Saturday Good Reads - Aug. 2, 2026

Benjamin Franklin is rightly considered to be one of America’s founding fathers. But there was also his son, William, who had an entirely different take on the American Revolution. Danica Kirka ar Associated Press explains: “Ben Franklin chose America. Son William chose the crown. This civil war is a microcosm of revolution.” 

Hadrian’s Wall was built during the reign of the Emperor Hadrain. It stretches across the narrowest part of England – 73 miles from Newcastle on the east to Solway Firth on the west. Its purpose: keep the barbarian Picts in the north, separating them from Roman Britain. Jonathan Thomas at Anglotopia is walking the wall, and he’s providing daily updates. (He’s actually walking 84 miles, starting at the seacoast on the east.) 

 

Therapy culture has been shaping America for decades, and it has not excluded the church. Amy Mantravadi at Mere Orthodoxy reviews a new book on the subject, Resisting Therapy Culture: The Dangers of Pop Psychology and How the Church Can Respond by Matthew Loftus.

 

More Good Reads

 

America 250

 

The “Battle” of Fort Thicketty – Tom Elmore at Emerging Revolutionary War Era.

 

This Connecticut Teenager Spied on the British During the American Revolution, Succeeding Where Nathan Hale Failed – Claire Bellerjeau and Tiffany Yecke Brooks at Smithsonian Magazine.

 

The Battle of Yorktown – Keli Holt at Just Enough History.

 

Faith

 

Don’t Be Ashamed to Be Old – Tim Challies.

 

In Praise of My Youth Pastor – Derek Rishmawy at Mere Orthodoxy.

 

Writing and Literature

 

That’s the Deal. What Rankles You Most About AI Prose? – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review.

 

‘A selfish, ignoble person’ – the dark side of the Nobel prize-winner Mario Vargas Llosa – Nicholas Shakespeare at The Spectator.

 

American Stuff

 

The Real Covid Scandal Is Bigger Than Fauci – Sigrid Bratlie at The Free Press.

 

Ernest Hamwi and the Ice Cream Cone – Jonathan Hickman at Missouri Historical Society.

 

Spinning in His Grave? TR, Fauci, & the Bureaucratic Beast – Chuck Chalberg at The Imaginative Conservative. 

 

British Stuff

 

The English are best – James Price at The Critic Magazine.

How I Became the Jason Arday Affair Scapegoat - Nathan Cofnas at The Wall Street Journal (story unlocked). 

 

Life and Culture

 

The DSA Strategy to Build Power – David Duhalde at The American Prospect.

 

The Mission Medley – Ennio Morricone (Live in Venice 2007)

 Illustration: An Old Man Reading, etching and dry point on laid paper (1642) by Ferdinand Bol (1616-1680). 

The reign of the branch

After Isaiah 11:1-11 

The branch bursts

into view, soon

establishing itself,

establishing a reign,

a reign marked by

righteous judgment,

blessing the meek

of the earth, striking

the earth with words,

destroying the wicked

with his breath. He

uses a belt, a belt

of righteousness;

her wears a belt

of faithfulness.

Meekness is blessed,

belief is blessed,

faith a blessed,

wickedness is

destroyed.

 

Photograph by Nick via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Friday Readings

 

“Faith Is a Radical Master,” poem by Walt McDonald – D.S. Martin at Kingdom Poets.

 

A Blessing for the School Books – Kelly Keller at Story Warren.

 

“There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood,” hymn by William Cowper – Anthony Esolen at Word & Song.

 

Words Like Rain – poem by Seth Lewis.

Poets and Poems: Gabrielle Myers and “Go Forth: Lose Yourself into Life”

The end of a relationship with a spouse or partner is like a death – a death of familiarity, a death of structure, a death of how we live our lives and who we share that life with. I’ve never experienced that kind of loss, but I’ve seen it happen to close friends and family members.  

Gabrielle Myers experienced that kind of loss, a relationship she ended after “five years of verbal abuse.” She did what many poets do – she turned to writing poetry to understand it, assimilate it, and resolve it –if such a thing can ever truly be resolved. But she did it in a rather unique way, by using the natural landscape around her to structure and explain her poems. And her loss.

 

The result is Go Forth: Lose Yourself into Life, Myers’ fourth collection of poetry. It could also be subtitled with the words she uses to begin her introductory essay: “Begin to Know the World Again from Nothing.”

