Saturday, March 21, 2020

Saturday Good Reads


I take a walk, or I look outside my window, and everything looks exactly like it looked a week, a month, six months ago. But I look more closely, and I notice how much time passes before a car goes by on the street, or I see the deserted center of my little St. Louis suburb when it should be thronged with cars, shoppers, and people dining out, and how many people are walking – singles, couples, and families – and smile and nod as they swerve broadly around you, unless I swerve first.

It’s a strange time, perhaps the strangest I’ve ever experienced, and we’ve only just begun. Tim Challies suggests we consider newspaper headlines in their context, and reminds us that preparation is not panic and confusion is not chaos, no matter how much we want to politicize the moment. E.J. Hutchinson at Mere Orthodoxy has a different take on what we can learn from COVID-19; he looks back to C.S. Lewis in World War II. And American expat Seth Lewis writes about how different St. Patrick’s Day looked in Ireland this year – and St. Patrick knew a thing or two about calamity himself.

More Good Reads

Poetry

One chilly March morning – Sonja Benskin Mesher.

Beyond the Lines: Frost's "Fire and Ice" – Adam Sedia at The Chained Muse.

Three Poems – Paul Brooks at Fevers of the Mind Poetry Digest.

‘Brave Soldiers We’ and 'A Very Old Tale' – Beverly Stock at Society of Classical Poets.

Safe – Paul Tripp.

Faith

The Catholic Artist in a Neo-Pagan Age – James Matthew Wilson at Church Life Norte Dame.

A Liturgy for Those Flooded by Too Much Information – Doug McKelvey at The Rabbit Room.

Art

The Spiritual Mechanics of Labor and Rest – Jack Baumgartner at The School for the Transfer of Energy.

Edward Hopper: The Loneliness Thing – Laurence Fuller. 

American Stuff



Common Soldiers Writing Song: “Oh, How Do You Like the Army?” – Sarah Kay Bierle at Emerging Civil War.

The Journal of Nicholas Cresswell, Part 1 and Part 2 – Eric Sterner at Emerging Revolutionary War Era.

British Stuff

Plague and Pestilence – Barb Drummond at Curious Historian.

Writing and Literature

The Haunting of America: Russell Kirk’s Ghostly Fiction – Ben Reinhard at The Imaginative Conservative. 


T.S. Eliot’s Animus – Adam Kirsch at New Criterion.



A Catholic Reading of the Spirituality in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon – M. Shawn Copeland at Church Life Notre Dame.

John Piper Reads Romans 8



Painting: Old Man Reading the Paper, oil on canvas by Louis Charles Moeller (1855-1930).

No comments: