I’ve often asked myself the question that many grandparents likely ask themselves: what kind of world are we leaving to our grandchildren? It’s a question that, with almost every passing day, seems to take on more urgency. And it’s not the coronavirus I’m worried about, but more whether or not my country is going to survive even my lifetime. Jon Mark Olesky at Tabletalk Magazine addresses that question and suggests that we are to be preparing our children for Babylon.
Terry Mattingly at Get Religion, which looks at how the news media cover religion, posted a few days about two articles. One concerned the decline of religion and the rise of “spirituality” in the United States, and what the implications might be for politics and the culture. The other article is about a new book, published by New York University Press (not what one would call a religious or conservative publisher). The book reports on a study of conservative/red and progressive/blue Christians. And the authors were in for some surprises, like it wasn’t the conservatives who tended to jettison Christian doctrine to support their preferred political candidate and party ( a totally counterintuitive finding if you read and watch only the news media).
In 1974, ABC began airing an unusual television program, “Kolchak: The Night Stalker.” Actor Darrin McGavin played Carl Kolchak, a newspaper reporter who found himself investigating
all sorts of odd phenomena and strange creatures (like vampires). The series ran for two season, 1974 and 1975, with a total of 20 episodes. But it was sufficient, writes Keith Roysdon at CrimeReads, to launch what came to be known as “Vampire Noir.” He may have a point; two years later, Anne Rice published Interview with a Vampire. For the record, I was a fan of Kolchak, even if the show was a kind of cheesier “Twilight Zone.”
More Good Reads
Faith
Just Another Day – Doug Spurling at Spurling Silver.
The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism – Aaron Renn at First Things Magazine.
The Success of Others – Seth Lewis.
How Much Can the Most Famous Dead Sea Scroll Prove? – Anthony Ferguson at Text and Canon Institute.
Life and Culture
What the 1619 Project Got Wrong – James Oakes at Catalyst.
How to Survive a “Reality Crisis” – Mike Duran.
Netspeak: How we can — and must — win the war on language – Andrew Hunt at The Critic Magazine.
The Crisis of Moral Legitimacy – Ilana Redstone at Tablet Magazine.
Poetry
The Afterlife – John Blase.
On Poetry, Programming, Chaos, and Cosmos – Micah Hawkinson at The Rabbit Room.
Epiphany-tide – Kathleen Everett at The Course of Our Seasons.
Yearning for change – Joy Lenton at Poetry Joy.
British Stuff
When London really was built back better – James Stevens Curl at The Critic Magazine.
The forgotten medieval habit of ‘two sleeps’ – Zaria Gorvett at BBC.
American Stuff
‘The day long remembered:’ Remembering Bull Run – Anthony Trusso at Emerging Civil War Blog.
Writing and Literature
Please, Mr. Postman: Revisiting the Broken Hearts of James M. Cain’s Masterpiece – Matthew Eng at Literary Hub.
The Real Places that Gave Rise to Southern Fictions – Casey Cep at The New Yorker.
Fields of Gold – Celtic Woman
Painting: Old Man Reading, oil on canvas by Johannes Weiland (1856-1909).
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