Saturday Good Reads

Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, is 100 years old. James Person Jr. at the Kirk Center considers its place in American literature, and what kind of world Anderson was describing in the book (it wasn’t unlike our own).

Moral grandstanding, a very close relative of virtue signaling, is everywhere these days – newspapers and other media, Congress, social media, and normal daily discourse (I was running into at work long before I retired four years ago). A psychologist thinks it’s possible to make a moral argument without resorting to grandstanding, and he has some advice at Vox.

I confess that I’ve never been interested in exploring Enneagrams, but apparently a lot of people do, including a lot of Christians. Allegra Hobbs at Medium argues this this mix of self-help, astrology, and wellness is starting to upend American Christianity.

Julian Peters at Plough Quarterly read Carl Sandburg’s poem “Buffalo Dusk,” and did a series of watercolors that interpret it visually. And they’re beautiful. 

Writing and Literature

The Pleasures of a Liturgical Calendar of Reading – Amanda Patchin at Front Porch Republic.

Living in the Same Spiritual World: C.S. Lewis & Charles Williams – Bradley Birzer at The Imaginative Conservative.

Five Reasons Why Christian Fiction Publishers Have Lost Male Readers (Pt. 1) – Mike Duran. 

On the Benefits of Building a Book Series Out of a Community of Characters – Allen Eskens at CrimeReads. 

American Stuff

Civil War Log Cabin Discovered – Emerging Civil War Blog.

Life and Culture

The Unexpected Virtue of Arbitrary Sports Allegiances – Kyle Keating at Mere Orthodoxy.

Remembering humanism – David Warren at Essays in Idleness.

Faith

The Salvation Army's Actions Speak Louder Than Its Theology – Stephen Carter at Bloomberg.

Study: Religious attendance flatlining, but giving remains strong – Yonat Shimron at Religion News Service.

Poetry

Wendell Berry and the Depth of a Moment – T.M. Moore at Society of Classical Poets.

The Advent Calendar – Brett Foster at Kingdom Poets.

News Media

Is There Still a Place for Blogs in 2020? – Tim Challies.

British Stuff

William Mason (1725-97) Memorial for his wife – Barb Drummond at Curious Historian.

Winter in Japan – Mt. Moriyoshi

Painting: A Novel Reader, oil on canvas by Vincent Van Gogh.