"The Prodigal of Leningrad" by Daniel Taylor

I’m trying to remember when I first became interested in Russian history. Most likely, when I was 10, and one of my Christmas presents (my mother knew me) was a Horizon Caravel book entitled Russia Under the Czars. I must have read it a dozen times. And I still have it. 

My senior year in high school, I discovered Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Cancer Ward, and The First Circle. In college, I took two semesters of Russian history, and I was glad I knew more about Russia’s past than most people. The professor was a great lecturer; he was also an unapologetic defender of the Soviet regime. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Some Wednesday Readings

Is Carney’s Davos sermon the way forward? – David Robertson at Christian Today.

 

Only Mozart – Joseph Sobran at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

How Holocaust Denial Became Mainstream – Simon Sebag Montefiore at The Free Press.

The Friend Who Turned Out to Be a Poet

For many years, until they changed the closing time, my wife and I could be found most Sunday afternoons at the YMCA in out suburb of St. Louis. I had a routine – start with cardio like the treadmill or stationary bike and find in the Cybex machine room. There was a fairly regular crowd there each Sunday, working out from about 5 to 6 p.m. One of those regulars was an older man, about six-foot-five. We knew him as Paul. 

My wife started chatting with him first. And then he spoke to me one Sunday, saying he’d heard I was from New Orleans. He had relatives there, too, even though he was from St. Louis. We’d talk while on the Cybex machines, and he didn’t say much about his own life, other than he liked poetry as much as I did and he loved to visit New Orleans.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

The same – poem by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

The Poem That Outlived the Holocaust – Douglas Century a The Free Press.

 

“Comin thro’ the rye,” poem by Robert Burns – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Cultivating, Winter 2026: Renewing Gratitude

The winter issue of Cultivating Oaks Press is live, and the theme is renewing gratitude. This issue includes some wonderful essays, articles, and stories by Rob Jones, Annie Nardone, Sheila Underwood Vamplin, Adam Nettesheim, Christina Brown, Lara d'Entremont, Kelly Keller, Maribeth Barber, and many more. I have a short story, "Grateful for the War." 

Some Monday Readings

 

C.S. Lewis Returns to Earth – Joseph Pearce at The Imaginative Conservative. 

 

Dispatch No. 4: Jayber Crow – Amelia Friedline at Dispatches to Jack.

 

Don’t Quit Your Day Job – Terry Whalin at The Writing Life.

The forest consumes

After 2 Samuel 18 

The slaughter of battle

is great that day,

thousands falling

to sword and lance

and knife. The dead

lie in heaps, wasted

piles of life destroyed.

And yet, in spite of

sword and lance and 

knife, it is the forest

that consumes more

than the battle, 

the forest with

its trees and logs and

pits and ditches and 

streams and rivers,

the forest capturing

warriors and showing

no mercy.

 

Photograph by Sebastian Unrau via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Sunday Readings

 

Who Is Rich and Who Is Poor? – Eric McLaughlin at Mere Orthodoxy.

 

Chilling Time – Kelly Keller at Story Warren.

 

It Doesn’t Matter What You Remember – Tim Challies.

 

Where is God’s Love When Life Goes Wrong? – Seth Porch at Desiring God.

 

The Burial of the Faithful – poem by Benjamin Myers at First Things.

Saturday Good Reads - Jan. 24, 2026

Back in 2007, spent a week in Williamsburg. I was biking a lot at that time, and I was able to rent a bike at a local shop. I biked the historic triangle – Williamsburg to Yorktown, and Williamsburg to Jamestown. The parkways connecting them had little car traffic and were generally flat. We visited all three by car as well; 2007 was the 400^th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown. If you can’t go, Christopher Klein at History.com explains how the three towns shaped the course of American history.  

