Monthly Archives: March 2019

Morgan Le Faye through the Ages

By Robin Bates | Published: March 10, 2019

Monday Last week I finished teaching a short “Wizards and Enchantresses” course for Sewanee’s Lifelong Learning program and thoroughly enjoyed myself. Having already talked about my class on Merlin (see here, here, and here), today I share what I had to say about Morgan Le Faye and her successors. With Morgan, we looked at how […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments closed

Lent: The Air Heavy and Thick

By Robin Bates | Published: March 9, 2019

Spiritual Sunday I share today a good Lenten poem by Denise Levertov where the poet finds herself in a funk, albeit not a dramatic funk. She’s experiencing neither a “dark night of the soul” nor a scorching wasteland desert, those extreme moments of crisis that have pushed people to revelation. (Today’s Gospel reading is Jesus’s […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments closed

Are We Watching Shakespeare or Beckett?

By Robin Bates | Published: March 7, 2019

Friday When assuring my English majors that they will find jobs in the world beyond college, I sometimes point out that they are experts in narrative. Increasingly we are learning how much we process reality through stories, and political operatives talk ceaselessly about “controlling the narrative.” How you organize facts (or for that matter, lies) […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments closed

Nourish the Refugee Angels

By Robin Bates | Published: March 6, 2019

Thursday To defend the Trump Administration’s unconscionable actions on the U.S.-Mexico border, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen dodged and weaved as the House of Representatives grilled her yesterday. Disregarding conditions that a number of Congress members had witnessed with their own eyes, she insisted that children are not being taken away from their parents and […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Comments closed

Children’s Choirs, Vienna’s and Blake’s

By Robin Bates | Published: March 5, 2019

Wednesday Last Friday I was able to see in person the Vienna Children’s choir, which previously I knew only from their recordings. As I listened to the high, pure voices in Sewanee’s cathedral-like All Saints Chapel, I thought of William Blake’s “Holy Thursday” from Songs of Innocence. The poem has some of Blake’s characteristic irony, […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments closed

Trump Is Dracula, Cohen Is Renfield

By Robin Bates | Published: March 4, 2019

Tuesday Though I’ve compared Donald Trump several times to Dr. Frankenstein’s monster (for instance, here), New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has compared the Trump saga to another monster story that I hadn’t considered. Michael Cohen, she writes, is Renfield to Trump’s Dracula. Renfield is a Dracula acolyte who has been imprisoned as a madman, […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Comments closed

Exposing Stalin-Style Fake News

By Robin Bates | Published: March 3, 2019

Monday NeverTrumper Jennifer Rubin made a Stalin allusion on MSNBC’s A. M. Joy yesterday that caught my eye because I am currently reading a novel about Stalin’s Soviet Union during the German invasion. Vasily Grossman’s extraordinary Life and Fate (1960), resembles Tolstoy’s War and Peace in the way it captures the country at a moment […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments closed

Living Glory Full of Truth and Grace

By Robin Bates | Published: March 2, 2019

Spiritual Sunday Today’s church readings are about, as Paul puts it in his First Letter to the Corinthians, seeing God face to face rather than “through a glass darkly.” We hear first about how Moses, after receiving the Ten Commandments, returned to the Israelites with his face so lit up that he had to wear […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments closed