Tag Archives: John Donne

By Donne Logic, Chess Refined, Not Dull

By Robin Bates | Published: November 25, 2018

While the 2018 chess championship is proving disappointing to some, Donne helps us see it as the experts do.

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Celebrating 45 Years of Marriage

By Robin Bates | Published: June 8, 2018

To commemorate the 45th anniversary of my marriage to Julia, I turn to Donne’s “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.”

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Aristotle Changed the Way Europe Thought

By Robin Bates | Published: January 11, 2017

In “Aristotle’s Children,” Richard Rubenstein gets us to rethink the Faith-Reason and Religion-Science splits. When Aristotle revolutionized the High Middle Ages, Church leaders and thinkers tried to reconcile the tensions. Knowing this has me rethinking Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Donne.

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Donne Can Help with a Separation

By Robin Bates | Published: June 7, 2016

Today is my 43rd wedding anniversary and, although Julia and I plan to be together for many more years, we will live apart next year. John Donne’s “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” may help us out.

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Donne vs. Brexit: No Nation Is an Island

By Robin Bates | Published: June 6, 2016

Donne’s “no man is an island” essay–Meditation 17–can be read as a commentary on the inadvisability of a British exit from the European Union (Brexit).

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Trapped in Spiritual Crisis? Read Donne

By Robin Bates | Published: May 28, 2016

John Donne can come to the rescue of students who are in spiritual crisis.

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In Memory of Daniel Berrigan

By Robin Bates | Published: May 2, 2016

Daniel Berrigan, Jesuit activist and poet, died this past Saturday. His “A Dark Word” is a fitting way to note his passing.

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Donne’s Warning about Climate Change

By Robin Bates | Published: December 29, 2015

Looking back over the past year, I repost an essay on John Donne’s “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” and climate change denial. Given that 2015 has been the warmest year on record and that “the weather outside is frightful,” Donne’s comments about “moving of th’ earth” are only too relevant.

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Donne’s Lovers, Spooky at a Distance

By Robin Bates | Published: December 1, 2015

Tuesday Adam Gopnik makes some nice literary allusions in a recent New Yorker essay-review of George Musser’s Spooky at a Distance, which is about the history of quantum entanglement theory. Entanglement, also known as non-locality and described by Einstein as “spooky at a distance,” claims that two particles of a single wave function can influence each other, even […]

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