Spiritual Sunday Like many mainline Protestant churches, our little Episcopalian congregation in St. Mary’s City, Maryland is having money difficulties. The expense of aging buildings plus a recession that wiped out much of our endowment has forced us to hold fairly continuous fundraisers to balance the budget. People have become testy and […]
2010 in Review The 1981 film science fiction film Escape from New York shows an entire city transformed into a maximum security prison from which no one can leave. Kurt Russell, of course, tries. The 1990 Bill Murray film Quick Change has three bank robbers successfully pulling off a heist in New York and then […]
Sports Saturday I don’t know whether bird watching is officially considered a sport but, what with Christmas falling on a “Sports Saturday,” let’s say it is. That way I have an excuse for writing about the annual Christmas bird count. Every year, between the middle of December and the first week in January, bird watchers […]
A cold snap has hit the American east coast, including Maryland, and we are experiencing what Christina Rossetti calls “bleak midwinter,” with temperatures moving down into the teens. To cheer myself up, I turn to one of my father’s Christmas poems. My father has been writing these poems annually for years. He sends them out […]
I offer my apologies to my regular readers for having written a series of very long posts this week. To give you some relief, I offer up a political poem by my father, who is a master of light verse. As he did in a poem that I ran in a previous post (you can […]
In Southern Maryland our eternal summer appears finally to be fading and the fall, my favorite season, is a’cumin in. To celebrate it, I am posting one of my favorite seasonal poems, John Keats’ “To Autumn” (1817). The poem takes on added significance as the news continues to get worse for my friend Alan. Despite […]
Spiritual Sunday Here is a harvest poem that moves quickly from an actual harvest (in the first line) to a heavenly one. The clouds are like sacks of grain, their meal drifting across the skies, and we can gaze upward and glean them with our eyes. As Gerald Manley Hopkins sees it, God reveals himself […]
In a departure from custom, today’s post focuses on journal writing. Beatrix Potter may best be known as the author and illustrator of Peter Rabbit, Squirrel Nutkin, Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle and other classics, but she was also a world-class naturalist who kept a fascinating journal. My colleague Kate Chandler, who teaches many of our college’s “ecoliterature” […]
A Scott Bates whale poem to lift your spirits.
