Monthly Archives: May 2017

A Comforter to Guide Us in All Truth

By Robin Bates | Published: May 21, 2017

Jesus’s promise to his disciples, to send them “another advocate with the father,” is picked up by a disheartened Milton as he seeks to justify the ways of God to man–and to himself.

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Pratchett’s Strong Case for Diversity

By Robin Bates | Published: May 19, 2017

Terry Pratchett’s comic fantasy Discworld books culminated in the introduction of the railway in his final novel. Pratchett is an effective advocate for a post-modern, multicultural world.

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The Fires and the Black River of Loss

By Robin Bates | Published: May 18, 2017

We recently held a memorial service for my dear friend and colleague Kate Chandler. I read from some of Kate’s eloquent nature writings and concluded with a Mary Oliver poem.

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T. S. Eliot, Hope for the Suicidal

By Robin Bates | Published: May 17, 2017

In a guest post, novelist Lauren B. Davis draws on Eliot’s “Waste Land” and “Four Quartets” to deal with the suicides of her two brothers and find a way forward.

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Maybe Ryan Sees Trump as John Galt

By Robin Bates | Published: May 16, 2017

If Paul Ryan refuses to stand up to Donald Trump, it may be because he worships him as a John Galt figure.

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GOP Plays the Sap for Trump

By Robin Bates | Published: May 15, 2017

The ties to Russia involving Donald Trump and his associates are like the many reasons that Sam Spade has for finding Brigid O’Shaughnessy guilty in “The Maltese Falcon”: “Maybe some of them are unimportant. I won’t argue about that. But look at the number of them.”

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Only after Pain Comes Life

By Robin Bates | Published: May 14, 2017

For Mother’s Day, here’s a Madeleine L’Engle poem about Jesus’s mother experiencing the crucifixion and then the resurrection. In it we see both the joys and the heartbreak that come with an unconditional mother’s love.

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Commencement à la Wordsworth

By Robin Bates | Published: May 12, 2017

Tomorrow our students graduate and they will sing a school song that draws heavily on Wordsworth. The song also has an unexpected twist not intended by the author that always gets a laugh.

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Trump’s Latest Queen of Hearts Beheading

By Robin Bates | Published: May 11, 2017

Donald Trump is starting to resemble the Queen of Hearts with all the figures that he has fired, most recently FBI director James Comey. We must stand up to the Queen as Alice does.

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