Some Monday Readings – Sept. 14, 2026

London’s ice cream wars – Jim Warerson, David Hall, and Polly Smythe at London Centric. 

The Other Side (of sad stories) – Glenn McCarty at Story Warren.

 

College campuses need to be liberated from their administrators – Barry Lam at College Town.

 

Don Quixote’s Guide to Better Reading – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review.

 

9/11 and How the Western Left Continues to Shame Itself – Andrew Devine at The Devine Message.

 

A Prayer for Grandparents Day – Yuri Bezemov at How to Subvert Subversion.

 

Don’t Miss Your Opportunities – Terry Whalin at The Writing Life.

 

American nature: On a pair of exhibitions at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site – James Panero at The New Criterion.

 

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

Painting: Mount Chocorua, New Hampshire (1827), oil on canvas by Thomas Cole (1801-1848).

Poets and Poems: Robert McDowell and “The Excellent Assembly”

If you’re older than 29 tor 30, you know precisely where you were on Sept. 11, 2001. My wife was at home, our oldest son was in college, and our youngest son was in school. I’d gone early to my small office in downtown Kirkwood, Mo.  

I turned on my small, portable television to watch the news. Instead, I saw a large passenger jet crash into the South Tower of the World Trade Center in New York. Another jet had crashed into the North Tower 18 minutes earlier. A little more than 30 minutes later came the crash into the Pentagon. And then the crash into the field in Pennsylvania. 

 

Everything changed that day. Airline safety screening changed forever. A war started. The people who were the masterminds behind it were hunted down. But something deeper changed, something indefinable – the idea of the United States we carried in our heads.

 

Twenty-five years have passed. To remember that day, to remember the people on those planes and in those buildings, the policemen and firemen who gave their lives, and the families who lost loved ones, writer and poet Robert McDowell has written The Excellent Assembly. It’s a collection of 52 poems, not based on real people, but imagined to describe the types of people who died and were affected.

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

Some Thursday Readings

 

The Weeping World: A reading of Shakespeare’s ninth sonnet – K.S. Bernstein at Apple Blossoms in a Mournful Wood.

 

“Song of the Chattahoochee,” poem by the Sidney Lanier – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

What Wendell Berry Saw – Jason Edwards at Front Porch Republic.

 

“Dear Friends,” poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson – Anthony Esolen at Word & Song.

 

“The Pobble Who Has No Toes,” poem by Edward Lear – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Reading Wendell Berry’s ‘III’ – Megan Willome at Poetry for Life.

 

Poet Laura: By Heart – Donna Hilbert at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Saturday Good Reads - Sept. 11, 2021

Twenty years have passed since Sept. 11, 2001, and we seem to have come full circle. The Taliban are back in charge of Afghanistan, including some the very same people who were in charge when Osama bin Laden launched his attacks on the United States. CityJournal republished a 2004 essay by James Q. Wilson, entitled “What makes a terrorist? It takes a whole village – even a whole culture.” And it’s just as apt today as it was in 2004. 

Author Salman Rushdie, himself no stranger to terrorist regimes and their long reach, has continued to write after his The Satanic Verses raised the ire of the Iranian ayatollahs back in the 1980s. And he’s doing something unusual with his latest book – he’s serializing it on Substack. Alex Shephard at The New Republic wonders if Rushdie will be able to revive serialized fiction. 

 

Years ago, as in 1972, I read a small gem of a short novel called Catholics by Brian Moore. Set in the distant future (the end of the 20^th century), it’s set in a monastery on a small island. A young priest is sent to force the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, and his efforts are not welcome. It was far from the only this this writer from Northern Ireland wrote. John Self at The Critic Magazine calls Moore “Belfast’s best-kept secret.”

 

Thomas Jefferson is known for many things – the Declaration of Independence, the founding of the University of Virginia, and serving as the third president (and paying $15 million for the Louisiana Purchase). But did you know he was also a poet? Michael Curtis at the Society of Classical Poets has the story.

 

More Good Reads

 

9/11

 

9/11 twenty years later – Andrew Mccarthy at New Criterion.

 

Artists remember 11 September – The Art Newspaper.

 

Inside the memory of 9/11 – David Smith at The Critic Magazine.

 

Teaching 9/11 to the Emerging Generation – John Stonestreet at Breakpoint.

 

The Sphere, 20 Years Later – Christina Stanton at Mere Orthodoxy.

 

Twenty Years Later – Elizabeth Stice at Front Porch Republic.

