Monday John Stoehr, who edits The Editorial Board, had a provocative column recently that is worth contemplating on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Stoehr argues that sadism is the animating principle of the Republican Party, with Donald Trump being its purest expression. Whether this is in fact true of most Republicans, Trump himself is certainly […]
Monthly Archives: January 2019
Pelosi, Mueller vs. Grendel Trump
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Beowulf, Beowulf poet, Donald Trump, Nancy Pelosi, resentment, Robert Mueller, Trump shutdown, Trump supporters Comments closed
Mary Oliver’s Christian Vision
Spiritual Sunday It has become a tradition with this blog to share a Mary Oliver poem every Easter. Although the poet, who died this past Thursday, wasn’t overtly religious, many of her poems are dramas of grace intervening in a fallen world. She strikes me as the kind of Christian that Emily Dickinson was, finding […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged "Egrets", "Fawn", "How I Go to the Woods", Christianity, Mary Oliver Comments closed
Teach Chaucer to Address Sexual Assault
Thursday I’ve been talking with Idaho English teacher Glenda Funk, who is proposing a panel for the upcoming NCTE convention (National Council of Teachers of English) on teaching literature in ways that make a tangible difference in students’ lives. After I mentioned how The Wife of Bath’s Prelude and Tale foreground issues of sexual assault, […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Geoffrey Chaucer, Laurie Halse Anderson, Rape, sexual assault, Speak, Wife of Bath's Tale Comments closed
What Is Eating Away at America?
Wednesday What does it mean to have a Russian asset as president, if the FBI’s suspicions (as reported by the New York Times) turn out to be correct. Perhaps William Blake’s poem “The Sick Rose” captures the situation. In that instance, the Rose would be the American republic, which is sick despite its high ideals […]
Books Gave Me a Refuge
Tuesday I’ve been dipping into A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader, given to me by my good friend Sue Schmidt and recommended by reader Glenda Funk. A range of writers, artists, scientists, philosophers and others were asked to write a letter to young people about the value of reading. Original illustrations accompany […]
On Using Lit as a Cudgel
Monday A conservative reader the other day accused me of relentlessly using this blog as “an anti-Trump cudgel,” which got me thinking about whether I was indeed guilty of losing perspective. Was I in the grip of what Balzac calls an “idée fixe”—which is to say, an obsession that defines a life? According to Encyclopedia […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Asterix, culture wars, Gobseck, Honoré de Balzac, idée fixe, multiculturalism Comments closed
What I Heard Was My Whole Self
Spiritual Sunday Today’s Gospel reading concerns Jesus’s awakening as he was being baptized by John. That moment was his own epiphany, when the membrane between the sacred and the profane was penetrated and he realized that God dwells within us (Luke 3:21-22): Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Anthem, Book of Hours Love Songs to God, Denise Levertov, Holy Dove, Jesus's Baptism, John the Baptist, Leonard Cohen, Rainer Maria Rilke, Variations on a Theme by Rilke Comments closed
Lindsey Graham as a Dickens Toady
Friday High school teacher Carl Rosin, whose Great Expectations class interviewed me by telephone yesterday, suggested that Donald Trump’s national shutdown is giving us our own versions of Dickens’s “toadies and humbugs.” For a while I’ve seen Vice President Michael Pence as candidate #1, but I must say that South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham is […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Charles Dickens, Donald Trump, Great Expectations, Lindsey Graham, National shutdown, Trump's wall Comments closed
