Some Monday Readings - July 20, 2026

Rehabilitating Time: Memory & the Writing Life – Daniel Sundahl at The Imaginative Conservative.

Charity That’s Just Ducky – Annie Nardone at Cultivating Oaks Press.

 

At Waltham Abbey – Spitalfields Life.

 

Want More Babies? We Need More Friends – Robert Henderson at City Journal.

 

“The people here are liberty mad…” Nicholas Cresswell and the American Independence – Rob Orrison at Emerging Revolutionary War Era.

 

Archaeologists Found a 2,000-Year-Old Garden Beneath a Church. It May Be the Site of Jesus’s Tomb – Michael Natale at Popular Mechanics.

 

The Hazards of Public Life – Jeffrey Bilbro at Plough.

 

Up the Hudson and Into the Heart of America – Megan Pidcock at The Wall Street Journal (unlocked). 

 

How a Chance Meeting Gave Me Some Tools to Help Mr. Wild Dog and Rejuvenated My Dream – Katie Andraski at Katie’s Ground.

 

St. Pancras Church and the Loss of the Steamship City of Boston – A London Inheritance.

 

Painting: The Beeches, oil on canvas (1845) by Asher Brown Durand (1796-1886), part of the Hudson River School, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.

Decision on the Stairs: New Short Story at Cultivating

The Summer 2026 edition of Cultivating Oaks Press is online today, and the theme is “renewing charity.” My new short story, “Decision on the Stairs,” is fiction, but it’s based on something that happened to my wife and I in London in 2012. We were getting ready for our day when fire alarms went off, and the hotel had to be evacuated. The elevators were not an option; we were on the 14^th floor, and the hotel was nearly full. There was no panic, but there was rising anxiety, and people were rushing to get out.  

What happened on the stairs became a short story 14 years later. You can read the story here. You can access the entire issue here.

Photograph by H&CO via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Charity is Selfish?

Today, when we hear the word “charity,” we think of United Way, the Salvation Army, philanthropy, giving to the need and the poor, what used to called “alms” a hundred years ago. The meaning of the word has changed over time; the Biblical meaning is, C.S. Lewis points out in Mere Christianity, is something more like “love, in the Christian sense.”

He’s not talking about love as an emotion or feeling. “It is a state not of the feelings but of the will; that state of the will which we have naturally about ourselves, and must learn to have about other people.”

I have to think about that: charity as a state of the will, a state of determination, of doing.

One key to Lewis’ description is that phrase that is easy to overlook, “which we have naturally about ourselves.” When we want to do something that we want to do, we will move heaven and earth to get it done.

Well, I do, anyway. Ask my wife.

That act of selfishness is closer to what the Biblical definition of charity actually is – having that same capacity for others that you have for yourself. This sounds something akin to the golden rule – do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Love others as much as you love yourself.

Ever practical, Lewis asks, what do you do when you don’t love someone? What happens when people can’t find any feeling in themselves to love others, or love God?

His answer: Act as if you do. “Don’t manufacture feelings. Ask yourself, ‘If I were sure that I loved God, what would I do?’ When you have found the answer, go and do it.”

What?

His point is that in the very act (and the emphasis is on “act”) of doing, we will find the way. Sometimes – perhaps more than sometimes – this kind of love, this “charity,” is what faith is about, faith in serving others, in serving God and changing our own hearts.

And this was a short chapter – a little over four pages.


Jason Stasyzen and Sarah Salter have been leading us in a discussion of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. To see more posts on the chapter entitled “Charity,” please visit Sarah’s blog, Living Between the Lines.