Monthly Archives: January 2019

Pelosi, Mueller vs. Grendel Trump

By Robin Bates | Published: January 21, 2019

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 […]

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Mary Oliver’s Christian Vision

By Robin Bates | Published: January 20, 2019

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 […]

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R.I.P. Mary Oliver, Bride of Amazement

By Robin Bates | Published: January 18, 2019

Friday Mary Oliver, who died yesterday, may have been America’s favorite poet. I taught her Pulitzer Prize-winning American Primitive for over 20 years in a nature-focused Introduction to Literature class and so have seen up close her impact on readers. When death has entered my own life, I have often turned to Oliver’s poetry. For […]

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Teach Chaucer to Address Sexual Assault

By Robin Bates | Published: January 17, 2019

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, […]

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What Is Eating Away at America?

By Robin Bates | Published: January 16, 2019

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 […]

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Books Gave Me a Refuge

By Robin Bates | Published: January 15, 2019

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 […]

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On Using Lit as a Cudgel

By Robin Bates | Published: January 14, 2019

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 […]

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What I Heard Was My Whole Self

By Robin Bates | Published: January 13, 2019

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 […]

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Lindsey Graham as a Dickens Toady

By Robin Bates | Published: January 11, 2019

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 […]

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