Saturday Good Reads - Feb. 28, 2026

I’m not a big hockey fan, but I cheered along with (most of) the rest of America when the USA team defeated Canada and won the gold medal in the Olympics in Milan. The algorithms at Facebook and Instagram noted my interest and filled my feeds with reels, posts, photos and news reports. And then came the Huffington Post and its coverage. I suppose there will always be one Ebenezer Scrooge shouting “Bah! Humbug!” 

When the American Revolution began, colonists had a choice – join, resist, or stay out of it. Quakers usually avoided participation, but one, Abraham Carlile of Philadelphia, chose active support of the British when they occupied the city. When the British army abandoned the city the following year, Carlile remained, believing he’d doing nothing wrong. And that decision turned out to be a mistake.

 

If you’re interested in Medieval history, you might be interested in what Andrew Roycroft is starting at New Grub Street. He’s beginning a series on the Medieval period, starting with a discussion of Piers Plowman by William Langland. I haven’t read the poem since taking English literature in college some 50 years ago, and I think I’ll revisit it.

 

More Good Reads

 

America 250

 

Philadelphia’s President House – Phil Greenwalt at Emerging Revolutionary War Era.

 

The Genius of America: Our Constitution – Eric Lane and Michael Oreskes at American Heritage.

 

The Breaking of Maryland’s “Old Line” – Drew Palmer at Emerging Revolutionary War Era.

 

Jefferson’s Words for a Fractured Country – Jonathan Horn at The Free Press.

 

Reluctant Ally: The Dutch Republic and the American Revolution – Nicholas Marsella at Journal of the American Revolution.

 

American Stuff

 

James K. Polk and the 5,106 Votes That Changed America – Walter Borneman at The Coolidge Review.

 

America Is the West. Is Europe? – Spencer Klavan at The New Jerusalem. 

 

British Stuff

 

The Decline of Classical Liberal Policing in Britain and its Former Dominions – Martin George Holmes at Insomnia Quarterly.

 

Why is Andrew “not above the law”? – Stephen McAlpine.

 

Art

 

The Monet Line – Jeffrey Streeter at English Republic of Letters.

 

Life and Culture

 

Every Child is Born a Person: Classical Education for All – Aimee Davis at Front Porch Republic.

 

Writing and Literature

 

Writing Is Pain, but Environment Can Help – Trevin Wax at The Gospel Coalition.

 

Poetry

 

57 – Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

“On Mites (To a Lady),” poem by Stephen Duck – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

“On Barn,” poem by Jeanetta Calhoun Mish – Benjamin Myers at HPPR Poets on the Plains.

 

Life and Death – Paul Cardell

 Painting: Lady Reading lit by an Attic, oil on canvas by Pol Friis Nybo (1869-1929). 

A just ruler

After 2 Samuel 23:1-7 

A just ruler is one

who rules in the fear

of the Lord, and so

rules justly and

fairly. How do we

know? If the ruler

dawns on his people

like the morning light,

like the sun shining

in a blue sky, like

a gentle rain that

brings grass from

the earth, then

we know the ruler

is just. It is not

what a ruler says;

it is what the ruler

does.

 

Photograph by Philippe Oursel via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Friday Readings

 

“You Who Would Read This Book,” poem by Marguirite Porete – D.S. Martin at Kingdom Poets.

 

“Come, Thou Almighty King,” hymn by Anonymous – Anthony Esolen at Word & Song.

 

Confronting the Unman – Jake Meador at Mere Orthodoxy. 

 

A Treasure Chest for Thoughts – Seth Lewis.

Pass the Crawfish Étouffée and the Boiled Shrimp!

When I read Evangeline by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in high school, I had no idea that I was not only reading one of his epic poems; I was also reading a fictionalized account of some of my own ancestry and history. 

Yes, I knew I had some French ancestry on my mother’s side, sitting side by side with some German as well. I didn’t know that the German had arrived relatively late, in the mid-nineteenth century, while the French had been there more than a century earlier. And I didn’t know that most of that French had come from Canada, in the maritime provinces collectively called Acadia. A tiny handful of my mother’s French ancestors had come directly from France.

