Saturday, October 27, 2018

Saturday Good Reads


My personal trainer, who helps me keep my back problems at bay, often tells me that the human being is designed to walk. I take walks around my own suburb in St. Louis and the one next door to us, and when we were in London last year, I walked around St. James Park nearly every morning. (One morning, I circumvented the perimeter of Buckingham Palace. It was a good distance, but the exhaust fumes from the traffic could be stifling.) Zach Morgan at Thin Difference recommends walks for several reasons, including their meditative nature, while Jean Janzewn at Image Journalhas a poem about walking – on water in Venice.

Hugh Whelchel at the Institute for Faith, Work, & Economics has a post about religious freedom, and how it was a very near thing that it was almost “religious tolerance.” James Madison made the decisive argument. From the same period, one of the founding fathers, the man who served as secretary of the Constitutional Convention, could have become a great historian. Instead, he became a Bible translator. Justin Taylor has the story at The Gospel Coalition.

U.S. Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska quite Twitter for six months, and he now tells his family (and us) what he learned. Speaking of Twitter, it turns out that being exposed regularly to viewpoints opposite your own on Twitter makes you more convinced your own are correct. Ezra Klein at Vox has the story.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn spent years in the Soviet Gulag, never thinking that he would not only outlast the Soviet system but also help play a significant role in its downfall. At The Imaginative Conservative, Joseph Pearce writes about Solzhenitsyn’s courage to be a Christian.

More Good Reads

Faith

Why a Ukrainian Church Said ‘No’ to American Aid – Peter Greer at the Institute for Faith, Work, & Economics.

The Life of a Good Man – Marilyn Gardner at Communicating Across Boundaries.

Can my prayer reach his suffering? – Sylvia Schroeder at 936 Pennies.

Writing and Literature



Life and Culture

The Glorious Inefficiency of Local Bookstores – Dean Abbott at The Imaginative Conservative.

Why Do We Keep Seeing Remakes? We Have Lost the Metanarrative – Zak Schmoll at Entering the Public Square.

The Public Square is About Parenting – Samuel D. James at Mere Orthodoxy.

Art and Photography

Humdinger – Tim Good at Photography by Tiwago. 

The last. lovely gift of the day – Diana Trautwein via Facebook.

Yo-Yo Ma: NPR Tiny Desk Concert



Painting: Couch on the Porch, Cos Cob; oil on canvas by Frederick Childe Hassam, 1914.

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