Some Wednesday Readings

Love Along the Raid: A Morgan’s Raiders Love Story – Caroline Davis at Emerging Civil War. 

Old Tom’s Ash Wednesday – Bradley Birzer.

 

T.S. Eliot’s Long Lent – Dwight Longenecker at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

Britain: Westminster is running out of time – Lee Cain at The Critic Magazine.

 

The Vikings of Orkney – Warren Frye at The New Criterion.

 

Concerning Kipling – poem by George Bradley at Literary Matters.

 

Photograph: Ring of Brodgar Stone Circle and Henge, Orkney Islands, Scotland – Maxwell Andrews at Unsplash. Used with permission.

Poets and Poems: Erin Murphy and “Mother as Conjunction”

When we were children, my brothers and I would sometimes be handed a snack that I thought had been invented by my mother. “Bread, butter, and sugar” was possibly our favorite treat. My mother was tickled that we saw it as a special dessert. It was only years later, when I visited her in a rehab center while she recovered from a broken hip bone, that she told me where it had come from. 

She grew up in the Great Depression. Money was so tight that my aunt quit high school because she couldn’t pay the 25 cents for gym clothes. My mother, the fourth of six children, knew hunger. She said there were times when there was nothing to eat, so they’d go to bed hungry. The next day, my grandmother would prepare sandwiches for school, using the only ingredients she had – butter and sugar sandwiches. It was a poor child’s lunch in the 1930s, and her own children thought of it as a terrific treat.

 

Reading poet Erin Murphy’s new work, Mother as Conjunction, imagine my surprise to discover someone else who had the same experience as my mother, except it happened decades later. 

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

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Nature – poem by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

Memento Mori: On Philip Larkin’s “Aubade” and its Discontents – Alexander Fayne.

 

The Sea in You – poem by David Whyte.

 

“My Heart Leaps Up,” poem by William Wordsworth – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Whatever Is – poem by Sarah Chestnut at Rabbit Room Poetry.

"Bones Buried Deep" by Emma Jameson

It’s June of 1940. Dunkirk has happened. France had surrendered. The day of the formal surrender – June 22, 1940 – is approaching. And in Britain, there’s a collective holding of breath. What happens now? 

For Dr. Benjamin Bones, working in the village of Birdswing in Cornwall, what happens is another murder. A body is found in a stream nearby. It’s finally identified as that of a young man from Plymouth, and he’s been kicked and beaten to death. The case takes on a different overtone when the body is identified – a young Jewish man, the sole support of his young brothers and sisters.

 

The discovery brings out the best and the worst in the local residents. Dr. Bones, and his great love Lady Juliet Linton, are surprised by the depth of anti-Semitic feeling from the people they like and thought they knew. It seems particularly virulent among the more upper-class crowd who gather at the Duke of Cornwall Hotel in Plymouth, already infiltrated by Lady Juliet’s errant husband working undercover for the British government. But what happened to the young man?

 

Emma Jameson

Bones is joined by the official investigator, a detective from Plymouth who himself is Jewish and knows firsthand what discrimination is like in the police department. Lady Juliet is not to be left out, and she finds innovative ways to investigate on her own.

 

Bones Buried Deep  is the fourth of four Dr. Benjamin Bones mysteries by British mystery author Emma Jameson, who’s also written the Lord and Lady Hetheridge mystery series (all set in London and have something to do with the word “blue”). 

 

This installment in the Dr. Bones series, like its predecessors, is leavened by humor (Jameson has created a great comic detective with Lady Juliet). And humor is definitely needed in what would be a dark tale indeed without it, a tale of vicious discrimination, death, black marketing, and the overhand of war.

 

Related:

Blue Murder by Emma Jameson.

 Something Blue by Emma Jameson.

 Black & Blue by Emma Jameson.

 Blue Blooded by Emma Jameson.

 Blue Christmas by Emma Jameson.

 Untrue Blue by Emma Jameson. 

 London Blue by Emma Jameson.

 Bones in the Blackout by Emma Jameson.

 Bones at the Manor House by Emma Jameson.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

Technological Poverty – Matthew Walther at The Lamp.

 

A Quiet Refusal to Compromise – Elizabeth Corey at Law & Liberty.

 

The Novel That Kept a British Prime Minister Up All Night – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review.

 

Art is the Signature of Man – Joseph Pearce at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

Why Essex is Britain’s most right-wing county – Daniel Dieppe at the Critic Magazine.

