Saturday Good Reads - July 29, 2023

British Stuff 

St. Paul’s Covent Garden, the Actors’ Church – A London Inheritance.

 

London’s monocultural history – Sam Bidwell at The Critic Magazine.

 

Jack London’s Photography – Spitalfields Life. 

 

Writing and Literature

 

Brian Doyle: Without Stories, We Are Only Mammals with Weapons – John Nagy at Church Life Journal.

 

Poe vs. Himself: On the Writer’s One-Sided War with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – Anne Whitehouse at Literary Hub. In case you didn’t know, Edgar Allen Poe was offended when Longfellow didn’t respond as Poe thought he should to a submission of work. From then on, Poe waged a one-sided war against the poet who’d already become an American icon.

 

Catch and Release – Stewart Sinclair at The Millions. When we visit New Orleans, we often see street performers in front of St. Louis Cathedral in the French Quarter. Like jugglers. Stewart Sinclair talks about his days as a juggler, earning money to support himself while he studied writing and literature at Loyola University.

 

The Kekule Problem: What Lies Hidden in Cormac McCarthy’s Dreams – Scott Beauchamp at Church Life Journal. 

 

Faith

 

Worldview: Put Your Heart Into It – Hugh Whelchel at the Institute for Faith, Work, & Economics.

 

Hezekiah’s Tunnel: Not Straight, But True – Clint Archer at The Cripplegate.

 

Constantine’s Foil: How Peace in Rome Led to Persecution in Persia – Donald Fairbairn at Desiring God. This is a subject I was completely unfamiliar with. We know that Christians were persecuted regionally and locally until the empire-wide persecutions of the late 200s, but it also happened in Persia. 

 

These Are the Top Christian-Themed Movies of the Century and ‘Sound of Freedom’ Reveals Rising Power of Jesus in Hollywood – Paul Bond at Newsweek. 

 

Life and Culture

 

Beyond Barbie and the Bomb: It’s time for religion-beat pros to prepare for #BarbAslan – Terry Mattingly at Get Religion. From the patriarchy to Aslan: The director of the movie Barbie has been contracted by Netflix to direct two Narnia films. 

 

American Stuff

 

The Indomitable Mrs. Bell – Michael Connolly at The Imaginative Conservative. 

 

Richard M. Barancik, the last living Monuments Man, has died, aged 98 – Wallace Ludel at The Art Newspaper. Europe and the rest of us owe these men a deep, deep debt. They saved a considerable amount of European art from the Nazis, including from an order to destroy as the Nazi regime collapsed.

 

“Here Come The Boys”: Morgan’s Last Days in Kentucky – Caroline Davis at Emerging Civil War. Something the rest of us missed out on in American history classes: Brigadier General John Hunt Morgan led his Confederate troops on a raid into the Union states of Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, and West Virginia, a few weeks after Major Benjamin Grierson led his Union troops on a raid through Mississippi.

 

Poetry

 

Ben Jonson’s “To Penshurst” – Jeffrey Hart at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

The Light of Gerard Manley Hopkins in the Dark Victorian World – Mitchell Kalpakgian at The Imaginative Conservative. 

 

News Media

The Most Embarrassing “Facebook Files” Revelation? The Press, Exposed as Censors and The New “Facebook Files” Show Everything the first Amendment Was Designed to Prevent – Matt Taibbi at Racket News.

The end of the Washington Post – Mark Judge at The Spectator. Out local newspaper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, publishes news and op-ed articles from the Washington Post. Some days, it looks like the Washington Post has taken over the op-ed page. Increasingly, the news stories are more and more resembling opinion stories. Mark Judge calls it out, noting even Bob Woodward called the newspaper to task for accepting the Russian collusion narrative with once questioning it.

 

Bogoroditse Devom All-Night Vigil by Sergei Rachmaniov – MDR Rundfunkkoror

 Painting: The Ghost Story, oil on canvas by Frederick Smallfield (1829-1915).