It’s been less than week (it seems like months) since the Cities Church in St. Paul, Minn., experienced a serious disruption in its worship service by protestors looking for a pastor supposedly involved with ICE. We learned a lot of things from that disruption, including protestors were unaware of the FACE Act and former CNN anchor Don Lemon didn’t understand the First Amendment. Several people had some thoughtful responses. Samuel D. James at Digital liturgies wrote that we have to let the church be the church. Jesse Johnson explained that the First Amendment doesn’t give anyone the right to disrupt a worship service. And Al Mohler, often controversial across the evangelical spectrum, wrote in World Magazine that the disruption should be a wake-up call for the church.

 

While we wait to see what happens next in Iran, reporter Ashley Rindsberg at The Free Press took an unexpected look, not at Iran but in her own media world. And she discovered that, for the past year, Wikipedia editors have been helping Iran rewrite its record on human rights.

 

More Good Reads

 

America 250

 

The Course of Human Events by Steven Sarson – review by Gabriel Neville at Journal of the American Revolution.

 

America’s 250^th Isn’t Just a Birthday – Yuval Levin at The Free Press.

 

Thomas Nelson of Yorktown, Virginia – Nicholas Marsella at Journal of the American Revolution.

 

‘Freedom plane’ to take US founding documents on tour for country’s 250^th anniversary – Benjamin Sutton at The Art Newspaper.

 

The Unlikeliest Hero of the American Revolution – Johnathan Horn at The Free Press.

 

Faith

 

I Might Owe My Students an Apology About Josephus – John Dickson at The Gospel Coalition.

 

Why Is Christianity the Best Religion? – John Piper at Desiring God.

 

Life and Culture

 

The Times New Roman Font War: I’m on Charlemagne’s Side – John Horvat at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

What Efficiency is For – Thomas Kidd.

 

The Semester the Lights Came On – Elizabeth Stice at Front Porch Republic.

 

Save the Humanities from the Slop – Alan Noble at The Gospel Coalition.

 

Tobacco Ruminations No. 4 – Brian Miller at Notes from an East Tennessee Farmer.

 

Poetry

 

The boy Will goes skating in the frosty night – Anthony Esolen at Word & Song.

 

Yeats, Auden, Eliot: 1939, 1940, 1941 – Colm Toibin at London Review of Books.

 

“The Bust,” poem by W.H. Davies – Joseph Borrum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Writing and Literature

 

An Invitation to the Wonders of Reading – Alex Sosler at Front Porch Republic.

 

Like Walking on Water – Jeff Johnson and Phil Keaggy, poem by Luci Shaw

 Painting: John Keats in His Study, oil on canvas by Joseph Severn (1793-1879). 

The only acceptable sacrifices

After Psalm 51 

Not animals slain, nor

birds plucked, nor bowls

of blood, nor fragrant

incense burned. No,

none of these are

acceptable sacrifices. 

What the Lord demands:

a broken spirit,

a contrite heart.

That’s it.

That’s the list.

That’s what’s needed.

That’s what’s expected.

That’s what’s required.

 

Photograph by Remi Clinton via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Friday Readings

 

Rebellion – Kyle Borg at Gentle Reformation.

 

Don’t Overthink Your Problems – Wyatt Graham.

 

“Half-Light,” poem by Sarah Rossiter – D.S. Martin at Kingdom Poets.

 

Hibernation – poem by Joy Lenton at Poetry Joy.

 

“I to the Hills Will Lift Mine Eyes,” hymn in the Scottish Psalter – Anthony Esolen at Word & Song.

 

Just the thing – poem by Seth Lewis.

The Poetry of Gregory Corso

I have to admit that I was not only unfamiliar with the poetry of Gregory Corso (1930-2001) but I also had never heard of him. That is, until I walked into an exhibition at the St. Louis Art Museum and saw a monumental painting (roughly 30 feet tall), with its title written into the top of the painting: “For Gregory Corso.” 

I pulled out my phone and Googled him. A Beat poet, an associate of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, Neil Cassady, and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Bookstore, among several others. That clicked; it placed him in the 1950s in counter-culture San Francisco, a decade before the hippies. Allen Ginsburg’s famous Howl. Beatniks. Cool, man.

