A mother whose child was found dead after she gave birth alone in her cell in HM Prison Bronzefield, the largest women’s prison in Europe, should never have been remanded in the first place, the Bishop of Gloucester, the Rt Revd Rachel Treweek, said this week.

The independent investigation by the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman (PPO) into the death of “Baby A” was published last week. It highlights a catalogue of failings, including calls from the baby’s mother, Ms A, which went unanswered during the night of the birth. The situation for pregnant women in Bronzefield is “symptomatic of a national absence of policies and pathways for pregnant women in custody”, it says, and the Prison Service “must take this opportunity to improve the outcomes for pregnant prisoners so that this tragic event is not repeated”.

Ms A gave birth on the night of 26 September 2019. The report notes that she had a “traumatic childhood”, and was known to local authority children’s services from birth: “Years of trauma meant she struggled to form relationships of trust with agencies attempting to engage with her.”

Before being remanded to Bronzefield, charged with robbery on 14 August 2019, she had refused all maternity care in the community, and was thought to be misusing alcohol and drugs. Once in prison, she refused to attend appointments for scans. Although she told a nurse that she would kill herself or someone else if her baby was taken from her, she was not put under suicide monitoring. On the night of the birth, she should have been checked by a nurse three times a day, and at least twice during the night, but this did not happen.

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Spoke to the Bishop for Prisons, Rachel Treweek, about the awful case of Ms A and her baby. The Ombudsman’s report is so disturbing, particularly because many of the failings identified had been highlighted before https://t.co/NXy4hI3Uog

— Madeleine Davies (@MadsDavies) October 1, 2021

There is an unsettling disconnect in the rhythms of South Carolina these days, when normalcy and crisis clash and co-reign.

More than a year and a half into the coronavirus pandemic that has killed some 12,000 South Carolinians — nearly 1,900 dead in the past month alone, as the fatality rate speeds up — early fall life looks much like it always has for many people who crowd into restaurants, sporting events, concerts and church services.

While tens of thousands gather in college football stadiums, hospitals strain under a worsening surge of COVID-19 patients. While one community mourns the deaths of two schoolchildren, among COVID’s youngest victims, passionate crowds fill school board and council chambers to protest mask mandates. While lines of cars wait for hours at a drive-thru coronavirus testing site in the state capital, half of the state’s eligible residents still wait or refuse to be vaccinated.

The discord is striking in that each of these moments coexist with the others — the mirth alongside the sorrow, the fear alongside the vitriol.

As the pandemic worsens, these clashing moments mingle across the Palmetto State.

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Tens of thousands gather in college football stadiums, while hospital ICUs filled with hundreds verge on chaos in South Carolina. As the pandemic worsens, clashing moments mingle in day-to-day life across the state. https://t.co/PwQIlYN8Ou

— The State Newspaper (@thestate) October 4, 2021

Embodiment’s centrality in the human experience has implications for the Church. Certainly since its earliest days the Church has gathered, whether in secret or public, in catacombs or cathedrals. Perhaps the most frequent rationale for such gathering comes from Hebrews 10:24–25: “And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.”

What is so vital and unique about gathering for church that God commands it? The answer lies in the historic understanding of Christian worship as sacramental; that is, God communes with man through tangible means that deliver God’s work in Christ to humanity. Gospel. If this is what happens in church, streams or downloads just won’t cut it.

Perhaps then, a faulty understanding of worship lies behind why so many churches rapidly turned to online church and consider it a viable option. And, contrary to what seems a logical assumption, it has not just been low-church Protestant traditions embracing online worship. High-church traditions from Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy to Anglicanism and Lutheranism—even with their elevated view of the ministerial office, the sacraments, and liturgical worship—have not been immune to digitalization. In my denominational home, the LCMS, which takes seriously historic orthodoxy, worship practice, and Christ’s bodily presence in the Eucharist, online communion was endorsed in some quarters, though the Synod officially dismissed the practice.

What this reveals is that experiences of digitality in every other life domain have seeped into worship practices and are superseding longstanding theologies of worship and their doctrinal underpinnings. Couple this with the widespread understanding of humans as “thinking things” or “feeling things,” and no matter one’s denominational affiliation, no longer is worship primarily sacramental and theological; it is individual and anthropological.

