Monthly Archives: December 2009

Reconnecting with the Chimes Within

One of my favorite Christmas stories when I was growing up was Raymond Macdonald Alden’s “Why the Chimes Rang.”  I write today to figure out why.  You can click here to read it.  The story is about a church with a tower so high that no one can see the top.  It is reputed to […]

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Using Shakespeare in Business Dealings

In yesterday’s examination of universal health care legislation in terms of Dickens’ Christmas Carol, I mentioned E. D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (1988).   Hirsch believes that cultures need a set of common texts to function effectively.  While I have some reservations about that work, I wholeheartedly support Hirsch’s contention that […]

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Obamacare to Tiny Tim’s Rescue

Paul Krugman made clever use of Dickens’ Christmas Carol in a column last week.  The New York Times columnist and Nobel prize winning economist addresses opponents of the health care bills that have emerged out of the House and Senate, arguing that progressives should be pleased, despite the bills’ limitations.  Arguing that politics is the […]

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The Children’s Books that Shaped Me

The poem I printed by my father in my last post provides a good map of the books and poems that he used to read to me and my brothers.  In case there were any works that you do not recognize, here’s a key: –Leerie is “The Lamplighter” in Robert Lewis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden […]

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Books Unleashed in Christmas Carrels

On this Christmas day, I want to acknowledge one of the greatest gifts I ever received from my parents: my love of reading.  Both are voracious readers, and my father (Scott Bates) would read to me and my brothers every evening.  This included, for each of us, both a story or chapter and a poem.  […]

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Ring Out the Old, Ring in the New

I am writing to you from the home of my parents in Sewanee, Tennessee, where I figure I have spent around 48 of my 58 Christmases.   In this I differ from the Tennyson in the third Christmas passage of In Memoriam.  For the first time since Hallam’s death, he is not celebrating the season in […]

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Dead Hands Reaching Out to Comfort

Alfred Lord Tennyson’s three Christmas passages in In Memoriam are reminiscent of the way that my own family celebrates Christmas. My ancestry is British and the ceremonies that we observe date at least as far back as my great grandmother Eliza Scott Fulcher, born in the 1850’s.    Christmas in Sewanee, Tennessee (which is where we are […]

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Singing Carols in the Darkness

Thinking about my dead son in this Christmas season brings to mind Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam, the lengthy poem that he wrote over the course of 17 years lamenting the death of his close friend Arthur Henry Hallam.Hallam was a young man when he died unexpectedly of a cerebral hemorrhage, and Tennyson describes his […]

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Terabithia and Coping with Loss

Last week my library discussion group talked about the children’s classic and Newberry award winner Bridge to Terabithia (1977), by Katherine Paterson.  It has been our tradition each December to choose a children’s book in honor of the holiday season. Bridge to Terabithia, we discovered, fits the season well.  Warning: I reveal the ending in […]

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