Some Thursday Readings

 

We Have Butterflies to See: Four Walks in Central Park – Geoffrey Smagacz at Front Porch Republic.

 

Top 10 Dip into Poetry – Every Day Poems.

 

“The Watchers,” poem by William Stanley Braithwaite – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

"Island Games" by Luke H. Davis

DI Gareth Benedict and his team are assigned to help police the Island Games, a sports event held every two years and attracting teams in some 13 sports from various islands, and not only those around the United Kingdom. This year, the island of Anglesey off the coast of Wales is the host, and teams are coming from as far away as the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic. 

The reader knows, before the police forces do, that the games have also attracted two assassins. We don’t know yet their intended targets, but we will. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

Learning to Dine with Sinners – Andrew Klavan at The New Jerusalem.

 

We’ll Catch Up Sometime – short story by Br. Seth Bauer at The Imaginative Conservative.

Poets and Poems: Noa Grey and “The Elegance of Sadness”

One of my earliest memories involves my mother, sitting in the screened porch between our kitchen and the carport. I might have been four or five, and she would have been in her early 30s. She had her legs drawn up under her, and she was holding a handkerchief, crying. I ask her why, and she said she was just feeling sad.  

Decades later, when she was reaching the end of her life, and I asked her if she remembered that. She did, and she was 89. She said she felt terrible that I had found her crying, but she had been deeply unhappy. I had unexpectedly walked in on it. She said that, at the time, she was realizing that her life was turning into something entirely different from what she had imagined when she was younger, and she felt like it was losing a dream. 

 

Sadness is a word I associate with her. It’s a condition that can come from many sources – disappointment, loss, health setbacks, family upheavals, or sometimes no reason at all, to mention only a few. It’s a very human condition, something we’ve all experienced to varying degrees. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

There I Go Again: On pessimism and the poetry of Stevie Smith – Alexander Fayne.

 

Two Cities and Two Men – poem by Cody Ilardo at Power & Glory.

 

Pilgrim Verse – poem by Jody Lee Collins.

 

“L. The Snow,” poem by Emily Dickinson – Every Day Poems.

 

“The Bells,” poem by Edgar Allen Poe – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

Some Monday Readings

The Day NY Publishing Lost Its Soul – Ted Gioia at The Honest Broker. 

The Beautiful Mess of Steinbeck’s East of Eden – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review.

 

Weimar America & A Smoldering World – Rod Dreher’s Diary.

 

Erich von Daniken and the modern paranoid style – James Snell at The Critic Magazinbe.

 

An apology and a revelation – Lancia Smith at Cultivating a Writer’s Life.

 

The nature of nature writing – Padraig O Tuama at Poetry Unbound.

 

How to Deliver a Legendary Speech – Yuri Bezmenov at How to Subvert Subversion.

 

MLK’s Final Act of Faith – Jonathan Eig at The Free Press.

 

Letters from Triune: ‘Fat,’ ‘lazy,’ and the high price of whisky – John Banks’ Civil War Blog.

A plea

After Psalm 51 

He pleads to hear

God’s joy and gladness,

the rejoining of broken

bones, hiding his face,

blotting out iniquities,

creation of a clean heart,

renewing a right spirit

within, returning home

from exile and 

abandonment, restoring

to joy, upholding him

willingly, delivering

him from judgment, 

a tongue to sing

of righteousness,

opening his lips

to praise.

 

Photograph by Buse Doga Ay via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Saturday Good Reads - Jan. 17, 2026

This week, the Iranian government shut down the country’s internet, trying to stop the protests that threaten to topple the ayatollah and his regime. Something odd happened: the Iranian shutdown also caused numerous social media accounts promoting Scottish independence from Britain to go dark. I wonder how that happened. 

Author Gayle Feldman is publishing a biography of Truman Capote this month, and in an excerpt posted at Literary Hub, she describes how Bennett Cerf at Random House guided In Cold Blood to publication. I can remember reading it in high school, mesmerized by the book and simultaneously horrified at the story of how cold-blooded the two killers were. Capote was part of the wave known as “New Journalism,” which included Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Hunter Thompson, Joan Didion, and others.

