I moved to Houston!
*Welcome to another edition of the #Nerdflow Newsletter!*
Apologies for the delay! I didn’t send a newsletter at the end of June because my wife and I were in the middle of moving from Long Island to Houston. This means you’ll get a July double-header!
I’m mostly settled in at the new apartment. Houston has amazing food that’s making me nervous about fitting into my clothes. Also, it’s extremely humid and it’s rained (albeit scattered) like every single day since we arrived a few weeks ago. But I’m looking forward to exploring this place more and connecting with people IRL. If you have any recommendations, let me know!
My brain is fried because of the move and because I just finished drafting a new essay. So, for the top of this newsletter, I’ll just share a quote from my readings that I really liked…
Despite widespread belief that race is a uniquely modern construct, many elements of the key discourses on race were already present in the Middle Ages. Climate-based theories that black skin develops from the heat of the sun were well articulated long before the fourteenth century. Literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries already shows a preoccupation with skin color and the coding of black as evil and white as good. Law codes of fifteenth-century Spain exhibit a preoccupation with “purity of blood,” and literary works from Germany and France indicate that despite conversion a trace, or taint, of infidel blood could remain and preclude complete integration. All medieval European societies showed legal and literary fears of miscegenation.
-Lynn T. Ramey in Black Legacies: Race and the European Middle Ages
What I’m Writing
Last month, I interviewed historian Keisha N. Blain about her new book Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America. We talked about Hamer's faith, the continuing fight for voting rights, and more. Here’s a snippet:
Republicans are currently attempting to enshrine minority rule by limiting the pool of voters, and this is exactly what Hamer was fighting against in Mississippi during the 1960s. When she joined the Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee (SNCC) in 1962, she recognized the illegitimacy of elections that denied the majority of residents a chance to participate.
Read the full interview here.
This month, the essay collection The God Beat: What Journalism Says about Faith and Why It Matters came out and features my first ever anthologized essay! Learn more about the book here.
Writing Life Tip
Experiencing an issue as you write a story? Write about it in the story.
The thing about writing creatively is that everything can potentially be material, including the writing process itself. Writers experience all sorts of tensions as they write. “How can I write about this tragedy without being exploitative?” “Will I offend someone if I say this?” “Why am I struggling in my research to find the necessary facts to finalize this paragraph?” One classic tool in the writer’s arsenal is explicitly acknowledging these tensions within the writing itself. Turn the problem into material. Lemons to limonada.
For example, here’s my modest attempt in the essay I wrote about disinformation and Isidore of Seville (aka the patron saint of the internet):
Speaking of disinformation, I, myself, struggled with this dynamic in the process of writing this essay. How do you know if something is true? If enough people share the same thing, does that make it true? Based on my internet searches, I initially thought that Pope John Paul II had, in fact, made Isidore the official patron saint of the internet. But upon further investigation, this turned out to be a rumor that, nevertheless, got picked up by The Atlantic, CNN, Gizmodo, and several Catholic sites such as Catholic.net. If scribe after scribe copies a falsehood or an error in a text, it eventually gathers the weight of consensus.
This essay idea, including the pitch, began with the assumption that Isidore was the patron saint of the internet. But it wasn’t until my second or third draft, after doing more research, that I learned that this was wrong! What did I do? I realized that including this trip up within the piece actually resonated with one of its major themes.
Of course, like any other device, writers have to be careful not to overuse it. We’d all get tired if the bulk of essays we read consisted of writers telling us about their problems of trying to write their stories. But it’s good to know that this device is a creative option on the table when appropriate.
What I’m Reading
The 2020 Census of American Religion by Public Religion Research Institute
Are You a Boy? Or Are You a Girl? by Chris Karnadi
Why Is the Country Panicking About Critical Race Theory? by Spencer Bokat-Lindell
Book: Black Legacies: Race and the European Middle Ages by Lynn T. Ramey
Song I Love
This feels obligatory…
Selena - Disco Medley