Monthly Archives: May 2020

Students as Beowulf vs. Covid

By Robin Bates | Published: May 10, 2020

Through describing their essays on “Beowulf,” I recount how five students are responding to the Covid crisis.

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Mothering Jesus

By Robin Bates | Published: May 9, 2020

Spiritual Sunday – Mother’s Day For Mother’s Day, here are three Madeleine L’Engle poems about Mary and Jesus following the crucifixion. I love how they focus on Mary as mother. Three daysWhen you agree to be the mother of GodYou make no conditions, no stipulations.You flinch before neither cruel thorn nor rod.You accept the tears; […]

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Choose Life over Needless Sacrifice

By Robin Bates | Published: May 7, 2020

Trump wants people to gamble with their lives to open up the economy. These works remind us that life is too precious to be sqandered this way.

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Blundering into the Valley of Death

By Robin Bates | Published: May 6, 2020

Thursday It now appears that the Trump administration has finally come up with a coherent response to the coronavirus attack. Alfred Lord Tennyson captures it in “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” In other words, their approach is to reopen everything and send the American public charging into the teeth of the virus. Meanwhile, cannons […]

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Gide’s Immoralist & Trump’s Double Game

By Robin Bates | Published: May 5, 2020

Trump plays a double game, pretending to be president while acting like a teenage rebel. So does Michel in André Gide’s “Immoralist.”

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Feeding on Beauty in the Midst of Horror

By Robin Bates | Published: May 4, 2020

If music sustained camp prisoners during the Holocaust, as Rita Dove describes in this poem, the arts can sustain us during our current pandemic.

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Tolstoy on Suicidal Cult Followers

By Robin Bates | Published: May 3, 2020

Why do so many Trump supporters deliberately court coronavirus? Why do Napoleon’s soldiers in “War and Peace” throw themselves into a river to impress him.

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Enter by the Garden Gate

By Robin Bates | Published: May 2, 2020

“Paradise Lost” and Lewis’s “Magician’s Nephew” pick up on today’s Gospel reading, where Jesus warns against false prophets.

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