 

I didn’t know that, at college football games, when I chanted “Hot boudin! Cold coosh coosh! Come on Tigers, poosh, poosh, poosh,” I was using words from my own ancestry. When I read A Cajun Night Before Christmas to my children, I never thought to ask why I could imitate the Cajun accent so well.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: Evangeline, a monument to the Acadians, St. Martinsville, La., via Wikipedia.

Some Thursday Readings

 

Elegy for a Tow Truck Driver – poem by James Matthew Wilson at Rabbit Room Poetry.

 

Tribes – poem by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

“Portrait d’une Femme,” poem by Ezra Pound – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

A Worthy, Doomed Metaphysical Poet – David Deavel at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

“My Shadow,” poem by Robert Louis Stevenson – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

When I Discovered Latin American Literature

Yesterday, I received I Gave You My Silence, the new novel by Nobel Prizewinner Mario Vargas Llosa. Vargas Llosa died last year; this is his final work, published posthumously. 

When I saw the notice that it was being published. My mind moved back in time, some 40 years, to 1986. I was in a master of liberal arts program at Washington University in St. Louis, and I signed up for a fall seminar – The Latin American Novel. We would be reading novels by Garcia Marquez, Vargas Llosa, Manuel Puig (Kiss of the Spider Woman), and Carlos Fuentes, among others. The reading syllabus was challenging.

 

I don’t recall why I signed up for that particular course; others were available. My total reading experience in the Latin American novel was limited to one book – One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Perhaps that was the reason; Latin America has a vast literature, and I’d read very little of it.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

An Unknown Woman: how I discovered a hidden tragedy tied to Russia’s most famous painting – Vladimir Raevsky at The Guardian.

 

Did Edgar Allan Poe Invent Detective Fiction? – Thom Delapa at The Collector.

 

John Brown in Lake Placid – Evan Portman at Emerging Civil War. 

Poets and Poems: Rhina Espaillat and "For Instance"

Poetry is often associated with the young. We think of the fire of the Romantics, or the young T.S. Eliot upending traditional poetry with modernism with The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. But even younger poets age, banking the fire and passion as they become tempered by experience and understanding. 

Two of my favorite contemporary poets are Luci Shaw (1928-2025) and Rhina Espaillat (b. 1932). It’s something of a coincidence, or perhaps it isn’t, that both reached their 90s. Shaw died last December, just shy of her 95^th birthday. Espaillat tuns 94 this year. Theirs is not the poetry of youth but instead the poetry of long lives lived – and lived well. It’s also the poetry of understanding and affection for people, in all our wild and crazy humanity.

 

For Instance, the new poetry collection by Espaillat, demonstrates this understanding and affection. 

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Coleridge’s Greek Ode: ‘Against the Slave Trade’ (1792) – Adam Roberts at Substack-ships On Fire, Off the Shoulder of Orion. 

 

Just Beyond Yourself – poem by David Whyte.

 

What is a Simile? – L.L. Barkat at Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

Come, night, come, Romeo – poem by William Shakespeare at Every Day Poems.

 

“The Life of Man,” poem by Francis Bacon – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient & Modern.

 

Some Monday Readings

The Wonder of The Comedy: How to Read Dante – Jason Baxter at The Imaginative Conservative. 

A Shakespearean History of Traffic – Callan Davies at The Shakespeare Stage.

 

The Multibillion-Dollar Foundation That Controls the Humanities – Tyler Austin Harper at The Atlantic.

 

Don’t Count Your Chickens – Terry Whalin at The Writing Life.

 

Updike without a paddle – Bruce Bawer at New Criterion on Selected Letters of John Updike.

 

Ten Odd Facts About Hanel’s “Messiah” – Terez Rose at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

Illustration: Dante holding a copy of The Divine Comedy at the entrance of hell, with the terraces of Purgatory and the spheres of heaven. Fresco by Domenico di Michelino (1465).

What's it all about?

After 2 Samuel 23:1-7 

What does a man

think, near the end,

when shadows gather

and night is coming?

How does he assess

his life, what he’s

done, how he’s known,

what his legacy is?

For a ruler, the questions

are simple: has the Lord

spoken by me, have I

ruled in the fear of God,

does my house stand

with God, is the covenant

secure? Simple questions,

not so simple answers,

perhaps.

