Some Monday Readings - May 4, 2026

Tolkien, Chesterton, & the Sloth of England – Joseph Pearce at The Imaginative Conservative. 

Who Really Wrote Philip K. Dick’s Best Novel? – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review.

 

Plato’s Cave and the Rise of the Highly Educated Radical – Jacob Howland at The Free Press.

 

The Greatest Sentence Ever Written? – Christ Mackowski at Emerging Revolutionary War Era. 

 

Celebrating 15 Years with the Kettle On – Every Day Poems – L.L. Barkat at Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

Illustration: The Declaration of Independence. 

Some Monday Readings - April 20, 2026

 

Reading is magic – Sam Kriss at Numb at the Lodge. 

Tales from the road: The dead of Falling Waters, a forgotten Gettysburg Campaign battle – John Banls’ Civil War Blog.

 

No, Books Are Note Remotely Too Expensive – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review.

 

A New Wild West in Jackson, Louisiana – James Taylor Foreman at The Dispatch.

 

A Week of Tears. A Week of Storms – Katie Andraskie at Katie’s Ground.

 

Publishing has an AI problem – Alexander Larman at The Critic Magazine.

 

Learn the Hard Way – Terry Whalin at The Writing Life.

 

How Big Pharma (Successfully) Targeted Women – Matt Bivens at Racket News.

 

A Christian Philosophy of Education – Howard Merken at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

Photograph: The Falling Waters historical marker.

How I Learned the Liberal Arts Were Important

I can remember the first time I knew for sure that something had gone wrong with the liberal arts. I had suspected some things were awry in our own public school district. Teachers and administrators didn’t like parents asking even basic questions about curricula. “Our focus in on critical thinking,” one principal said, “not rote learning.” Included in rote learning were penmanship, learning historical facts, memorizing multiplication tables, phonics, and just about anything associated with traditional learning. 

But it was when my oldest son’s sixth-grade English teacher sent a note home on some class activity that I knew. The note was filled with spelling and grammar mistakes. When I asked if spelling and grammar were still taught, I was given some vague reference to avoiding harming children’s self-esteem. 

 

We pulled the plug. 

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

Some Wednesday Readings

 

What the BBC leaves out – Jack Flockhart at The Critic Magazine. 

 

Who was he? Read a remarkable Battle of Nashville letter – John Banks’ Civil War Blog.

 

The keffiyeh crew’s curious silence on Iran – Brendan O’Neill at The Spectator.

 

“Solitude,” poem by Ella Wheeler  Wilcox – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Why Contemporary Fiction is Bad – Lucas Smith at The Sprawl of Quality.

Some Wednesday Readings

How Novels Carried Me Through Suffering – Lara D’Entremont at A Faithful Imagination.

Gustav Klimt – Painting the Land – George Bothamley at Art Every Day. 

 

How American Educators Are Conning Kids – Frannie Block at The Free Press.

 

The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai by Diane Ashton – reviewed by James Hill Wellborn III at Emerging Civil War. 

 

One of the Best Fiction Books I’ve Read – Erik Raymond at The Gospel Coalition

 

Face of a Saint: Thomas Aquinas’ Appearance Revealed After 750 Years – Alyssa Murphy at National Catholic Register.

 

The Ruthless Elimination of Paragraphs – Samuel D. James at Digital Liturgies. 

 

The Prophet of Trump’s Second Term – Matthew Continetti at The Free Press.

 

The Codevilla Tapes – David Samuels at Tablet Magazine (from 2019; related to The Free Press article immediately above).

 

Vision in February – poem by Daniel Mark Epstein at The New Criterion.

 

Painting: Church in Unterach on the Atttersee, oil on canvas (1916) by Gustav Klimt (1862-1918). 

Essays: Benjamin Myers on Place, Education, and Poetry

I’ve been trying to recall when, or how, I first ran across the poetry of Benjamin Myers. I read his Elegy for Trains: Poems in early 2014, and if I can clear the cobwebs away from my memory, it may have been through a recommendation of a friend I met at a writing retreat in Texas. However it happened, Elegy for Trains put me on the road to becoming a Ben Myers reader.  

