Saturday Good Reads

Recently, I joined two online friends to undertake a project for 2021 to read all of Shakespeare’s plays, sonnets, and poems. I’ve already started reading the first assignment – the play Twelfth Night, or What You Will. Suddenly, everything starts coming up Shakespeare. I root through a kitchen drawer to find a dishcloth to cover rising bread dough, and I find a British Museum tea towel from 2012 for the exhibition “Shakespeare Staging the World.” Or I’m looking through stories at Literary Hub, and the site features “Lessons from Shakespeare: How to Survive a Pandemic with Humor.” I’m sure there’s a scientific reason for this serendipity. 

Is it possible to revive a dead language? There was one language that had virtually disappeared, at least in its spoken form, by the 19^th century. Livia Gershon at JSTOR Daily has an account of how it was revived. The language? Hebrew. 

 

Understandably, parents have had a lot of anxiety about the quality of education delivered online versus in the classroom. Russell Arben Fox at Front Porch Republic reviewed a book called The Cult of Smart by Fredrik DeBoer and discovered that the structure of schooling may actually play only a very small role in children’s education. 

 

More Good Reads

 

Writing and Literature

 

T.S. Eliot’s “The Cocktail Party”: The Language & Doctrine of Atonement – Daniel Sundahl at The Imaginative Conservative. 

 

Falling Letters – Brian Miller at The South Roane Agrarian.

 

Nick Offerman on the Essential Wisdom of Wendell Berry – Gary Lovely at Literary Hub.

 

Life and Culture

 

If Mr. Kristof Is Taking Names, Apple Should Be Next – Anthony Barr at Mere Orthodoxy.

 

Is 2021 the Year of Populism? – Andrew L. Gardner.

 

Poetry

 

Longfellow's Christmas Bells and a Better America – Joshua Whitfield at Church Life Journal. 

 

Forgotten places: on Marianne Moore – David Warren at Essays in Idleness.

 

Faith

 

Tidings of Comfort – Seth Lewis.

 

Beauty and Imagination in Christian Witness – Sam Clark at Front Porch Republic.

 

Architecture

 

Norway’s Stave Churches – Micah Mattix at The American Conservative.

 

British Stuff

 

Salisbury Water Meadows – Barb Drummond at Curious Historian. 

 

The king of cakes – Carolyn Hart at Standpoint Magazine.

 

American Stuff

 

Barnum’s Christmas Show in 1864 – Sarah Kay Bierle at Emerging Civil War.

 

Canon in D (Pachelbel’s Canon) for Cello and Piano – Brooklyn Duo

 Painting: Woman Reading, oil on canvas by Robert James Gordon (died 1893).