Saturday Good Reads

Perhaps it my recent reading of “Bartleby, The Scrivener” by Herman Melville, or the frequent references to Melville in Cross of Snow, the biography of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow by Nicholas Basbanes, that got me interested in the author’s works. What really caught my eye was an article on Melville by Will Hoyt at the Kirk Center, entitled “Ishmael’s Real Name was Jonah.” Hoyt provides an overall perspective on all of Melville’s works.

It was a big week for cancel culture. Writer Andrew Sullivan was the target of a writer at The New York Times, for an article written more than 20 years ago, and he and a lot of other people fought back. The conservative Victor Davis Hanson, who has one of the sharpest minds in American today, went after the latest attempt to cancel Fox commentator Tucker Carlson (by a member of the former Obama Administration, no less). Jonathan Rauch at Persuasion provided a cancel culture checklist, so you can tell the difference between an attempt to cancel and old-fashioned criticism. (When I think about it, I don’t think old-fashioned criticism even exists anymore.) And Greg Moore at Desiring God reminds us that cancel culture has been around for a long time. 

More Good Reads

Life and Culture

Goodthink and crimethink – Konstantin Kisin at Standpoint Magazine.

Spiritual Dangers in the Trump Era – John Murdock at Front Porch Republic.

Memory & Hope: Restoring the Teaching of American History – Gary Houchens at The Imaginative Conservative. 

Writing and Literature

Stories in Sepia – Tom Darin Liskey at Change Seven.

The Song That was Sharper Than Sting – Bethany Melton at Story Warren.

The Jim Crow South in Faulkner’s Fiction – Michael Gorra at The New York Review of Books.

Knowing What We Don’t Know – Rachelle Gardner, Literary Agent.

Poetry

Turn Aside: The Poetic Vision of R.S. Thomas – Jeffrey Bilbro at Plough.

In villages God does not live only – Joseph Brodsky via Kingdom Poets (D.S. Martin).

The Humble Confidence of Seamus Heaney – R.F. Foster at Literary Hub.

The walnut tree – Sonja Benskin Mesher.

Music

Southern Guilt, Southern Gospel – J. Brandon Meeks at Mere Orthodoxy.

Faith

Five Foundational Ideas About Work Taught in the Bible – Hugh Whelchel at the Institute for Faith, Work, & Economics.

When Change and Tears Are Past – Madelyn Canada at The Corner Shelf.

The Irish Blessing – Sung by More Than 300 Churches

Painting: Young Woman Reading in Bed, oil on canvas by Lucien Abrams (1870-1941).