 

Writing and Literature

 

To Fit and To fix: The Moral Imagination of Alexander McCall Smith – Jeffrey Bilbro at Plough Quarterly. 

 

McIlvanney and Me: Remembering the Man Who Created Tartan Noir – Ian Rankin at CrimeReads.

 

Pius Samwise: Roman Heroism in The Lord of the Rings – Zak Schmoll at An Unexpected Journal.

 

My First Thriller: James Grady – Rick Pullen at CrimeReads.

 

Is Ambrose Bierce an Accurate Primary Source and Does it Matter? – Jon Tracey at Emerging Civil War.

 

Faith

 

I Don’t Think That’s what “Two or Three Gathered Together” Means – Paul Phillips at He’s Taken Leave.

 

Is Faith a Work? – Stephen Nichols at Ligonier Ministries.

 

Turning Toward Light – Andrea Sanborn at A View of the Lake.

 

Culture

 

A Critical Theorist Worth Reading – Carl Trueman at First Things Magazine.

 

The Courage of Peter Boghossian – Rod Dreher at American Conservative.

 

Art

 

Where was Van Gogh originally buried? We still don’t know – Martin Bailey at The Art Newspaper.

 

Scars in Heaven – Casting Crowns

Painting: Portrait of a Young Man Holding a Letter, oil on canvas (1518) by Rosso Florentino (1494-1540), National Gallery, London.

September

He sits, stares at a single painting 

in the afternoon, rather abstract,

neo-abstract, perhaps neo-realist 

or post something, he doesn’t know

but it doesn’t matter, the painting

and its moment, the painting

in its moment is what matters

to him, speaks to him, he doesn’t

understand why but he’s beyond 

understanding, beyond veneration,

having arrived at veneration,

the painting is an icon, he thinks, 

the painting should be carried

properly by priests in cassocks

and belts of rope, priests

with long beards, as they carry

the icon flanked by acolytes

with candles down the steps

to Fifth Avenue and turn south. 

Painting: September, oil on canvas by Gerhard Richter (2005), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. This poem is a repost from Sept. 11, 2014.

Reading Billy Coffey

One of the stories in Billy Coffey’s new novel Paper Angels is about 9/11. It’s not about what happened on 9/11, but more about how the central character in the book, Andy Sommerville, reacts to a foreigner while watching the lighting of the annual town Christmas tree. The story is full of symbols – the tree, the season, why the foreigner (a German) hides something in the tree (you have to read it to find out).

Like good writing has a tendency to do, that story reminded me of something else: my own family’s Christmas after 9/11. I was supposed to have flown to Eastern Europe for a missions trip that October; the trip was delayed until the following spring. The economy was starting to reel. War was starting against the Taliban and Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. We were still feeling the effects – physical, emotional and even spiritual effects – of the deaths in the twin towers, the Pentagon, and that field in Pennsylvania.

That Christmas, the first Lord of the Rings movies opened in theaters. The Fellowship of the Ring would have been a good movie at any time, mostly because of how true it stayed to J.R.R. Tolkien’s original book and because of director Peter Jackson’s imagination. Jackson got it almost exactly right. But that year, that Christmas, the movie became something more than just a good movie. It became a kind of passage from what we had all been before to what we were becoming, or what we might become. My youngest son and I saw the movie four times in the theater.

However blissfully unaware we might have been before 9/11, Osama bin Laden taught America a lesson – but not the one he wanted to teach. No, the lesson he taught America was that, like The Fellowship of the Ring so clearly demonstrated, evil walks this world. Forces of evil would gleefully destroy the good if they could. On 9/11, forces of evil were determined to do just that, bankrolled by a rich man whose money came from his father.

In the movie and its sequels, the fate of Middle Earth rests first on a small group of men, an elf, a dwarf, a wizard and four hobbits, and then only on the shoulders of two hobbits. They continue on, against impossible odds, because, as Gandalf the wizard says, “It is what we do with the time we have” that matters.

That could be a theme of Coffey’s Paper Angels. If you believe in God as Billy Coffey does and as I do, what matters is the time we have. During that time we are being fashioned into the people we were created to be. That doesn’t mean life is always understandable. It’s not. Many things are unfair. Many things don’t make sense. Senseless tragedies happen. People die because some evil mind in the mountains of Afghanistan wants to make a point and thinks he has to destroy something.

Sometimes we feel like hobbits, struggling through the mines of Moria, or the dead zone before the land of Sauron, or the cave with the giant spider. We seem so small, so insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

And yet we matter. We are part of something larger than ourselves. We have a part to play. We are being hammered and sculpted into something better. The anvil often hurts; the chisel cuts and chips. Sometimes it feels like everything cracks and shatters.