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After Zoom Church: Restoring the Real in Christian Worship https://t.co/7h9HC9tL6K

— Public Discourse (@PublicDiscourse) September 28, 2021

Although the unalloyed logo (a “childlike cartoon face of indeterminate ethnicity”) possesses a facial affect that almost forces the onlooker to smile with satisfaction, when Schmidt mingles it with his own face he sours. Wallace’s image does not sugar the icon’s awful truth. Men who yearn for marriage but are consumed by the competing demands of work are innately dissatisfied: cut off from the daily demands, the “domestic discipline,” the saving need to sacrifice for family, their identification with work becomes overwhelming. The atomized “self” is an extraordinarily powerful invention, and it frees us from inherited obligations and forms, institutions and norms. But there is always a catch. The self, if sometimes experienced as expansive and massive, is intrinsically small.

“What is love?” asks Nietzsche’s Last Man: “What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?’ thus asks the last man, and blinks. The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small . . . One still loves one’s neighbor and rubs against him, for one needs warmth.” Notice the dynamic at play: the last man, who makes everything small, blinks at the biggest things, but his pusillanimous state does not leave him unsettled. Schmidt, on the contrary, recognizes and balks at his own smallness—he has eyes for the sacred and yearns to be transcended but does not know how; gazing at the distant dots of the cosmos and even using them as guides, he instantiates one of the riddling problems of our age: marriage remains a lodestar for many, but exemplary (if flawed) marriages—which mix sacramental mysteries with utter practicalities—are declining with terrible speed, a phenomenon exacerbated by an excessive identification of self and work.

David Foster Wallace’s story smokes our minds with the mushrooming loneliness of his atomic protagonist. Schmidt’s “self” has lost and has been remade in the image of his abstracted and sophistic workplace. Chesterton was fundamentally worried that capitalism’s logic would wear away at the deep roots of the family. In “Mister Squishy,” we watch not the atoms being smashed, but the progeny of this fission, circling his job in an earthbound orbit, unable to bond, bouncing off the walls of his condo. A conscientious employee, exemplary even. A smashed man, sickly squishy, hard to digest.

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The Uneven Race Between Work and Marriage
by Joshua Hren of @WisebloodBooks https://t.co/B7dHhwtNIR #fridaymorning #CatholicTwitter #FridayThoughts #Catholic #FridayVibes #religion #FridayMotivation #theology

— Church Life Journal (@ChurchLifeND) June 11, 2021

Most high, all powerful, all good Lord!
All praise is Yours, all glory, all honor, and all blessing.

To You, alone, Most High, do they belong.
No mortal lips are worthy to pronounce Your name.

Be praised, my Lord, through all Your creatures,
especially through my lord Brother Sun,
who brings the day; and You give light through him.
And he is beautiful and radiant in all his splendor!
Of You, Most High, he bears the likeness.

Be praised, my Lord, through Sister Moon and the stars;
in the heavens You have made them bright, precious and beautiful.

On his feast day #otd 4 Oct:
St Francis of Assisi preaches to the birds,
Bodleian Library MS. Auct. D. 3. 2, fol. 122r pic.twitter.com/z29s3vDSPb

— John McCafferty (@jdmccafferty) October 4, 2021

Most high, omnipotent, good Lord, grant unto thy people grace to renounce gladly the vanities of this world; that, following the way of blessed Francis, we may for love of thee delight in thy whole creation with perfectness of joy; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

https://t.co/7SYx3mP9ca

— wyclif ⚓ (@wyclif) October 4, 2021

Almighty God, who art the author of all spiritual gifts: Bestow upon thy Church in this our day the grace of knowledge, to apprehend the fullness of divine truth, and of utterance to declare that truth to others; that the testimony of Christ may be confirmed among us, and in everything we may be enriched in him, even thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord.

October sunrise in the Highlands. pic.twitter.com/lVNjfXCwQV

— Dan Snow (@thehistoryguy) October 3, 2021

Praise the LORD! O give thanks to the LORD, for he is good; for his steadfast love endures for ever! Who can utter the mighty doings of the LORD, or show forth all his praise? Blessed are they who observe justice, who do righteousness at all times!

–Psalm 106:1-3

Keble College, Chapel, Oxford.
Architects; William Butterfield, 1876. pic.twitter.com/8w3zUhZhCI

— Helena Ereditsh (@ereditsh) May 5, 2021