Some Monday Readings – Sept. 14, 2026

London’s ice cream wars – Jim Warerson, David Hall, and Polly Smythe at London Centric. 

The Other Side (of sad stories) – Glenn McCarty at Story Warren.

 

College campuses need to be liberated from their administrators – Barry Lam at College Town.

 

Don Quixote’s Guide to Better Reading – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review.

 

9/11 and How the Western Left Continues to Shame Itself – Andrew Devine at The Devine Message.

 

A Prayer for Grandparents Day – Yuri Bezemov at How to Subvert Subversion.

 

Don’t Miss Your Opportunities – Terry Whalin at The Writing Life.

 

American nature: On a pair of exhibitions at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site – James Panero at The New Criterion.

 

Short Story, Deep Treasures: Biblical Allusion in “The Gift of the Magi” – John Savoie at Literary Matters.

Painting: Mount Chocorua, New Hampshire (1827), oil on canvas by Thomas Cole (1801-1848).

Three days

After Luke 2:41-52 

The travel group is large,

men and women, old

and young, children and

the elderly, parents and

grandparents, many

related, all known

to each other, all knowing

they’d watch out for each

other and the children.

They travel a day before

the couple realize their

son, their oldest, is not

with the group, Panic

seizes their hearts;

they hurry back to the city,

to Jerusalem. They look

everywhere, searching,

asking everyone if they’d

seen the boy, panic rising

in their hearts as they visit

and revisit every place

they’d seen and visited and 

rested. After three days, 

three days of imagining

the worst, three days 

of panic and anxiety, 

three days of growing

fear and despondency,

three days of looking

everywhere except,

perhaps, the least and

the most obvious,

the temple, the house 

of God. Three days, 

and the boy they feared

was dead, was found,

as if he’d risen again

in their hearts.

 

Photograph by Cole Keister via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Sunday Readings

 

The Face We All Look For – Ami Wickiser at Gospel-Centered Discipleship.

 

Delicious Life – Elizabeth Stice at Mere Orthodoxy.

 

A Shepherd’s Heart: Honest Conversations when Members Leave Upset – Dan Reiland.

Saturday Good Reads - Sept. 12, 2026

The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered beginning in 1947. A group of Bedouin shepherds discovered clay jars almost a thousand years old in desert caves. Jars kept being discovered into 1956. Selections from the scrolls are being exhibited this year at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. And Michael De Sapio at The Imaginative Conservative explains why the scrolls are so important to Western civilization. 

It happened back in the 1920s, a time of excess, prosperity, and broad disillusionment. America seemed to fall in love with vicious killers. And now, it seems to be happening again. Daniel Darling at The Daily Wire explains why America, or some subset of Americans, now worships its cold-blooded killers.

 

I have been bombarded by emails from people described as marketing experts, agents, editors, and book promoters, often with elaborate descriptions of my novels and how wonderful they are. Your heart might react a little, until you realize that all of these experts are likely derived from an AI application and the whole thing is a scam. Tim Challies explains how scammers are targeting Christian authors.

 

More Good Reads

 

America 250

 

The Poetry of American Independence – Steve Knepper and Brad Skow at New Verse Review.

 

Strange Bedfellows: Adams and Franklin – Chris Mackowski at Emerging Revolutionary War Era.

 

How Did the Nation Get Its Name? – Greg Daugherty at Smithsonian Magazine.

 

A Battle in Our Own Backyard – Molly McMurphy at Missouri Historical Society.

 

Washington’s Invalid Crops: Wounded Warriors Still Served the Revolutionary Cause – David Welker at Journal of the American Revolution.

 

Life and Culture

 

The Crucifixion of Patrick Clancy – Bethel McGrew at Further Up.

 

Homeschooling Is More Normal Than You Think – Tessa Carman at Mere Orthodoxy.

 

Faith

 

Why we need to be students of the past / church history – Michael A.G. Azad Haykin at Historia ecclesiastica.

 

A Catechism on Technology – Darryl Dash at Dashhouse.

 

Writing and Literature

 

What is literary criticism, if not close reading? Art, Magic, and Common Sense – Henry Oliver at The Common Reader.

 

American Stuff

 

The Enduring Tragedy of 9/11 – Michael Oren at Clarity.

 

25 years ago, two strangers met in the twin towers and escaped on 9/11. What happened next? – David Smith at The Guardian.

 

On Escaping This Horrible Era – Matt Taibbi at Racket News.

 

The First Rough Draft of 9/11 History – Nicholas Clairmont at The Free Press. 

 

Poetry

 

“My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is,” poem by Sir. Edward Dyer – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

“September 1913,” poem by Wiliam Butler Yeats – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

British Stuff

 

Tearing at the fabric – James Price at The Critic Magazine.

 

Shut Up and Dance – Movie Compilations

Painting: Hotel Room, oil on canvas (1931) by Edwad Hopper (1882-1967); Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.

