

Barbie Change Gets Her Hair Done by Victoria Chang

Black Woods by Kevin Prufer

untitled by Brenna Twohy

Saguaros by Javier Zamora

What Was Left of the Sestina after Looking at a Photo Album of My Father’s Squadron by Brad Trumpfheller

Night Shift by Jericho Brown

Dark Devotional by Rebecca Bratten Weiss

Father Fragments (Or, Yellow Ochre) by Analicia Soleto 

Two Poems by Aricka Foreman 

Club 2718 & This is a review for Blue in Green by Miles Davis by Taylor Johnson

Coverage by Julian Randall

Ars Moriendi and Some Boys Aren’t Born At All by Logan February

XV by Julio Serrano Echeverría, translated by José García Escobar

Febrile by Gabrielle Octavia Rucker

St. Francis Disrobes by Paige M. Lewis

Redacted from a Know-Your-Rights Training Agenda— by Cynthia Dewi Oka

you’ve always been a border simulator by Gabriel Dozal

Chirality by Vanessa Angelica Villarreal

Cardi B Tells Me About Myself by Eboni Hogan

Ode to Lithium #6: Barometer by Shira Erlichman

On Glorification by Siaara Freeman

(Persephone’s Husband Is Not Important And He Says) and After the Curse Was Lifted, Midas by C. Bain

The Dawn and Snow White’s Mother by Khaya “Khalypso” Osbourne

Nomenclature by Kristin Chang

Al Quds (Jerusalem) by Khalid Abu Dawas

The Pieces We Are Not by Sarah Kay

With my hands around the throats of my mother’s marigolds by Hafizah Geter

Ji Haushi by Chekwube O. Danladi

Cuba, 1962 by Ai

A Memorable Fancy by Sina Queyras

A Memory by Saeed Jones

How Can Black People Write About Flowers at a Time Like This by Hanif Abdurraqib 

Incantation by Chris Abani

Feet by Ross Gay

There’s No Wrong Way to Eat a Reese’s by Jeremy Radin

FICTION:

Bespoke by Zachary Doss

The Quantum Theory of Suffering or Why I Look at the Moon by Natalie Diaz

Girlies by Cara Dempsey 

Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers by Alyssa Wong

Who is Like God and Welcome by Akwaeke Emezi

Night Wind by Eloghosa Osunde

Domestic Violence by Madeline Ashby

NONFICTION:

A Letter to My Mother That She Will Never Read by Ocean Vuong

Hikikomori: Salt Constellations by Jennifer S. Chang 

Why Your Mother Can’t Drive by Cinelle Barnes

My True South by Jesmyn Ward

CRITICISM/OTHER:

Looking for Surprises in Senegal: photos by Jake Michaels; text by Kerri McDonald

Women and Femmes Unite: A Structural and Political Analysis of Femininity by B.B. Buchanan

A Refuge for Jae-In Doe: Fugues in the Key of English Major by Seo-Young Chu tw: rape

A Discussion Re: Courage by Ashley C. Ford

The Unlikely Hiker by Emily Prado with advice from Jenny Bruso

You’re Not Overreacting by Imani Shanté

Archiving While Black by Ashley Farmer

Lil Wayne rhymes with suicide tw: death

[kitchen-light]

I might be a Grecian urn speaking truth, or maybe a jar of oil, never running out.

R. Bratten Weiss, from her poem ‘Earth Goddess’

[revolutionoftenderness]

Poetry Friday:

“A thorn tree stands near the cattle pasture, in the winter, bare,  startling: the kind they used to make a crown for God. It seemed good  to me that it was there that day, when I was angry and the wind was too.  Though some may seek a rainbow, or returning dove, as signs of solace,  I like to see a thorn tree, or the dry whitened ribs of a doe dead last year.  I like to give money to a street bum, all I have...”

- Rebecca Bratten Weiss, from “The Thorn Tree,” from Convivium, volume 1

[simchafisher]

Did Fulton Sheen witness and cover up the sexual assault of a child?

Did Fulton Sheen witness and cover up the sexual assault of a child?

Did Fulton Sheen witness and cover up the sexual assault of a child?

Less than a week after Sheen’s beatification was announced,  Rebecca Bratten Weiss’ Patheos blog echoed recent chatter on Twitter, sharing text that alleges Sheen saw a priest sexually abusing a child.The text claims Sheen walked in as the abuse happened, but he merely told the priest to put his pants back on, called the victim…

[monicandrsonus]

Three Popes (One a Saint) Called Abortion “Murder”

. . . But There is a Particular Time and Place for Such Language My friend, Rebecca Bratten Weiss, co-founder of the New Pro-Life Movement, has written: Unfortunately, just as there is a genuine anti-life attitude on the part of some abortion proponents . . . the readiness to ignore questions of culpability and cry […] from https://www.patheos.com/blogs/davearmstrong/2019/04/three-popes-one-a-saint-called-abortion-murder.html

[jkinak04]

Baby Jesus In a Cage? Yes, It’s Political | Rebecca Bratten Weiss So, really, there's nothing especially new and out of the ordinary about depicting the Holy Family in a condition of instability and danger. Source: Baby Jesus In a Cage? Yes, It’s Political | Rebecca Bratten Weiss

[carlmccolman]

Rebecca Bratten Weiss: Silence, Feminism, and Literature (Episode 42) This week’s episode marks the one-year anniversary of Encountering Silence! Our pilot episode was released a year ago today.

[wcatradio]

WCAT Radio Christian Democracy with Jack Quirk and Special Guest Rebecca Bratten Weiss

[queeringthechurch]

'New Pro-Life Movement' co-founder loses job, attacked online | National Catholic Reporter

‘New Pro-Life Movement’ co-founder loses job, attacked online | National Catholic Reporter

Catholic bloggers and others are rallying to support yet another Catholic smeared by right-wing Catholic media last week. Rebecca Bratten Weiss believes the same colleagues who gathered “evidence” for the negative article about her also contributed to her adjunct teaching contract not being renewed this year.

Weiss, an adjunct literature professor at Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio…

[expatminister]

There has never been a time when the Church was not torn between that invasion and that treason. It was so, for instance, in the Victorian time, Darwinian 'competition,' in commerce or race conflict, was every bit as brazen an atheist assault, in the nineteenth century, as the Bolshevist No-God movement in the twentieth century. To brag of brute prosperity, to admire the most muddly millionaires who had cornered wheat by a trick, to talk about the 'unfit' (in imitation of the scientific thinker who would finish them off because he cannot even finish his own sentence-- unfit for what?)--all that is as simply and openly Anti-Christian as the Black Mass.

GK Chesterton (h/t Kara Slade & Rebecca Bratten Weiss on FB)

[revmeg]

In the morning I ask myself whether I am taking over the world enough, and though my friends assure me that yes, I totally am, it's hard to believe, since no one is blowing fanfares on trumpets, or giving me twin silver tigers on a leash. No one is throwing roses at me when I go slogging down these dirt roads in my big rubber boots. If I have a milkshake, it is bringing no one to my yard, except for ants.

from “Cocaine Milkshake” in Talking to Snakes by R. Bratten Weiss, p. 5