Saturday Good Reads - May 9, 2026

Many of us grew up reciting “Listen, my children, and you shall hear, of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.” Those opening lines of the poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and what followed became our understanding of the famous and mythic ride. But as the Smithsonian Magazine points out, Paul Revere had another race, now forgotten, to secure government documents, of all things.  

Ray Bradbury is famous for the novel Fahrenheit 451 and stories like The Martian Chronicles. He also believed in freedom of speech and fought censorship. Bradley Birzer writes at Modern Age that Bradbury should be seen as an advocate of freedom, not ideology. Speaking of freedom, Birzer himself just published a new book this past week, The Declaration of Independence: A Radical Experiment in Liberty.

 

Randy Alcorn has a post about heaven, and it’s an intriguing one. He writes that many believe in eight common myths, and that’s all they are, myths.

 

More Good Reads

 

America 250

 

Before 1776, There Was Rhode Island – Bjorn Bruckshaw at Emerging Revolutionary War Era.

 

George Washington Crosses the Delaware – Keli Holt at Just Enough History. 

 

The Odyssey and Irrelevance of John Adams – Kevin Diestelow at Journal of the American Revolution.

 

A Naval Battle off Wilmington, DE, May 8, 1776 – Eric Sterner at Emerging Revolutionary War Era.

 

Writing and Literature

 

The Most Powerful Words You’ll Ever Write Change You First – Jana Carlson.

 

Poetry

 

On Nostalgia: Ever Cleaner, Ever More Pillowy – Boris Dralyuk at Poetry Magazine.

 

“Home Thoughts,” from Abroad,” poem by Robert Browning – Anthony Esolen at Word & Song.

 

Trees – poem by David Whyte.

 

“Mock Panegyric on a Young Friend,” poem by Jane Austen – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

The Wrong Kind of Black Poet – Ernest Jesuyemi at Compact.

 

‘A Small Rebellion Against the Machine’ – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review interviews poet Seth Wieck.

 

Why Don’t People Like Poetry? – Daniel Cowper at New Verse Review.

 

Faith

 

Why AI Will Not Replace Human Love – Elena Streett at Front Porch Republic.

 

British Stuff

 

‘A remarkable time capsule’: The enchanting history of Oxford University’s 750-year-old medieval library – Christian Kriticos at BBC.

 

Life and Culture

 

How the Far Left Tapped into a Money Machine – Roy Teixiera at The Free Press.

 

Nobody Teaches Arithmetic Anymore – Dan Murphy at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

News Media

 

Substack vs. Twitter – Competitors or Complementary? – Yuri Bezmenov at How to Subvert Subversion.

 

What An Awesome God – Phil Wickham

 

Painting: Reading Woman, oil on canvas by Jacques-Emile Blanche (1861-1942), Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest.

The rock

After Matthew 16:16-20 

What do the people

say, he asked, who

do the people say 

I am? Perfunctory

and expected answers:

John the Baptist,

Elijah, Jeremiah,

a prophet like them,

that’s what the people

say. He makes it personal:

What about you? Who

do you say I am? 

Simon Peter, ever large

and ever in charge,

answers, the Christ,

the son of the living God.

He responds: blessed

are you, Upon you,

upon this rock, 

I will build my church.

 

Photograph by Zoltan Tasi via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Friday Readings

 

The One Walking in the Fog Beside Us – Lara d’Entremont at A Mother Held.

 

Let the Lord Handle It – Chris Martin at FYI.

 

“Awake, Arise,” hymn by Christopher Smart – Anthony Esolen at Word & Song.

 

The Ingredients of a Petal – poem by Seth Lewis.

 

Milking a Two-Bucket Cow – Linda Egenes at Mary Swander’s Emerging Voices.

Five Ways to Research Your Family History

The writing of my historical novel Brookhaven took about 150 years. 

I must have seen something like this before, but I can’t recall a specific example. Many novels include an acknowledgement page, cutting the people who helped or inspired the author. My historical novel Brookhaven has an author’s note explaining some of the novel’s background. But it also has something you don’t usually see in a novel – a nine-page bibliography.

 

I included more as a reminder to myself of where the novel come from. 

 

A grandmother who referred to the Civil War as the “War of Northern Aggression.” A father who told slightly mangled family stories, including one that sounded like an epic journey. A research paper in high school on what the “plantation system” really looked like. A family Bible with a mystery embedded in the birth and death records. A mountain of reading old and new American history books. An aunt who spent decades researching family history, long before the invention of the internet. Discovering I liked, as in really liked, the poems of Henry Wadsworth Longellow, once the top-selling poet and author in the United States who was dropped into the dustbin of literary criticism. 