 

Photograph by Altinay Dinc via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Sunday Readings

 

For the Beauty of the Earth – Jen Harris at Every Morning New Mercies.

 

On Ash Wednesday – Jonathan Rogers at Story Warren.

 

The Purpose of Biblical Ministry – Robb Brunansky at Cripplegate.

 

How Is AI Shaping You? Three Principles for Wise Use – Samuel James at Desiring God.

Saturday Good Reads - Feb. 21, 2026

I learned the song when I was a young child: “Yankee Doodle went to London / just to buy a pony, he stuck a feather in his cap / and called it macaroni.” It’s an old song, likely dating to the start of the American Revolution or colonial period. Historians know how it’s been used over the centuries, but it’s still a mystery as to where it came from. 

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whose poetry figures in my novel Brookhaven, wrote the poem that is the most famous about the American Revolution, “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.” It was one of the stories included in Tales of a Wayside Inn, published in 1863, as another conflict ranged in America. We have Longfellow to thank for how we understand Paul Revere’s ride, and it happened slightly differently from how he romanticized it. Well, perhaps more than slightly. But it did happen. Kostya Kennedy at Time Magazine explains why the famous ride did indeed matter.

 

One of the most common headlines I’ve seen in the last 25 years is “Book publishing faces a crisis.” Book Publishing seems to stay in crisis these days, with the latest being what’s perceived as a dramatic drop-off in sales of non-fiction books. Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review looks at the data and asks, is the non-fiction book crisis for real?

 

More Good Reads

 

America 250

 

Richard Cranch, Boston Colonial Watchmaker – Andrew Dervan at Journal of the American Revolution.

 

George Washington: The Indispensable Man – Charlton Allen at Real Clear History.

 

Why George Washington Should Still Inspire Every American – New York Post.

 

No, George Washington Didn’t Have Wooden Teeth. Yes, he led the Siege of Boston – Michael Casey at Associated Press.

 

The Sieges of Fort Morris, Georgia – Douglas Dorney, Jr. at Journal of the American Revolution.

 

The republican “we”: On David McCullough and Walter Isaacson – Michael Taube at The Critic Magazine.

 

Writing and Literature

 

Revisiting Milton: A Review of Alan Jacobs’ Biography of Paradise Lost – Amanda Patchin at Front Porch Republic.

 

Four Unexpected Traits of Great Writers and Artists – Nicholas McDonald at The Bard Owl.

 

How Wuthering Heights Pushed Victorian Boundaries – Betsy Golden Kellem at History.

 

Faith

 

Taking the High Places Down – John Beeson at The Bee Hive.

 

Throwing Yourself Off the Temple: When Productivity Replaces Trust – Staci Eastin.

 

News Media

 

Nancy Guthrie and the gamification of crime – Katherine Dee at The Spectator.

 

Poetry

 

“Church Monuments,” poem by George Herbert – Anthony Esolen at Word & Song.

 

“Unexpressed,” poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

British Stuff

 

Who governs Britain? – David Shipley at The Critic Magazine.

 

American Stuff

 

The Largest Surrender of the Civil War: Bennett Place, North Carolina – Kris White at Boom Goes the History (podcast).

 

Is-Land – Jeff Johnson

Painting: Corfu, A Rainy Day, oil on canvas by John Singer Sargent (1856-1925).

On the wings of the wind

After 2 Samuel 22 

I ride the wings

of the wind, lifted

from danger and

peril and my own

stupidity and sin,

lifted and cleansed,

brought into presence,

carried through and

over the fire, over 

the storm, arriving

at a place of safety,

of peace, peace within

my own soul.

 

Photograph by Irina Iriser via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Friday Readings

 

The Mad Farmer on Claude, AI, and the Church – Hayden Nesbit at Mere Orthodoxy.

 

“Idle,” poem by Anne Corkett – D.S. Martin at Kingdom Poets.

 

Psalm 119 in Eight Words – Andrew Wilson at Think Theology.

 

“Lord, Who Throughout These 40 Days,” hymn by Claudia Hernaman – Anthony Esolen at Word & Song.

