Author: Jennifer Mugrage

I'm a wife, mother, Christian, closet Luddite, Neanderthal advocate, incurable book hound. I'm also the author of The Scattering Trilogy, which is set in 10,000 B.C. Buy, read, pass it on! Leave comments. Let's talk!

No Friend to This House is A Great Title

On By Jennifer Mugrage2 Comments

Like anybody who has ever encountered it, I have “issues” with the story of Jason and Medea.

In case you missed it, he sails off on the Argo to get the Golden Fleece. She is a witch, daughter of the king of Colchis, descendent of Helios, the sun god. Struck by Eros with an inordinate crush on Jason, she helps him accomplish all the tasks necessary to get the fleece and escape alive. He takes her with him on the Argo, and they crash around Greece, leaving a trail of bodies in their wake. Eventually, he throws her over for a younger model, a native Greek gal who is daughter of the king of Corinth. Medea takes a bloody and spectacular revenge, which I won’t spoil (look it up).

I first heard all this from my ninth-grade Lit teacher. She presented it in a very feminist way, but to be fair, this particular story sort of begs for that. I remember, in university, arguing rather incoherently with a male classmate about who was the real villain in this story. Later, when I was home schooling and read a simplified version of the legend to my kids, we decided we didn’t like the story, and we didn’t like Jason or Medea either, and they were both horrible people and they deserved each other.

So, hopefully, this book will be the nadir of my year of reading Greco-fiction: facing the story of Jason and Medea square on, by reading an entire novel about them.

The reason I liked the title of this novel is that it sounded like a phrase taken directly from the Greek — and so it was. The author, Natalie Haynes, has really done her homework.

Euripides’ Medea was the first Greek tragedy I saw performed, and it was the first or second play I read in Greek. … I wrote my dissertation on the heroics of infanticide in Euripides (I don’t have children, before you think about composing your sternly worded letter). … I’ve been reading and thinking about this play for the best part of thirty years, and I have probably seen it performed twenty-five times … I decided that the thing I needed to do [before writing the novel] was translate the Euripides, longhand. This is–in case you are wondering–weapons-grade procrastination. It took me a few weeks …

Haynes, in the Afterword, pp. 359 – 360

Haynes’ treatment of this story has been called feminist. And O.K. … sort of? But it’s not “feminist” in the sense of someone who understands the literature poorly who then reacts against the ancient heroic-age value system and sets out to undermine it. It is, rather, the work of someone who has marinated themselves in the ancient heroic-age mileu, which inherently presented a very broken relationship between men and women (especially husbands and wives). This story, and also the story of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, bring a lot of tension with them and almost demand that you take what might be called a “feminist” perspective, at least in part, unless you want to take a very simplified view of the whole thing and not really analyze it much at all.

It’s not just me saying this. Apparently, everyone has been arguing about Medea for … well, ever since she came to their attention.

Diodorious Siculus says that the reason we have so many contradictory versions of her story is because tragic poets are drawn to talking about marvels. It’s also worth mentioning that any character who prompts different versions of their story is one who was popular in antiquity. If you want to read more about Medea, I spent many happy hours with “Medea,” a collection of essays edited by James J. Clauss …

ibid, pp. 365 – 366

Apparently, my and my children’s feeling that the whole story is regrettable is echoed by the Nurse of Jason and Medea’s two sons. Here is her opening monologue to the play (translated by Haynes):

If only the Argos had sunk to the bottom of the sea rather than winging its way towards the land of Colchis … For then my mistress Medea would not have sailed to the towers of Iolcus, stricken with love for Jason … and she wouldn’t live here, in Corinth, with her husband and children, pleasing the citizens to whose land she came in flight, helping Jason in everything. That is the greatest help: whenever a wife doesn’t disagree with her husband. But now, everything is hostile .. For Jason–betraying his own children and my mistress–is sharing his bed with royalty … Medea is wretched, dishonored like this. She cries out about the oaths he swore to her .. I’m afraid she is planning something. She’s a strange woman. No one starts a fight with her and takes an easy victory.

ibid, pp. 272 – 273

Successive phrases from this speech are used as chapter headings for the first 3/4 of the book.