Photograph: A page of family records in the Bible, pre-preservation.

Some Thursday Readings

 

This Just In – poem by J.S. Gilbert at Frivolous Quill.

 

Murmurs in the Cathedral – Jeffrey Streeter at English Republic of Letters.

 

Third Annual Poetry Prize for Submissions – First Things Magazine.

 

“A Look at the Heavens,” poem by John Clare – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Poet Laura: Mother in Satin – Donna Hilbrt at Tweetspeak Poetry.

"The Burning Glow" by Luke H. Davis

Cameron Ballack is back. And he’s traipsing all over where I used to bike. 

Ballack is the fictional wheelchair-bound detective created by St. Louis-based writer Luke H. Davis. In previous books (and there’s been a gap of some years), he and his team were based in St. Charles County, Missouri, part of metropolitan St. Louis. In his new outing, entitled The Burning Glow, Ballack is now the lead detective for the Special Investigating Department, which operates across the metro St. Louis region. (St. Louis actually does have something similar that operates across jurisdictional lines called the Major Case Squad.)

 

What Ballack and his team are pulled into is a car bombing in the part of the city of St. Louis known as “Little Bosnia,” home to numerous immigrants who fled the war in the 1990s. 

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

Some Wednesday Readings

 

Want to Find Yourself? Volunteer in Your Church Nursery – Cameron McAllister at Front Porch Republic.

 

Facts About Euthanasia in Canada – Tim Challies.

 

Growling in a corner: Samuel Johnson’s lost years – Henry Oliver at The Common Reader.

 

Defining Ideology – Bradley Birzer at The Imaginative Conservative.

Poets and Poems: Baruch November and “The Broken Heart is the Master Key”

More than 40 years ago, I discovered the stories and novels of Isaac Bashevis Singer (1903-1991). I don’t remember how I came across his work, but I found myself reading stories about a culture that had largely vanished, not long before I was born. 

My understanding, if I had one of the Yiddish culture, had been shaped by a play that became a movie, Fiddler on the Roof, the story of Tevye, his wife Golda, and their daughters as they navigate the forces of modernism and anti-Semitism changing their lives. It’s set in the Jewish Pale of Settlement in Russia, around the turn of the 20^th century. And then I read Singer’s stories, which not only provided a richer context than the movie but also made the culture seem more real. As much as I enjoyed the movie, it was Singer’s stories that showed the reality without the Hollywood framing.

 

As I started reading The Broken Heart is the Master Key: Poems by Baruch November, I was almost catapulted back to Singer’s stories. November’s poems aren’t about a culture that had almost disappeared; instead, they reflect the echoes of that culture, two generations after Nazi Germany destroyed it in Poland, eastern Europe, and western Russia. 

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

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Doubly – poem by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

How to Write a Found Poem – The Many Tools to Discover Treasure – L.L. Barkat at Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

“A Psalm of Life,” poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – D.S. Martin at Kingdom Poets.

 

“In Time of Plague,” poem by Thomas Nash – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Due to the Loss of Field Roast Artisan Grain Sausage – poem by L.L. Barkat at Every Day Poems.

 

Some Monday Readings - May 4, 2026

Tolkien, Chesterton, & the Sloth of England – Joseph Pearce at The Imaginative Conservative. 

Who Really Wrote Philip K. Dick’s Best Novel? – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review.

 

Plato’s Cave and the Rise of the Highly Educated Radical – Jacob Howland at The Free Press.

 

The Greatest Sentence Ever Written? – Christ Mackowski at Emerging Revolutionary War Era. 

 

Celebrating 15 Years with the Kettle On – Every Day Poems – L.L. Barkat at Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

Illustration: The Declaration of Independence. 

Partiality is a sin

After James 2:1-13 

Partiality: the tendency

we share to judge

and arrange people

in hierarchies for reasons

of which are legion.

Partiality: A sin.

Heaven’s cafeteria 

contains no reserved 

tables; so, too, should

the church. So, too,

should each of us.

Anything short

of impartiality is

a sin, our sin. 

The widow and

the orphan are 

just as vital 

to God’s kingdom 

as the rich merchant.

A neighbor is

a neighbor. Love him.

We are each and all

made in the image

of God, and he has

no partiality.

 

Photograph by Clay Banks via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Sunday Readings

 

The Trial of Daily Bread – Greg Morse at Desiring God.

 

Preaching the Gospel to All – Barry York at Tabletalk Magazine.

 

Progressive Christianity’s Metamodern Posture – Jeffrey Beaupre at Modern Reformation.

 

The Sacred Christian Art of Martin Earle – Robert Lazu Kmita at The Imaginative Conservative.