Saturday, July 20, 2024

Saturday Good Reads - July 20, 2024


Last Saturday, July 13, a man attempted to assassinate Donald Trump at the Butler County, Pennsylvania, county fair. Many – too many – newspapers didn’t report it the next day, not because they hate Trump but because they print Sunday newspapers early, and production was well underway. It’s a function of what’s happening in the newspaper business – early printing deadlines, pared down editorial and production staff, advertisers preferring other sources, declining newspaper readership, and more. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch recently announced it would no longer publish a print edition on holidays, supposedly to give its carriers the day off but really because it’s in retreat toward publishing online only for cost reasons. Rick Edmonds at the Poynter Institute has the story on the July 13 news, or lack thereof.

 

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was the darling of the Western news media in the early 1970s, because he was resisting the Soviet regime and embarrassing to Richard Nixon as he pursued détente with Brezhnev and friends. And then the writer gave a speech at Harvard in 1978, and suddenly he’d become, in the news media’s eyes at least, a right-wing fundamentalist wacko. But as Gary Saul Morson writes in Commentary, Solzhenitsyn clearly saw what was coming with Western culture.

 

If I had to pick a favorite gospel, it would likely be the Gospel of John. It was the first book of the Bible I read after becoming a Christian. It’s also different from those of Matthew, Mark, and Luke; for one thing, John skips the entire birth narrative of Jesus. (And my ESV Study Bible reminds me that not one of the gospels has a stated author; their associated names come from tradition and early church history.) Theologian Michael Kruger at Canon Fodder has a favorite gospel, too, and he explains why.

 

More Good Reads

 

Writing and Literature

 

Fiction is not real – B.D. McClay at Notebook.

 

The Enduring Charm of Jane Austen – Suzie Andres at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

American Stuff

 

Redeeming (Mostly) Thomas Jefferson – Bradley Birzer at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

The Portal: Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and stepping back into American history – David Samuels at Tablet Magazine.

 

Life and Culture

 

The surrender – Matt Taibbi at Racket News.

 

On Pilgrimage and Package Tours – Tara Isabella Burton ay The Hedgehog Review.

 

What Would It Take to Recreate Bell Labs? – Brian Potter at Construction Physics.

 

Faith

 

Stop Calling the Church a “Family” – T.M. Suffield at Nuakh. 

 

Is the History of the Bible Important? – Justin Hoffman.

 

Art

 

Touches – Sonja Benskin Mesher. 

 

Poetry

 

Poets – Andrea Potos at Every Day Poems.

 

Death, Be Not Proud, poem by Jone Donne – close reading by Karen Swallow Prior at Rabbit Room Poetry.

 

“Voices of the Air” by Katherine Mansfield – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

British Stuff

 

At Highgate Cemetery – Spitalfields Life.


Deepfake World – Paul Kingsnorth 



Painting: Boy Reading Adventure Story, oil on canvas (1923) by Norman Rockwell (1894-1978), originally published in the Chicago 
Tribune.  

No comments: