King Charles III will not issue an Easter message this year, according to Buckingham Palace. He did, however, issue one for Ramadan. A sign of the times? In The Wall Steet Journal, Brit Louise Perry writes that Christendom is no more, and not just in Britain (article unlocked). Canada, for example, has a new hate crime bill which seems to target Christians. Some in Britain have noted that, while the Anglican church seems close to collapse, there is a revival underway. Rhys Laverty at The Critic Magazine says the reports of revival in Britain are not premature, but it’s a phenomenon mostly associated with evangelical and Catholic churches.
We are assaulted with so much news these days that the temptation is to turn it off. All of it. And yet so much if it is accepted narrative masquerading as news. We slip into our respective siloes to make sense of it all. Joe Duke at Front Porch Republic argues that there’s a better way then listening only to echo chambers.
On Easter, Christians around the world celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Michael Kruger at Canon Fodder went looking for the best evidence of the resurrection.
If the information on the Family Search website is accurate, my paternal ancestors can be traced back to 1520s England. A few would eventually emigrate to America in the 1620s and late 1600s. On my mother’s side, the first group arrived in the 1720s; more followed in the 1760s. The final group arrived in the first great German migration to America in the 1830s. I’m not sure when one’s ancestry becomes important, but I can say I discovered it fairly young, put it on hold for a few decades, and then came back to it.
In 2001, poet Linda Nemec Foster published a poetry collection, Amber Necklace of Gdansk, that reads like a study of where she came from. In this case, it’s Poland. Ancestors had emigrated from Poland to America, settling in Cleveland. Growing up in the Cleveland area, Foster became aware of the stories of the old country and the family customs that carried over.
It’s one of those “Aha!” moments. I was reading an illustrated poem, William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 (“Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day”) when I realized I’ve been long fascinated with mixing artistic genres.
I didn’t think this was some great personal revelation, but I was struck by how I tend to gravitate toward graphic treatments of classic or contemporary texts.
The work that included Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 was Nature Poems to See By by Julian Peters. It’s a collection of 24 classic nature poems, arranged by season (each with six), and illustrated with what is a literary comic strip.