That’s what happens to Andy Sommerville in Paper Angels. The power of Coffey’s writing and stories is that we are each our own version of Andy. We recognize him because we are him.

And out of the pain and the hurt and the tragedy will come something good, something new, something beautiful, because the something comes from God.

Related:

My review of Paper Angels.

Gerhard Richter's "September"

Everything that could be said today is being said today, and I won’t add words, or many of them.

In May, we were in the bookshop of the Contemporary Art Museum in Chicago, and I found Robert Storr’s September: A History Painting by Gerhard Richter. I don’t agree with everything Storr, the dean of the School of Art at Yale University, has to say about 9/11 in the book -- too much of the East Coast liberal in him, and too much of the Midwest conservative in me. But I was taken with Richter’s painting. I had had a post over at High Calling Focus earlier this year about a Richter work at the St. Louis Art Museum, but I wasn’t aware of this work.

It’s small, approximately 20 by 30 inches. And while it doesn’t have the clarity of so many photographs, and the tragedy, horror and pain reflected on so many human faces that day, for me it represents much about what happened that day, what happened to all of us. 

Painting: September by Gerhard Richter (2005), The Museum of Modern Art, New York

What endures

A rich man’s son embraces

a theology of death, and

September blue is split open,

shredded in an avalanche

of paper, steel, concrete,

glass, smoke, jet-fueled fire,

a jihad of technology.

A little speck

of the Word,

engulfed in dust,

buried in debris,

choking in a rain

without water,

endures.

This poem is submitted to the prompt today by dVerse Poets, and is one of the most difficult things I’ve chosen to write. To see more poems, please visit dVerse Poets.

The photograph is of St. Paul’s Chapel of Trinity Episcopal Church Wall Street sits directly across the street from the World Trade Center. The chapel endured the rain of debris, but the only damage was one cracked window. In the days following 9/11, it became a makeshift memorial for the 3,000 people who died that day.

Three years after 9/11, I had to attend a court hearing for work in lower Manhattan. I walked to Ground Zero, joining hundreds of other people milling about the site, then just a huge gaping hole cleared of debris. The amazing thing was that, despite all of the people, the silence was profound. No words could describe what was, and wasn’t, there.

 

What endures by Glynn2

The Day We All Became New Yorkers

I was an independent consultant, and had just arrived at my small office in downtown Kirkwood, the suburb of St. Louis where I live. Kirkwood is a time-warp kind of place, or so it seemed then. Founded in 1857, blocks of beautiful old houses, a farmer's market, a still working train station and a community attitude that there is no better place to live on the face of the earth. A friend of mine (who doesn't live in our suburb) once said, "Kirkwood isn't a community; Kirkwood is a religion." And he was not too far wrong.

I turned on the computer, sipped coffee, preparing for another day. And then I saw the photo of the World Trade Center, with one tower aflame. I flipped on my little portable televsion. I then did what was the natural thing for me to do. I called my wife. "Turn on the TV," I said. "But what--" she said, before I interrupted. "Turn on the TV." I couldn't speak what I was seeing on my tiny screen. Together, on the phone we watched our television screens. And then the plane hit the second tower.

"Come home," my wife cried. But home had become a different place. And it would again. One night, less than seven years later, a crazed gunman walked into the Kirkwood City Hall during a council meeting and started firing. People died. People I knew and had talked to. City Council members. Two policemen. The mayor died many months later, after seeming to recover from his gunshot wounds.

America met evil on Sept. 11, evil on a colossal scale. Kirkwood met it on a cold night in February, 2008. Everything changed.

There are many online friends who are posting today, and I will update this as they do. Here are a few ways America is expressing its grief, its memory and its resolve about the what happened on the day we all became New Yorkers, we all worked at the Pentagon, and we all crashed into a field in Pennsylvania.

L.L. Barkat, whose husband was supposed to have been working in One World Trade Center that day: The Curator Magazine; The High Calling Blogs; Love Notes to Yahweh.

Billy Coffey, who stared up into a 9/12 sky and saw only clouds and birds: What I Learned Today.

Katdish, who asks what were you doing eight years ago today? Hey Look a Chicken!.

Time Magazine: Photoessay.

Joan Ball, remembering a firefighter: Flirting with Faith.

Mashable: Remembering 9/11 Through Social Media.

Matthew Warner at Fallible Blogma: Remembering 9/11.

Vitamin Z: A Couple of Haunting Photos on 9/11.