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

Some Thursday Readings

 

The Splendor of the Orient – K.S. Bernstein at Apple Blossoms in a Mournful Wood on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 17.

 

August, in Passing – poem by Riyanka Paul.

 

Sonnets in St. Louis: The Life of Sara Teasdale – Zoe Korte at Missouri Historical Society.

 

Some Wednesday Readings - Aug. 19, 2026

The Joy of Baseball – Daniel Darling at One Little Word. 

Know your rights as an author and don’t get scammed – Nathan Bransford.

 

Submerged memory: C.S. Lewis and the art of forgetting – Henry Oliver at The Common Reader.

 

Remembering Blaise Pascal’s Night of Fire – Emily Kleinhenz at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

On the third day: On the religious illiteracy of college students – The New Criterion. 

 

Child – poem by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

Britain: How taboos have stifled truth – Guy Dampier at The Critic Magazine.

 

Short Story, Deep Treasures: Biblical Allusion in “The Gift of the Magi” – John Savoie at Literary Matters.

 

Flashback: The Uses of a Novella – my post at the American Christian Fiction Writers blog.

 

Painting: Blaise Pascal about 1691.

Jon Nappa Imagines the Life of Longfellow

When I was writing my historical novel Brookhaven, I almost stumbled into using the poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow as a literary device. I had recently read three of his epic poems – The Song of Hiawatha, Evangeline, and The Courtship of Miles Standish. As I child, like virtually every other schoolchild of my generation, I had memorized “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.”  

After reading and writing about the three epic poems, I read Cross of Snow, the 2020 biography of Longfellow by Nicholas Basbanes. Two years later, I saw the movie “I Heard the Bells,” the story behind Longfellow’s poem that eventually became a popular Christmas carol. And all this while, I kept looking for something that will help me unify a theme for this as-yet-unnamed novel. 

 

The movie might have been the clincher. And I thought, what about Longfellow’s poetry? If I had searched more or better than I did, I might have found the 2017 novel What Longfellow Heard by Jon Nappa. 

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

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Late summer – poem by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

The Nesting Ground – poem by Rachel Lyn Aldreick at Rabbit Room Poetry.

 

The Pershing Hotel – poem by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell at Every Day Poems.

 

Discover Your Favorite: 15 Poems Every Kid Should Know – Jody Lee Collins.

 

Howard’s Trees – poem by Benjamin Myers.

Some Monday Readings - Aug. 17, 2026

 You Don’t Have to Use AI: The Case for the Bartleby Option – Brad East at The New Atlantis. 

NYQ Craft Interview (on poetry) with Joe Weil – Benjamin Myers at New York Quarterly.

 

AI Writing: The Day of Reckoning – Colin Hansen at The Gospel Coalition.

 

American Evangelicals Long for the Embrace of the Machine God – Christopher Jones at Mere Orthodoxy.

 

I Quit One of the World’s Greatest Novels – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review.

 

AI, Explained (By a Human) – The Pour Over.

 

A Time Capsule of Free-Range Childhood – Kat Rosenfeld at The Free Press.

 

After Editing Two AI-Assisted Manuscripts, I Rewrote My Client Agreement – Mary Kole at Jane Friedman.

 

Imagination and Myth in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang – Aimee Davis at Story Warren.

Photograph by Igor Omilaev via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The spirit

After Isaiah 11:1-11 

This root, 

this branch,

bursts into 

the air, long 

promised, mostly 

forgotten, little 

believed. This root, 

this branch, is 

infused with spirit,

the spirit of the Lord,

replete with wisdom,

with understanding,

with counsel and

might, with knowledge

and fear of the Lord.

 

Photograph by Suganth via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Sunday Readings

 

When Little League Games Become Big League Idols – Cody Watson at Sovereignty in Motion.

 

Training Pastos to Care for Souls – Tim Challies.

 

‘In God Is Our Trust’ – poem by Roy Peterson at Society of Classical Poets.

 

Read the Bible Slowly – Murray Campbell at Murray’s Substack.

 

You Are Not Enough (And That is Not Failure) – Hannah Hagarty at Gospel-Centered Discipleship. 

 

Final Words – Melissa Edgington at Your Mom Has a Blog.

Saturday Good Reads – August 15, 2026

We have mobile phones, but we still have a landline. And according to caller ID, the most common caller we get on that line is someone I’ve grown rather fond of. His name is “Spam Risk.” He’s gotten crafty; he sometimes changes his name to “Medical Clinic,” or that of a local grocery chain, or just a location. But he is, and always will be, “Spam Risk.” He deserves his own short story or novel. But there might be hope for this unwanted intrusion; Gary Saul Morson describes it at The Wall Street Journal (story unlocked): A Modest Proposal to Deal with Spam Calls.  

