Monthly Archives: December 2016

Let Us Enter Advent in Hope

By Robin Bates | Published: December 10, 2016

At a time when many of us are worried about the future, Allan Boesak reminds us that Advent is a time of hope.

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Culture Theorist Foresaw Trump’s Rise

By Robin Bates | Published: December 8, 2016

The Frankfurt School’s Theodor Adorno, “culture industry” theorist, foresaw the rise of Trump. He looked to modernism, including modernist literature, as an antidote.

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Despite Trump, “The Land Holds Us Still”

By Robin Bates | Published: December 7, 2016

On this one-month anniversary of the 2016 election, I look back at two authors who meditated on what to do next immediately after hearing the news. Terry Tempest Williams looks to nature while Zadie Smith looks to the music to be found in multiethnic harmony.

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Comic Relief for Desperate Students

By Robin Bates | Published: December 6, 2016

If you cramming madly for finals (or remembering a time when you once did), here’s a wonderfully witty Philip Appleman poem about the experience.

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The Magic Spell Cast by Stories

By Robin Bates | Published: December 5, 2016

In “1Q84” Murakami describes novels as holding out the promise to solve our problems only we can’t quite make them out.

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Massacring the Environment Dakota Style

By Robin Bates | Published: December 4, 2016

With a North Dakota winter bearing down on those protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline, I see a convergence of images that also show up in Lucille Clifton’s poem “the killing of the trees”: environmental degradation, oppression of Native Americans, and frozen bodies.

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John the Baptist: his mouth be true as time

By Robin Bates | Published: December 3, 2016

In Lucille Clifton’s version of John the Baptist, he is a black minister preaching the social gospel.

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Poe: Trapped in the Prison of the Self

By Robin Bates | Published: December 1, 2016

Two Chinese students have brought home to me, from their collectivist perspective, how Edgar Allan Poe went against the grain of American individualism. He exposed its dark side, even as Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman were unabashedly celebrated it.

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