This past week, we watched the movie Pressure (2206), about the final 72 hours of the run-up to the D. Day invasion in World War II. The top three stars are Brendan Fraser as Dwight Eisenhower, Damian Lewis as a rather nasty Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, and Andrew Scott in an incredible performance as British meteorologist James Stagg. It is Stagg who must determine if the weather allows a go or no-go for the invasion. It’s riveting. History Extra has a podcast on the true story behind the movie.
Historians (and everybody else) will likely argue until Doomsday about the role the Christian faith played in the founding of the United States. But the U.S. Constitution was itself based on several state constitutions, which were based on various Puritan covenants, which were based on the Bible. Jerry Newcombe at the Institute for Faith, Work, & Economics explains the importance of the first English Bible printed in the United States.
We know that C.S. Lewis’s Anglican faith helped shape the writing of The Chronicles of Narnia. But what about J.R.R. Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings? D.J. Taylor at Literary Hub explains how it was Tolkien’s Catholic faith that shaped not only LOTR but all of his writings.
Outraged by his words, furious he would suggest that others were worthy of love, they resorted to violence, dragging him out of town, this man they knew, the carpenter’s son, the man whom they believed had blasphemed because he suggested others had gained God’s favor. They drove him to the hilltop, prepared to cast him down, prepared to kill, but he simply moved through their midst, away from the cliff, away from the hilltop, and left.
Painting: The Brow of the Hill Near Nazareth, oil on canvas by James Tissot (1836-1902), Brooklyn Museum.
I’ve read Paul Kingsnorth for years, first his novels, then his poems, and then his essays. The writer who began as something of a radical environmentalist who discovered faith, explored Ireland’s holy wells and met wild saints, became a popular speaker, and, in a way, anticipated the promise and peril of artificial intelligence and the rise of what he calls “the machine.” It would be an oversimplification to call him England’s (or Ireland’s, since he lives there now) answer to Wendell Berry. But there would also be some truth to that oversimplification.
Bery often wrote and spoke about industrial agriculture and the death f rural communities. Those themes are also part of Kingsnorth’s “machine,” but he goes further. He includes technology in general, and particularly digital technology, global economic systems, and the aspects of modern life he sees as soul-crushing.
Poet and writer Rachel Hicks has lived in some unusual places. She was born in the foothills of the Himalaya Mountains, and she’s lived in India, Pakistan, Jordan, the Republic of Congo, Hong Kong, China, and the United States. Her nomadic background comes into full play with her debut poetry collection, Accumulated Lessons in Displacement.
When I started reading, I expected to see those international experiences reflected in the poems. And they’re there. What I did not expect was the find so many poems of a haunting beauty, that leaves you with a sense of awe. But that’s what I found.