It might be because I’ve lived a long time. But what I do not get, at all, is this fascination for and support of socialism. Perhaps it’s because I’ve read The Gulag Archipelago, and I remember when it was published. Ot the killing fields of the Kymer Rouge in Cambodia in the 1970s. Or the brutal suppression of the “Prague Spring” in Czechoslovakia in 1968. For those who think it could never happen here, well, they never thought it would happen in lots of places. Bradley Birzer, writing at The Imaginative Conservative, looks at the resurgence of socialism here.

 

Family history is rarely handed down intact, or even handed down at all. I was told a few things about my paternal grandfather, for example, mostly about the crazy songs he liked to sing and the expressions he used. A story about my great-grandfather, however, was handed down, an epic Civil War story. I based my novel Brookhaven on that story. Except the handed-down story turned out to be almost entirely wrong. But the reality told another kind of story – about a father who lost two sons and a son-in-law in the Civil War and was terrified that his youngest would be called up, so he took steps to protect that son as long as he could. At Front Porch Republic, N.P. Curtin writes about the importance of family stories, and keeping the family history alive.

 

More Good Reads

 

Life and Culture

 

On visiting Auschwitz – Andy Owen at The Critic Magazine.

 

Art

 

How to Wreck a Museum – Caitlyn Flanagan at The Free Press.

 

The Gallery in Our Minds – Jeffrey Streeter at English Republic of Letters.

 

American Stuff

 

Booknotes: Researching Your Civil War Ancestor – Civil War Books and Authors.

 

Anthony Fauci’s Vaccine Deceptions – Vinay Prasad at The Free Press.

 

This High School Wouldn’t Fix Its Antisemitism Problem – Rupa Subramanya at The Free Press.

 

America 250

 

The Road to Yorktown – Kelu Holt at Just Enough History. 

 

The Hessians Were Supposed to Quickly End the American Revolution. Instead They Endured Years of Battles and Suffered Thousands of Casualties – Greg Daugherty at Smithsonian Magazine.

 

Writing and Literature

 

The Brothers Karamazov in a Nutshell – Joseph Pearce at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

Exogenesis, Alexandria, and the Renewal of Language – Tessa Carman at Front Porch Republic.

 

Why We Still Read Novels – Henry Oliver at The Common Reader.

 

British Stuff

 

Tom Vowden, Stained Glass Conservator – Spitalfields Life.

 

Faith

 

No Screens at Church – Rebecca Skabelund at Front Porch Republic.

 

When Did the Church Begin? – Anthony Faggiano at Reformed Dogmatika.

 

Poetry

 

“The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” poem by Robert Service – Anthony Esolen at Word & Song.

 

“If I Could Tell You” by W.H. Auden – Read by Tom O’Bedlam

 

Painting: Reading at a Table, oil on canvas by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

A shoot, a branch

After Isaiah 11:1-11 

From the stump

of the axed tree

comes forth a shoot,

tender and green,

emerging against

all odds, forcing

its way, tender

and green, into

the air.

 

From the roots

of the axed tree

comes forth

a branch, fragile

but growing,

soon bearing

fruit, unexpected

fruit, bursting

from the branch,

nourishing and

beautiful, into

the air.

 

Photograph by Akira via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Friday Readings

 

“Ultrasound: Your Picture,” poem by George David Clark – D.S. Martin at Kingdom Poets.

 

How to Change Your Perspective on Time – Seth Lewis.

 

Access All Areas: Exhilarating Proximity in the Christian Bubble – Stephen McAlpine/

Piets and Poems: Martyn Hesford and "Ash Light"

I don’t know if grief is really a thing with feathers. Sometimes I think of it as a ghost, sometimes there, sometimes gone, but able to suddenly appear and startle you almost to tears. My father died nearly 40 years ago; grief didn’t hit me until three years after his death. My mother died 12 years ago; I felt it immediately. My half-sister, 11 years older, died several years ago; it felt like part of my childhood died, the time I knew her best. My half-brother, eight years older, died last year, and that one hit me harder than all the others. The best and worst conversation of my life was our last phone call, when he knew he’d die soon and was saying goodbye.  