 

What else does God name? – Seth Lewis.

Poets and Poems: Mary Meriam and "Then Flew My Caw Away"

I wasn’t quite prepared for Then Flew My Caw Away: Poems, the recently published collection by Mary Meriam. Many of the poems are about broken families or broken or lost relationships. They’re filled with a sharpness, a toughness, words wielded like a heavy blade. But every so often, something else breaks through, and it’s so tangible you can almost taste it.  

That something is pain. In “Heron,” the collection’s first poem, she writes, “I need to live another way,/ somewhere, maybe Oakland, / leave my old broken oak tree / feels like my only friend.” Several of the poems suggest a mother figure who, intentionally or not, dominated the child. The words often ache. They don’t ask for pity; they simply seek to understand and explain.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Thursday Readings

 

Reasons for not writing…and other poems – Kelly Belmonte at Kelly’s Scribbles.

 

Small things – poem by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

“In the Wilderness,” poem by Robert Graves – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

Some Wednesday Readings

Love Along the Raid: A Morgan’s Raiders Love Story – Caroline Davis at Emerging Civil War. 

Old Tom’s Ash Wednesday – Bradley Birzer.

 

T.S. Eliot’s Long Lent – Dwight Longenecker at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

Britain: Westminster is running out of time – Lee Cain at The Critic Magazine.

 

The Vikings of Orkney – Warren Frye at The New Criterion.

 

Concerning Kipling – poem by George Bradley at Literary Matters.

 

Photograph: Ring of Brodgar Stone Circle and Henge, Orkney Islands, Scotland – Maxwell Andrews at Unsplash. Used with permission.

Poets and Poems: Erin Murphy and “Mother as Conjunction”

When we were children, my brothers and I would sometimes be handed a snack that I thought had been invented by my mother. “Bread, butter, and sugar” was possibly our favorite treat. My mother was tickled that we saw it as a special dessert. It was only years later, when I visited her in a rehab center while she recovered from a broken hip bone, that she told me where it had come from. 

She grew up in the Great Depression. Money was so tight that my aunt quit high school because she couldn’t pay the 25 cents for gym clothes. My mother, the fourth of six children, knew hunger. She said there were times when there was nothing to eat, so they’d go to bed hungry. The next day, my grandmother would prepare sandwiches for school, using the only ingredients she had – butter and sugar sandwiches. It was a poor child’s lunch in the 1930s, and her own children thought of it as a terrific treat.

 

Reading poet Erin Murphy’s new work, Mother as Conjunction, imagine my surprise to discover someone else who had the same experience as my mother, except it happened decades later. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Nature – poem by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

Memento Mori: On Philip Larkin’s “Aubade” and its Discontents – Alexander Fayne.

 

The Sea in You – poem by David Whyte.

 

“My Heart Leaps Up,” poem by William Wordsworth – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Whatever Is – poem by Sarah Chestnut at Rabbit Room Poetry.

"Bones Buried Deep" by Emma Jameson

It’s June of 1940. Dunkirk has happened. France had surrendered. The day of the formal surrender – June 22, 1940 – is approaching. And in Britain, there’s a collective holding of breath. What happens now? 

For Dr. Benjamin Bones, working in the village of Birdswing in Cornwall, what happens is another murder. A body is found in a stream nearby. It’s finally identified as that of a young man from Plymouth, and he’s been kicked and beaten to death. The case takes on a different overtone when the body is identified – a young Jewish man, the sole support of his young brothers and sisters.

 

The discovery brings out the best and the worst in the local residents. Dr. Bones, and his great love Lady Juliet Linton, are surprised by the depth of anti-Semitic feeling from the people they like and thought they knew. It seems particularly virulent among the more upper-class crowd who gather at the Duke of Cornwall Hotel in Plymouth, already infiltrated by Lady Juliet’s errant husband working undercover for the British government. But what happened to the young man?

 

Emma Jameson

Bones is joined by the official investigator, a detective from Plymouth who himself is Jewish and knows firsthand what discrimination is like in the police department. Lady Juliet is not to be left out, and she finds innovative ways to investigate on her own.

