Saturday, May 23, 2020

Saturday Good Reads


The movies, plays, and books about World War II keep coming. My wife says it’s because the war produced millions of stories, running from heroism to cowardice and success to tragedy. (And I think, too, because the good guys won, and that was not a foregone conclusion.) Heather Morton at Front Porch Republic tells one of those stories – a great aunt shot in both legs and left for dead by a communist gunman in Yugoslavia because she was Ukrainian-German. 

I haven’t read Brendan by Frederick Buechner in a long time. After read David Deavel’s “Messing About in Boats: Frederick Buechner’s Brendan” at The Imaginative Conservative, I think it’s time to reread it.

I first met the poetry of William Butler Yeats in high school. His life and work (1865-1939) spanned the Victorian, Edwardian, World War I, and modernism periods. What I didn’t know, until I read Adam Sedia’s article at the Society for Classical Poets, was how heavily influenced his poetry was by occultism

The coronavirus has brought an outpouring of art and writing, but I don’t think I’ve been as touched by anything as I was by Andrea Sanborn’s story at A View of the Lake, entitled “Tucking Ben In.”

I’ve visited Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery here in St. Louis, and I’ve seen the very oldest section, which includes the graves of some 16,000 Civil War soldiers, Union and Confederate, many of them the dead and seriously wounded from the Battle of Shiloh in 1862. Kristen Pawlak at Emerging Civil War shares the stories of several of them

More Good Reads

Poetry

What the night sky declares – Joe Spring at Joe Spring Writes.


Wearing masks – Troy Cady at T(r)oy Marbles.

Wordsworth is Finally Getting His Revolutionary Props – William Anthony Hay at The American Conservative


“Beach at Corolla, NC” and “Bee Fall” – Paul Jones at South Writ Large.

Life and Culture

Then & Now – David Warren at Essays in Idleness.

Art


The master’s hand: A treasured Vermeer gives up its secrets – Nancy Kenney at The Art Newspaper.

The Painting Behind the Door - Emily Benedek at Tablet Magazine.

Faith

Weird Christianity’s Aesthetic and the Tyranny of Values – Casey Spinks at Front Porch Republic.

Biblia Pauperum (Ascension) – Fred Sanders at The Scriptorium Daily.

Loneliness Has Been My Faithful Friend – Steve DeWitt at Desiring God.

A Christian Reading Manifesto – David Steele at Veritas et Lux.

Writing and Literature



Blue Ridge Dear – Joseph Bradshaw


Painting: Femme Lisant, oil on canvas (1920) by Henri Matisse (1869-1954)

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