Sharlet: One of the upcoming books I’m most excited about is Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement, by former Revealer editor Kathryn Joyce. I was reminded of it this morning when I stumbled upon the blog of Jaynee Lockwood, a Quiverfull mom of “11 little missionaries,” pictured on the right side of the blog under the heading of Psalm 127, “Lo, children are an heritage of the LORD:and the fruit of the womb is his reward. As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth.
Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them.” It’s no secret blogs rarely live up to the genre’s potential for allowing us insight into lives different than our own, but the pictures alone on the Lockwood blog — scroll down to 10 little blonde Americans organized by height for the amusement of Mexican border guards — are some kind of revelation. And then there are the casual glimpses into a worldview radically different than that of most Revealer readers: “Our Rebekah has always had a desire to teach children in Africa. After hearing one of the missionaries to Uganda speak one evening, she said to me, ‘Mommy, when Daddy helps me find someone to marry, I don’t think I want to marry him if he’s not going to go to Africa to be a missionary.’ :)” We all know about missionaries; but how many of us are aware of the growing courtship movement? Read more about life in the quiver at The Lockwood Family blog.