 

Bones Buried Deep  is the fourth of four Dr. Benjamin Bones mysteries by British mystery author Emma Jameson, who’s also written the Lord and Lady Hetheridge mystery series (all set in London and have something to do with the word “blue”). 

 

This installment in the Dr. Bones series, like its predecessors, is leavened by humor (Jameson has created a great comic detective with Lady Juliet). And humor is definitely needed in what would be a dark tale indeed without it, a tale of vicious discrimination, death, black marketing, and the overhand of war.

 

Related:

Blue Murder by Emma Jameson.

 Something Blue by Emma Jameson.

 Black & Blue by Emma Jameson.

 Blue Blooded by Emma Jameson.

 Blue Christmas by Emma Jameson.

 Untrue Blue by Emma Jameson. 

 London Blue by Emma Jameson.

 Bones in the Blackout by Emma Jameson.

 Bones at the Manor House by Emma Jameson.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

Technological Poverty – Matthew Walther at The Lamp.

 

A Quiet Refusal to Compromise – Elizabeth Corey at Law & Liberty.

 

The Novel That Kept a British Prime Minister Up All Night – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review.

 

Art is the Signature of Man – Joseph Pearce at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

Why Essex is Britain’s most right-wing county – Daniel Dieppe at the Critic Magazine.

Singing to remember

After 2 Samuel 22 

I wrote a song, once,

a song of thanksgiving

and redemption, a song

I remember now. It is

a song of life,

a song of my life.

the song I wrote

to remember always

celebrates who

the author is,

the author of salvation,

the author of redemption

and rescue, the author

who takes me and

protects me in the cleft

of the rock, the author

who brings me to

the oasis in the desert,

the author who writes

my story. I sing

that song to remember.

 

Photograph by Vitalii Khodzinskyi via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Sunday Readings

 

The Spiritual Discipline of Unlearning – David Prince at Prince on Preaching.

 

Holy Humor – Joshua Budimlic at Iotas in Eternity.

Saturday Good Reads - Feb. 14, 2026

Ah, those Valentine Day candy hearts, with those little messages that read like they anticipated text messages decades later. “Luv U.” “U R Mine.” I was surprised to learn that they originated during the Civil War. See “Hub Wafers: A Yankee Delight” at Emerging Civil War.  

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is all over the media – stock market drops, worries about impact on jobs, already beginning to redefine industries. More than a year ago, a former colleague at work asked me if I’d embraced ChatGPT. I surprised her when I shook my head no. “Not for me,” I said. “I think I’d prefer to give up writing altogether.” AI popped all over my inbox this week. Writing coach Ann Kroeker asks whose voice is on your page. Writer Paul Kingsnorth sees it as the latest manifestation of what he calls “the machine,” and tells writers to oppose it. And Samuel D. James takes a look at that latest AI article that went viral.

 

More Good Reads

 

America 250

 

The Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence: The Present Status of the Controversy – Scott Syfert at Journal of the American Revolution.

 

Just Call It Washington’s Birthday – Jonathan Horn at The Free Press.

 

Writing and Literature

 

Twenty-one reactions to Wuthering Heights (from 1847 to 2007) – Henry Oliver at The Common Reader.

 

Shakespeare in the Bardo – Tana Wojczuk at The Baffler.

 

Life and Culture

 

The Popular Progressive Podcast Calling Evangelicals ‘Cancer’ – Bonnie Kristian at The Free Press.

 

Ten Books No One in Education Wants You to Read – Michael Rose at Classical Compass.

 

How Jamaica’s Bobsled Team Became an Unlikely Global Sensation – Kareem Nittle at History.

 

Poetry

 

A Sonnet on the Transfiguration – Malcolm Guite.

 

“On Stella’s Birth-day,” poem by Jonathan Swift – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Poet Laura: Month of Fevers – Donna Hilbert at Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

Faith

 

All Those Undone Days – Andrew Roycroft at New Grub Street.

 

American Stuff

 

The Oath I Took – Sarah Harley at Front Porch Republic.

 

Winters Remembered – Brian Miller at Notes from an East Tennessee Farmer.

All Because of Mercy - Casting Crowns

Painting: A Woman Reading, oil on canvas (1920) by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973).