I give this book 3 out of 4 stars. (Or 4 out of 5, take your pick.) The research, storytelling and psychology are spectacular. It gets tenser and more tragic towards the end. It is, of course, very hard to read, because this is a tragedy. The hardest parts to read, for me, were the parts where the Nurse speaks to the children. Even though it’s set in the ancient world, this is fundamentally a story about a home that gets broken when the children are very small. That’s hard to bear.

The one missing star? I needed more description.

This book consists almost entirely in monologues by the different characters (except for Jason), punctuated occasionally by dialogue. I guess that makes sense for a novel that is a re-telling of a play. But if I’m going to read a book set in the ancient Mediterranean, which includes a tour of the cities of Iolcus, Colchis, Aeaea (Circe’s island), and Corinth, not to mention the Aegean, Adriatic, and Black Seas, I want more than little hints and scraps about what these places look, sound, and smell like. I want to see the terrain, the buildings, and the clothes people wear. Haynes gives us almost none of that. We only get a little bit of description when it is directly relevant to a plot point, like the Symplegades (giant clashing rocks), or the golden dress that Medea gifts to Glauke. This is where Haynes falls short of Renault, who describes buildings, clothing, and artifacts in detail.

Also, there is almost zero description of how the people look. That’s important to me.

As for Jason, we are only told that he is “good-looking” until he meets Medea, when we find out that he has dark, curly hair and golden skin. This means that we have to go through the Argo’s entire outbound journey making up our own mental image of Jason, and then modify it when we find out what is canon in the novel. In the case of Jason, that may be intentional. Part of his characterization is that he is a chameleon, able to be the figure that people want in order to get what he wants; or, as Haynes puts it, “a blank space where a man ought to be.”

But there are plenty of other characters that Haynes could describe when we first meet them, and she doesn’t. What do the Colchians look like? They are “not Greek.” Do they look Asian? Or is Medea made of gold, like the children of Helios in the novel Circe? What do the different Argonauts look like? The Tutor? The Nurse? Haynes does a better job describing the various goddesses, women, nymphs, and the golden ram whose lives are also busted up by this story … but still, I could use more.

Gentle reader, you have survived the harrowing journey of the Argo with me. What horrible ancient Greek story should we read about next?

Christianity & the Hellenistic World: A Book Review

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Christianity & the Hellenistic World, by Ronald H. Nash, pub. 1984 by Zondervan and Probe Ministries International. This review was published on GoodReads on May 8, 2026.

C&THW is a capable review of the scholarship around the question: Did Christianity actually arise from Platonism/Stoicism, Gnosticism, or the Hellenistic mystery religions?

The view that it did, became popular in the late 1800s/early 1900s, especially in a German school of thought called Comparative Religions, or the “History of Religions School” (Religionsgeschichtliche Schule — one of the many great ideas that German philosophers have given us). (p. 117) These claims were fairly quickly debunked by theologians and early-church historians, and they stopped being taken seriously in theological circles.

However, as often happens, the bad idea had escaped the barn and was wandering freely throughout the neighborhood. The idea that Christianity’s inception lay in Hellenistic thought-systems and not in the Jewish Law & the Prophets followed by the events of 30 A.D. was still being taught as fact by various philosophers and historians years later. (p. 11)

Nash’s book was written to survey the Comparative Religionists’ claims and present the debunking evidence for the lay person. It’s what I would call a popular-level scholarly book. The topic is scholarly and there are a ton of references, but it never gets too far into the weeds on any one topic. For example, I would have liked a lot more detail about the mystery religions, but that is not this book’s purpose, and you don’t need to know a lot about the mystery religions before you see that they are nothing like the Christian communion ceremony, for example.

The writing itself is matter-of-fact, capable, and not flashy. Probably many people would find this book boring. I certainly wouldn’t have picked it up ordinarily. But my interest in this topic had been piqued because I recently read Mary Renault’s The King Must Die, a lot of which is about ancient Greek “solar kings.” I was struck by how they parallel Jesus, and yet are very different from Him at the same time. I wondered whether anyone has tried to claim that Christianity was just the solar king myth repackaged for the Jews. Turns out, they have. So this book came to me at just the right moment to be pretty interesting. It’s going in my home library for sure.

Misanthropic Quote: Paul Secretly Pagan?

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Many of the theories about Paul’s alleged dependence [on the Stoics, Gnostics, or mystery religions] stumble over their inability to come to grips with the radical change produced by Paul’s conversion. Many of them are inconsistent with what we know to be the early church’s repudiation of pagan inclusivism.

–Ronald H. Nash, Christianity & the Hellenistic World, p. 267

I’m Finally Going to Run My Mouth About AI

On By Jennifer Mugrage3 Comments

Within the last week, I consumed two thoughtful pieces of commentary about AI, both by thinkers I trust for different reasons.

The recently independent Jeremy Boreing on the topic of AI. Him I trust because of the actual thought process displayed in the video.

AI and the Cream Rising

https://dougwils.com/books-and-culture/s7-engaging-the-culture/ai-and-the-cream-rising.html

Doug Wilson’s blog post about AI. Wilson I trust because of the volumes of material that he’s written and I’ve read.

I won’t add much to what they have to say. It’s going to be a busy week, for reasons that will be revealed tomorrow. However, I know that most of you won’t listen to the podcast, and only a small number will read the article, so I will summarize the salient parts of each in a sentence or two.

Boreing makes the point that every new technology comes with the fears and negative effects front-loaded, and the benefits arrive in the medium to long term, as we figure out where it fits in human society and how to limit its harms. He further points out that no new technology has ever delivered on any promises made on its behalf to create “less work.” New tech always creates more work: new industries, but also lots of new things that can be done by people who see the potential.

Wilson, too, points out that lazy folks will try to use AI as a way to avoid work, whereas the diligent and the geniuses will see vast new fields of work open up to them. He adds the obvious (but often overlooked) point that a “workless” utopia would actually be a dystopia.

In short, both men sensibly point out that AI is not going to change human nature. Humans do human things no matter how much tech they have. And we were designed to work.

This is, on the whole, a great relief to me. It is good to hear that the scary new thing is not going to change human nature. Granted, human nature isn’t great, but we already knew that, and all attempts to completely remake it always seem to get rid of the only parts worth saving.

Still, I’m not a total AI-o-phile, unlike, say, our friend Ben Shapiro. That’s because I’m a writer and a visual artist. My thinking is still developing on this, but as of spring 2026 here’s where I’m at.

Everyone senses that stories and art (including music) are the sort of things that ought to be made by people and nothing else. Unfortunately, it’s possible that AI will get good enough at “making” these things, that it will be impossible to detect it. You want a gritty, soulful story with human flaws? It will give you a gritty, soulful story with human flaws. It will get rid of the overly vivid colors and unrealistic smoothness in its paintings. It has already produced a country song by a hard-livin’ male voice about overcoming working-class obstacles.

When this happens, it’s like debasing the currency, but with stories and music and art. These things are much more valuable than currency. That’s bad.

From the creators’ side, everyone’s work will become suspect. This is already starting to happen.

From the consumer side, I am possibly even more upset. I DO NOT like it when I look closely at what appears to be a model wearing colorful European folk clothing, and realize that it’s an AI approximation of same. But at least, I can still realize it. I REALLY won’t like it when I have no way of knowing whether the “human” culture I’m imbibing is actually human culture.

That’s all I got today.

Misanthropic Quote about “Creative” Scholarship

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But how many serious blunders does a scholar have to make before his reputation is tarnished? If a scientist or even a historian made as many fanciful suggestions in his field that were as devoid of support as some of the theologians we have noticed, or if he begged as many crucial questions, his reputation would surely suffer. But sometimes in theology, it appears, the reverse often holds. I am not sure that this speaks well for theology and biblical studies as intellectual disciplines.

–Ronald H. Nash, Christianity & the Hellenistic World, p. 265