 

Agatha Christie was known for avoiding the spotlight. She hated giving interviews. But she did relent, at least once, in 1955, and talked with the BBC. A great line from the interview: “There’s nothing like boredom to make you write.” 

 

More Good Reads

 

America 250

 

The American Revolution and the Fate of the World by Richard Bell – review by Timothy Symington at Journal of the American Revolution.

 

Stoke the Fire for America’s 250^th – Andrw Zwerneman at On Classical Education.

 

The American Revolution Comes to Georgia The Battle of the Riceboats, 1776 – Robert Scott Davis at Journal of the American Revolution.

 

Writing and Literature

 

“A little learning is a dangerous thing” – Anthony Esolen at Word & Song on Alexander Pope’s 1711 essay.

 

Tools I Use to Run My Writing and Coaching Business – Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach.

 

In Praise of Bibliographies – Christine Norvell at Front Porch Republic.

 

Why Contemporary Fiction Can Be Great – Lucas Smith at The Sprawl of Quality.

 

C.S. Lewis Goes to Venus – Joseph Pearce at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

Faith

 

The Remnant: The Last Christians of Denmark – NorthHugr (video).

 

The Closure of the World’s Oldest Monastery – D.P. Curtin at Real Clear Religion.

 

The Sticky Sin of Always Being Right – Trevin Wax at The Gospel Coalition.

 

Life and Culture

 

Against Very Online Candidates – Alexander Salter at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

Foreign Fraud Gangs Are Ripping Off West Coast States – Christopher Rufo. 

 

News Media

 

Why Twitter matters – Chris Bayliss at The Critic Magazine.

 

British Stuff

 

A Muslim state loses faith in British education – James Price at The Critic Magazine.

 

Poetry

 

“The Fly,” poem by William Blake – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Life in a Northern Town – Justin Hayward with Mike Batt

 

Painting: Girl Reading, oil on canvas (1872) by George Cochran Lambdin (1830-1896).

Why does he ask?

After Psalm 51 

Why dies he ask

for a clean heart

to be created within?

Because the friend,

the prophet, had

confronted the sin.

He was a man known

for being after God’s

own heart, and here

he is, asking for

a clean heart. He lays

out the process: 

a request for mercy,

a blotting out of sins,

a cleansing, knowledge

of what he’d done,

purging with hyssop,

washing to cleanness.

 

Photograph by Fabrizio Conti via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Friday Readings

 

“The Hymn of Ceylon,” poem by W.S. Senior – D.S. Martin at Kingdom Poets.

 

Reject the Religion of Efficiency – Samuel D. James at Digital Liturgies.

“No One Speaks English in Paris.” Well, Not Exactly

Our hotel in Amsterdam had arranged our transportation to the train station. It wasn’t far, but traffic was congested. Once there, we boarded the Thalys, the high-speed train from Amsterdam to Paris with a single stop in Brussels (it’s now called the Eurostar). 

My wife had taken French in high school and college, but I think we were both slightly apprehensive about Paris. I’d been told that no one in Paris spoke English except English-speaking tourists, “and if even if a French person does, they’ll never admit it and just stare at you with a blank look.” I’d also been told, “They don’t like Americans.”

 

I would learn a French word, or, more precisely, a phrase. It would get branded on my brain the entire time we were in Paris.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: the Louvre at night, via Unsplash.

Some Thursday Readings

 

Tipping Your Kayak – poem by Sarah Chestnut at The Rabbit Room.

 

Poetry as Reclamation – Huma Sheikh at Writer’s Digest.

 

Soft words – poem by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

“Nightwind,” poem by John Clare – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Sharing the Grail – poem by David Whyte.

 

“There Will Be Stars,” poem by Sara Teasdale – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

How Scott Adams Made Me a Hero

In the fall of 1995, I was helping the company’s IT function plan for its annual conference in March. They needed a keynote dinner speaker, and they looked to me to see if it were at all possible to get Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic. 