But all these griefs return, not at once and not with the same intensity. Some dull with time; some don’t. The ghosts of grief are likely a measure of the strength and depth of the relationship. What I’ve learned is that grief, with all its ghosts, can be another form of love.

 

These thoughts about griefs and family and ghosts came bubbling up when I read Ash Light: Poems, the latest poetry collection by Martyn Hesford. (The collection is available through both Amazon UK and the publisher, Grey Swan Press.)

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

Some Thursday Readings

 

St. Clare: A Sonnet – Malcolm Guite.

 

Summer Camp Highlights – poem by Maureen Doallas at Writing Without Paper.

 

The Ragged Hand of Winter – Sonnet by K.S. Bernstein at Apple Blossoms in a Mournful Wood.

Accepting a Short Story Challenge

Like most if not all writers, I follow several writers who post and talk about the craft of writing. Like other writers, it’s helpful, encouraging, and instructive to see what others, Christian and non-Christian alike, are struggling with, learning, sharing, and figuring out. 

I published my last book in late 2024.  What followed was period of exhaustion. Writing that book had been an intense experience; the research had begun in 2016 and continued through the writing of two other novels and deepened in the final two years. The published book includes nine pages of bibliography. I’d never written historical fiction before, and it was one of the most intense writing experiences of my life. Through the process, my respect for writers of historical fiction grew exponentially. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at the ACFW blog. 

 

Top photograph by Toa Heftiba via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

Morning Desire – Brian Miller at Notes from an East Tennessee Farmer.

 

Are You Looking for Magic? – Terry Whalin at The Writing Life.

 

Dorothy Sayers Is the Answer to John Dewey – Jesse Sumpter at The Imaginative Conservative. 

 

A Record of Writer’s Rush – Andrew Roycroft at New Grub Street.

Poets and Poems: Sally Nacker and "My Wild Yard"

Poet Sally Nacker lives in a house in or near a woods. That means her home is surrounded by nature. To experience nature, all she has to do is open her door and inhale. It was perhaps inevitable that she would find poetic inspiration here. All she had to do was walk in her yard. 

Find it she did.

 

My Wild Yard is a small taste of living in a natural setting. The 16 poems of this chapbook are simple and direct, inspired by the landscape around her. The poems are short; the longest is four stanzas of four lines each.

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

Some Tuesday Readings

 

How a Luna Moth Grows Up – poem by Adam Whipple at New Verse Review.

 

The Weight of Time – poem by Padraig O Tuama at Poetry Unbound.

 

“On Vacation,” poem by Sally Thomas – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

The Sleep of Seeds – poem by Lucia Cherciu at Every Day Poems.

 

“The purpose of poetry is to tell us about life” – Steve Knepper at New Verse Review.

Two Short Stories by Agatha Christie

I’ve been rediscovering, or actually discovering, the short stories written by Agatha Christie. Years ago, I read only a couple of collections of her stories. I focused on her novels – Hercule Poirot, Miss Jane Marple, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford. I’ll confess to being partial to Monsieur Poirot and his famous mustaches, but I generally liked all of her novels. 

A few weeks ago, when a notice showed up (Amazon and its algorithm own me) about a short story by Christie entitled “The Map,” it contained no reference to any of her famous detectives. In fact, it made no reference to the word “detective” at all. The description did suggest that it might be something of a ghost story. As it turned out, it wasn’t only a ghost story; it was downright borderline horror.

 

And now I’m hooked. 

 

Agatha Christie

The Golden Ball is a story about two people who unexpectedly become an engaged couple. A young man is lectured by his grandfather about proper attendance at work, and he finds himself outside of work on a busy London street. Driving by is a young socialite, engaged to a duke, no less, and she promptly invites him into her car, they decide they should get married, and off they go to the countryside to find an appropriate home. They do, but it is there that the surprises begin, and there are more than one. It’s rather madcap, reads like something light set in the late 1920s or early 1930s, and it’s great fun.

 

The Listerdale Mystery also concerns a house. A mother and her two adult children are formerly well-to-do gentr but brought financially low by the father’s unwise investment and borrowing decisions. They live in a cramped and rather shabby flat they can barely afford. The mother is worried that her son is becoming too interested in the nearby tobacconist’s daughter. The daughter is bewailing the interest of a well-to-do young man who wants to call upon her, but to see her living conditions would destroy any interest he might have. And then, unexpectedly, a fashionable property in Westminster in London becomes available at a ridiculously low rent, one even this down-at-heels family can afford. But gift horses are rarely what they seem.