Annual visit

After Luke 2:41-52 

It was something they did

every year, a journey

from Nazareth to Jerusalem,

to celebrate the Passover,

the remembrance of God’s

salvation of the people,

deliverance from Egypt,

deliverance from slavery,

the passing over the houses

marked with the blood

of the lamb over the doorway,

protected from the angel

of death. Jerusalem was

crowded, as it always was

at Passover, people crowding

into the city, packed throngs

around the temple, noise and

chaos and the bleating of lambs

to be sacrificed, food vendors

shouting, confusing to those

who did it every year. This year,

the couple from Nazareth brought 

their oldest, a 12-year-old boy,

a boy coming to visit

his father’s house.

 

Photograph by Toa Heftiba via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Friday Readings

 

“The Wish to Be Generous,” poem by Wendell Berry – D.S. Martin at Kingdom Poets.

 

“Lord of A Hopefulness,” poem by Joyce Anstruther – Anthony Esolen at Word & Song.

 

The Illustration – poem by Seth Lewis.

Poets and Poems: Robert McDowell and “The Excellent Assembly”

If you’re older than 29 tor 30, you know precisely where you were on Sept. 11, 2001. My wife was at home, our oldest son was in college, and our youngest son was in school. I’d gone early to my small office in downtown Kirkwood, Mo.  

I turned on my small, portable television to watch the news. Instead, I saw a large passenger jet crash into the South Tower of the World Trade Center in New York. Another jet had crashed into the North Tower 18 minutes earlier. A little more than 30 minutes later came the crash into the Pentagon. And then the crash into the field in Pennsylvania. 

 

Everything changed that day. Airline safety screening changed forever. A war started. The people who were the masterminds behind it were hunted down. But something deeper changed, something indefinable – the idea of the United States we carried in our heads.

 

Twenty-five years have passed. To remember that day, to remember the people on those planes and in those buildings, the policemen and firemen who gave their lives, and the families who lost loved ones, writer and poet Robert McDowell has written The Excellent Assembly. It’s a collection of 52 poems, not based on real people, but imagined to describe the types of people who died and were affected.

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

Some Thursday Readings

 

The Weeping World: A reading of Shakespeare’s ninth sonnet – K.S. Bernstein at Apple Blossoms in a Mournful Wood.

 

“Song of the Chattahoochee,” poem by the Sidney Lanier – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

What Wendell Berry Saw – Jason Edwards at Front Porch Republic.

 

“Dear Friends,” poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson – Anthony Esolen at Word & Song.

 

“The Pobble Who Has No Toes,” poem by Edward Lear – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Reading Wendell Berry’s ‘III’ – Megan Willome at Poetry for Life.

 

Poet Laura: By Heart – Donna Hilbert at Tweetspeak Poetry.

This Didn’t Happen to a Friend of Mine

It showed up as a Facebook memory, a story I hadn’t thought about in years. I’d posted in August of 2009 on my blog and linked it from Facebook. The title was, “This Happened to a Friend of Mine.” The post received a grand total of one comment, from someone named “Anonymous.”

 

I started reading it. And I realize it hadn’t happened to a friend of mine. The premise was a variation of “asking for a friend.”

 

Seventeen years later, I’m not sure why I posted it. The situation had happened two months before. The account I posted was mostly true but not entirely, some things disguised or slightly changed to discuss what happened without pointing to specific people. It was an incredible difficult time, the kind of story that happens all the time in the corporate world but never makes LinkedIn. 

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

Photograph by Arlington Research via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

Murders for September – Jeremy Black at The Critic Magazine.

 

Sweat the Technique: On Writing Process and Possibilities – Lincoln Michel at Counter Craft.

 

Wendell Berry and the Choice of Life – Elizabeth Stice at Front Porch Republic.

Poets and Poems: Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer and “The Wonderment”

Poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer starts this poetry collection with an explanation of what inspired it. I can’t say I’ve read or heard an explanation quite like it. Her father, on his deathbed, “his eyes open but unseeing,” said a phrase, an incomplete sentence: “From our birth…to our death…the wonderment.” 

In other words, all of it, all of life, is full of wonder. The great mountain vistas. The ocean sunsets. A baby’s laugh. But also, the unexpected death, the illness, the hard times, grief. All of it contains a sense of wonder. Visiting the place where her son died, which she wrote about in her previous collection, The Unfolding, and his grave. 

 

In The Wonderment: Poems, published today, Trommer writes about some of the things that fill her with wonder. 

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

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Wild Blackberries – poem by David Whyte.

 

“A Dirge,” poem by Christina Rossetti – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

When an East Cast Girl Sees Saguaros –poem by Aberdeen Livingstone at Rabbit Room Poetry.

 

Winners of Third Annual First Things Poetry Prize – First Things Magazine.