It’s hard to understand now, but the Dilbert carton was growing in popularity, and Adams – himself a former IT person – was considered the patron saint of IT. He wasn’t as well known outside of the function, not yet, anyway. But he soon would be.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

Illinois Teen Restores Civil War Graves for Eagle Scout Project – Kevin Damask at Military.com.

 

In This House, Robin Hood Is a Hero – Spencer Klavan at The New Jerusalem.

 

Iran’s uprising, and the moral bewilderment of Western youth – Brendan O’Neill at The Spectator.

 

Chaplin in the East End – Spitalfields Life.

 

A Brother’s Death, A Poet’s Muse: The Oates Brothers at Gettysburg – Lisa Samia at Emerging Civil War.

Poets and Poems: Linda Nemec Foster and “Bone Country”

One can visit Europe in lots of ways – cruise ship on the rivers, cruise ship on the ocean, bus, car, backpacking, bicycle, airplane, even on foot. I don’t know exactly how poet Linda Nemec Foster has visited Europe, and her 2024 collection Bone Country shows she’s at least visited in prose poetry.  

Bone Country is not a travelogue or tourist guide. Instead, it’s a deep dive into people, history, major upheavals, and small events. She watches a man with a spiked mohawk drink tea in Istanbul. An artist from Serbia insists he’s painted her face. She watches undercover policewomen and ghosts among the trees in Warsaw. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

10 – poem by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

A Poem for the 250^th Anniversary of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense – Andrew Benson Brown at The Society of Classical Poets.

 

“Good Night, World,” poem by Jacob Glatstein – Ruth Wisse at The Free Press.

 

Introducing Inspiration – New Annual Theme – L.L. Barkat at Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

“Hurt Hawks,” poem by Robinson Jeffers – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

“Snow” by John Banville

It’s near Christmas of 1957 and heavily snowing. Detective Inspector St. John Strafford is called to County Wexford in Ireland to the ancestral home of the Osbornes, a family that has seen better times but still maintain their position, at least in their own eyes. Like Strafford, they are Protestant, the remnant of the great landed families who dominated Ireland before independence from Britain. Strafford himself is the son of a similar family in similar circumstances – and no one knows why he became a police officer, including Strafford himself. 

What it’s been called to investigate is the body of a Catholic priest, Father Tom Lawless. The man, a frequent guest, had been found in the library, stabbed to death and the body mutilated. The body and the crime scene has also been tampered with – Colonel Osborne couldn’t stand the sight of the mess and so had the housekeeper clean up the blood. It soon becomes clear that this is where the priest may have died, but he was initially stabbed upstairs.

 

Strafford not only has to investigate the gruesome death, he also must deal with his political superior in the Dublin police force, the powerful archbishop of Ireland who prefers to cover up messy crimes, even of priest, and his own inner demons. And then his subordinate police officer, helping the investigation, disappears. 

 

John Banville

Snow is the first mystery novel in the Strafford and Quirke series by Irish writer John Banville. Originally published in 2020, it received rave reviews from The Guardian in Britain and The New York Times. It was something of a departure for Banville, a Booker Prize winner who’s known more for his literary novels. 

 

That said, Snow seems more a cross between a mystery novel and a literary one. It’s less about police procedure and solving a mystery and more about the interior life of the detective investigating the crime. But it’s well done, with Banville peeling away the layers of past and present that the crime is really all about.

 

In addition to his work in literary journalism (The Irish Press and The Irish Times), Banville is the author of numerous works of fiction, including novels, short stories, and novellas. Under the pseudonym Benjamin Black and his own name, he’s also written several crime novels. His fiction has received numerous awards, including the Franz Kafka Award and the Irish Pen Award for Outstanding Achievement in Irish Literature.

 

Related: The Sea by John Banville.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

Tanya Berry’s Work and Wisdom – Gracy Olmstead at Granola.

 

In Praise of Common Sense – Chris Mackowski at Emerging Revolutionary War Era.

 

The Ancient Roman Guide to Building Your Personal Library – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review.