 

Both stories are entertaining. They’re something of period pieces, but they show dimensions of Christie’s writing that are as entertaining as they are unexpected. 

 

Related:

 

“The Map” – a Ghost Story by Agatha Christie.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

Willa Cather’s Pioneering Women – Sarah Reardon at First Things Magazine.

 

The House Does Not Need You – Nic Rowan at The Lamp on Ray Bradbury and AI.

 

Mysterious Shapes Hidden Beneath the Amazon Canopy Reveal a Sprawling Ancient Civilization Much Bigger Than Researchers Expected – Sarah Kuta at Smithsonian Magazine.

 

The Ring and a Junction on Blackfriars Road – A London Inheritance.

 

The Gables of Elsinor– Henry Oliver at The Common Reader.

The right time

After Galatians 4:4-6 

Not early, not late,

but at the right time,

the fullness of time,

he came, sent

by his father,

for the right purpose

to redeem,

to redeem those

under the law,

to adopt those

under the law

as sons, followed

by the right action,

the sending of the Spirit

into our hearts,

the hearts of the sons,

the sons of the heirs

of God.

 

Photograph by Andrik Langfield via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Sunday Readings

 

Our Line in the Sand on AI: TGC’s Missional Opportunity – Brett McCracken at The Gospel Coalition.

 

Faith over Fear: Meeting Christ in the Middle of the Storm – Mike Hernandez at Gospel-Centered Discipleship.

 

Peace is Better – Melissa Edgington at Your Mom Had a Blog.

 

Saturday Good Reads – August 8, 2026

Given the number of movies, plays, poems, and novels about the man, you would think that the entire planet knows King Arthur was obviously a real person. The actual story is that proof has never been found that the man existed. St. Gildas, a monk writing about 540 A.D., mentions an earlier figure named Vortigern who won a battle against the Saxons. That account was picked up by others, including the Venerable Bede about 731 A.D. in the early 1100s, Geoffrey of Monmouth blew those accounts up, giving us Arthur, Merlin, and the start of the legend as we’ve come to know it. At History Today, Ken Dark makes the case for Arthur as a real person. (And I know for a fact that Guinivere looked exactly like Vanessa Redgrave, and the 1968 movie “Camelot” proved it.) 

He may be the most successful writer you never heard of. Japanese author Seishi Yokomizo sold 55 million books in his lifetime, almost all detective stories. Then World War II started, and the Japanese government wouldn’t allow him to publish, because Western influences were considered verboten. After Japan’s defeat, Yokomizo was once again free to publish. And his books are finally being translated into English.

 

It may be one of the most unusual reversal stories I’ve read in a while. A young woman enters Columbia University as a liberal, and her experience transformed her into a conservative. 

 

More Good Reads

 

Life and Culture

 

The Banality of Disruption – Glen Sproviero at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

The Morning Leonard Cohen Explained Antisemitism – Steven Karras at Steven’s Substack.

 

The Wendell Berry Moment – Daniel Vollaro at Front Porch Republic.

 

Writing and Literature

 

I Prefer Not To: Literary Laments in the Age of AI Dead Letters – Barbara Castle at Front Porch Republic. 

 

Literature as Part of Life – Henry Oliver at The Common Reader.

 

Dostoevsky Rediscovered – Joseph Pearce at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

America 250

 

The Declaration of Independence in Richmond – Bert Dunkerly at Emerging Revolutionary War Era.

 

Jefferson & the Crucible of Peaceable Coercions – Geoff Smock at the Journal of the American Revolution. 

 

British General Benedict Arnold, Goerge Washington and the Nadir of the American Cause – Keli Holt at Just Enough History.

 

American Stuff

 

White Haven: U.S. Grant’s St. Louis, Missouri Home – Patrick Young at The Reconstruction Era.

 

Historian blasts Smithsonian’s activism shift after first visit in over a decade: ‘Completely different place’ – Kiera McDonald and Andrew Mark Miller at Fox News.

 

Poetry

 

Village – poem by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

The Beautiful Invisible: Jan Twardowski’s Poetic Lessons on Loving in Solitude – Grzegorz Ignatik at Church Life Journal.

 

“The Thrush,” poem by Edward Thomas – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

You’re Still You – Josh Groban (from Ally McBeal)

 Painting: Woman Reading, oil on canvas (1943) by Albert Reuss (1889-1975).