A very happy Christmas to all my readers!
I have begun to contribute articles to 'Pelican+', which is very like Substack, but created for Catholic content. My articles go onto Peter Kwasniewski's 'Traditional and Sanity' section, as text and audio (read by me). I aim to do one a month.
The first of these was inspired by the Christmas season, and reading J.D. Vance's autobiographical work Hillbilly Elegy. We all know the Holy Family was poor, but in terms of Vance's concept of 'social capital' they did have a certain wealth, and the way that clan-based societies function continues to have relevance to us today.
Here is an illustrative portion:
When St Joseph knocked on Bethlehem’s doors with his pregnant wife, he wasn’t a vagrant or a refugee. He would have been practically everyone’s second cousin, and if someone hadn’t rustled up a reasonable place for his family to stay, the entire clan would have died of shame.
