Saturday, April 22, 2023

Saturday Good Reads - April 22, 2023


Way, way back in the dark ages (when I was in elementary school), reading was taught using a program called phonics. It was a system matching the sounds of spoken English with individual letters or groups of letters. And, it worked. Of course, if something works, especially in education, you need to replace it with something new and shiny, and phonics was quite a few educational theories ago. But according to the Associated Press, it’s now back to the future, what’s old is new again, and here comes phonics. 

In my novel Dancing King, there is a scene in which a BBC reporter interviews Michael Kent-Hughes and is made mincemeat of, for bringing in an agenda and being completely unprepared for an interviewee who knows more than the reporter. This week that same situation happened, except it wasn’t fiction. A BBC reporter interviewed Elon Musk and thought he was going to have a “gotcha” on Twitter and hate speech. There was a gotcha, all right, but it wasn’t Musk who caught it. James Carden at The Spectator reports

 

It wasn’t a story I expected to see at a secular site like CrimeReads: What Do Modern Mystery Novels and Medieval Mystery Plays Have in Common? The answer was – surprise – sin. I thought that was an idea that died when religion became passe. Yet, there it was.

 

More Good Reads

 

Life and Culture

 

Lessons from Will and Ariel Durant – Brian Miller at A South Roane Agrarian.

 

Are 8 billion people too many — or too few? Welcome to the population paradox of the 21st century – Bryan Walsh at Vox.

 

News Media

 

The security state says jump. The media ask ‘how high?’ – James Carden at The Spectator.

 

A Nostalgic Journey through the Rise and Demise of the Blogroll – Neville Hobson.

 

FBI war on 'rad trad' Catholics: Where's the outrage (or even fairness) in press coverage? – Clemente Lisi at Get Religion.

 

Jack Teixeira and our crisis of trust – Peter Van Buren at The Spectator.

 

Faith

 

How Should Christians Think About the National Debt? – Susan Wharton Gates at the Institute for Faith, Work, & Economics.

 

Walk Wisely – Gentle Reformation.

 

Salvation of a Skeptic – Robb Brunansky at The Cripplegate.

 

Why I Work Until the Day I Die – Hugh Whelchel at the Institute for Faith, Work, & Economics.

 

Poetry

 

Rehearsal for the Death Scene – Michael Symmons Roberts at Kingdom Poets (D.S. Martin).

 

Shadows – Jane Dougherty at Jane Dougherty Writes (H/T: Paul Brookes). 

 

Faring – Saskia Hamilton at The Paris Review (introduced by Claudia Rankine).

 

British Stuff

 

Ernest George’s London Etchings – at Spitalfields Life.

 

Ukraine

 

Evidence of God’s Faithfulness in Ukraine – Children’s Hunger Fund.

 

Writing and Literature

 

“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” & Other Tales by Edgar Allan Poe – Sean Fitzparick at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

Behold the Lamb of God – Andrew Peterson



 Painting: Old Man Reading, oil on canvas by Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792).

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