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In Praise of Being Inconvenient

February 11th, 2025 | 6 min read

By Nadya Williams

One recent night around 2:00 AM, my daughter’s distressed voice, calling for me, jolted me out of deep sleep. Barely awake herself, she was looking for her stuffed doll (named Dolly, obviously), the one without which she cannot sleep, because without clutching it in a very precise way, she cannot suck her thumb. And without sucking her thumb, she cannot get back to sleep. This vicious cycle makes perfect sense in her six-year-old mind, even if it might not in yours. Thence the cry of alarm at 2:00 AM. 

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Nadya Williams

Nadya Williams is the author of Cultural Christians in the Early Church (Zondervan Academic, 2023) and Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity (IVP Academic, forthcoming October 2024). Her next book, Christians Reading Pagans is under contract at Zondervan Academic. She is Book Review Editor for Current, where she also edits The Arena blog.