Singing to remember

After 2 Samuel 22 

I wrote a song, once,

a song of thanksgiving

and redemption, a song

I remember now. It is

a song of life,

a song of my life.

the song I wrote

to remember always

celebrates who

the author is,

the author of salvation,

the author of redemption

and rescue, the author

who takes me and

protects me in the cleft

of the rock, the author

who brings me to

the oasis in the desert,

the author who writes

my story. I sing

that song to remember.

 

Photograph by Vitalii Khodzinskyi via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Sunday Readings

 

The Spiritual Discipline of Unlearning – David Prince at Prince on Preaching.

 

Holy Humor – Joshua Budimlic at Iotas in Eternity.

Saturday Good Reads - Feb. 14, 2026

Ah, those Valentine Day candy hearts, with those little messages that read like they anticipated text messages decades later. “Luv U.” “U R Mine.” I was surprised to learn that they originated during the Civil War. See “Hub Wafers: A Yankee Delight” at Emerging Civil War.  

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is all over the media – stock market drops, worries about impact on jobs, already beginning to redefine industries. More than a year ago, a former colleague at work asked me if I’d embraced ChatGPT. I surprised her when I shook my head no. “Not for me,” I said. “I think I’d prefer to give up writing altogether.” AI popped all over my inbox this week. Writing coach Ann Kroeker asks whose voice is on your page. Writer Paul Kingsnorth sees it as the latest manifestation of what he calls “the machine,” and tells writers to oppose it. And Samuel D. James takes a look at that latest AI article that went viral.

 

More Good Reads

 

America 250

 

The Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence: The Present Status of the Controversy – Scott Syfert at Journal of the American Revolution.

 

Just Call It Washington’s Birthday – Jonathan Horn at The Free Press.

 

Writing and Literature

 

Twenty-one reactions to Wuthering Heights (from 1847 to 2007) – Henry Oliver at The Common Reader.

 

Shakespeare in the Bardo – Tana Wojczuk at The Baffler.

 

Life and Culture

 

The Popular Progressive Podcast Calling Evangelicals ‘Cancer’ – Bonnie Kristian at The Free Press.

 

Ten Books No One in Education Wants You to Read – Michael Rose at Classical Compass.

 

How Jamaica’s Bobsled Team Became an Unlikely Global Sensation – Kareem Nittle at History.

 

Poetry

 

A Sonnet on the Transfiguration – Malcolm Guite.

 

“On Stella’s Birth-day,” poem by Jonathan Swift – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Poet Laura: Month of Fevers – Donna Hilbert at Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

Faith

 

All Those Undone Days – Andrew Roycroft at New Grub Street.

 

American Stuff

 

The Oath I Took – Sarah Harley at Front Porch Republic.

 

Winters Remembered – Brian Miller at Notes from an East Tennessee Farmer.

All Because of Mercy - Casting Crowns

Painting: A Woman Reading, oil on canvas (1920) by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). 

Poets and Poems: Dave Malone and "Bypass"

I’m reading a poetry collection, and an image forms in my mind, a memory I hadn’t recalled in years. I’m 11, and my mother arranged for me to spend a week with my widowed aunt who lived in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans.  She was the family historian, and I was the family reader, so I suppose my mother thought we’d be a match. We were. 

She was a force to be reckoned with. In her lifetime, she crossed swords with reluctant neighbors, homeowner associations, historical commissions, the New Orleans City Council, and just about anyone whom she saw standing in the way of historical preservation and urban beautification. She also buried every deceased pet in her deep back yard, well behind her pre-Civil War house.

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

Some Friday Readings

 

Found in Translation: Love’s Fire and Ice – L.L. Barkat at Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

“Hendecasyllabics,” poem by Algernon Charles Swinburne – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Formalist, Farmer, and Faithful – Marie Burdett at New Verse Review.

Remembering a song

After 2 Samuel 22 

I remember a song

I sang before, long before,

a song to celebrate,

a song to remember

my rescue ar a time

of peril, a time

of disaster, a time

when my life seemed

over. Yet it wasn’t.

I sang a song

of deliverance, a song

of rescue, a song

of salvation, a song

of redemption fom

disaster. I sang

the song then;

I sing the song

now.

 

Photograph by Hailey Reed via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Thursday Readings

 

Holy Sonnet VII by John Donne – D.S. Martin at Kingdom Poets.

 

“Psalm XIII,” poem by Sir Philip Sidney – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

“When Jesus Left His Father’s Throne,” hymn by James Montgomery – Anthony Esolen at Word & Song.

 

Right Here – poem by Seth Lewis.