I know why I enjoy his poetry so much: I can’t read it without being reminded of my own family – my grandmothers, my aunts and uncles, and cousins on both sides. Family is anchored in the idea of place, and I can’t think of family without thinking of my mother’s tribe of German and Cajuns in New Orleans and my father’s smaller but character-filled family in Shreveport. When I read Black Sunday: Poems by Myers, I found myself reading it two and three times simply because of my own family memories it evoked.

 

Myers, a professor of English and literature at Oklahoma Baptist University, doesn’t only write poetry; he also writes about poetry, about education, and the idea of place. He’s collected his essays and article in Ambiguity & Belonging: Essays on Place, Education & Poetry.

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

Some Tuesday Readings

 

The Sadbook Collections – Book 2 – Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

Dead Sea Scrolls Trilogy – poems by Brian Yapko at Society of Classical Poets.

 

A Sonnet for Candlemas – Malcolm Guite.

 

“Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries,” poem by A.E. Housman – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

"How to Think Like Shakespeare" by Scott Newstok

In the mid-1990s, when email was all the rage and the worldwide web was making its commercial appearance, a friend in IT who was something of an IT guru told me about the DIKW pyramid, sometimes called the DIKW hierarchy. He explained how data becomes information, information becomes knowledge, and knowledge becomes wisdom. 

I confess I didn’t take this too seriously. Even this early in the IT revolution, I was already skeptical about the heaven on earth promised by proponents of information technology. I was less concerned about how data leads to wisdom and more concerned with how the technology could be used and how it was likely to change everything, for good and for bad. Twenty-five years later, if the hierarchy was accurate, then we should be drowning in wisdom, which we clearly are not. We may have more data, more information, and more knowledge, but somehow wisdom decoupled from the train, assuming it was there in the first place.

 

I was reminded of my quarter-century-old conversation while reading the excellent How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education by Scott Newstok.

 

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

“The American Spirit” by David McCullough

David McCullough has spent his professional lifetime exploring the people and events that form a goodly part of what we call American history. He’s fascinated by the history of the United States, but it’s a fascination that doesn’t preclude understanding of or excuse things that need to be criticized. His reach and interest are as broad as they is deep.

McCullough – editor, teacher, lecturer, television host – is the author of numerous works of history and biography, including The Path Between the Seas (1978); Mornings on Horseback (1982); The Johnstown Flood (1987); Brave Companions: Portraits in History (1992); Truman (1993); John Adams (2002); 1776 (2005); and The Wright Brothers (2015); among several others. He’s won two National Book Awards, two Pulitzer Prizes, and two Francis Parkman Awards.

In other words, he’s an eminence in American historical letters.

He gives speeches, and when he does, it’s worthwhile to listen and ponder. He’s assembled 15 of those speeches, stretching from 1989 to 2016, in The American Spirit: Who We Are and What We Stand For.  The volume is a gem of understanding, and of American history, the words and insights spoken by one of our pre-eminent American historians.

He’s a master of the telling detail, such as that of Simon Willard’s clock, which sits within a statue in Congress and has been there since 1837. “Its inner workings ticked off the minutes and hours through debate on the Gag Rule, the annexation of Texas, the Mexican War, tariffs, postal service, the establishment of the Naval Academy, statehood for Arkansas, Michigan, Wisconsin, matters related to immigration, the Gold Rush, Statehood for California, the fateful Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the final hours of John Quincy Adams,” he writes. These were events and actions not only important for the United States but indeed the world.

And we read the story of John Quincy Adams, who returned as a congressman from Massachusetts after he served as our 6^th President. Adams, the educated and experienced son of John Adams, would die in Congress, stricken while in the House of Representatives and carried to the speaker’s office, where he died two days later. Henry Clay held his hand as he died.

David McCullough

In these speeches, McCullough talks of buildings and commemorations, historical figures known and not-so-known, and events that we’ve heard so often they seem trite but in his hands become living things.

One of the common themes is education – why it’s important and why it needs to be a lifelong pursuit; it’s not a monopoly of the institutional classroom. Here his speeches show a shift, however. From 2005 on, McCullough begins to note what he sees happening in the classroom – that we are not teaching American history as it has been taught or even at all. And citizens, and the country, are both poorer for it.

During a time like now, when divisiveness, rage, and outrage are the political order (or disorder) of the day, The American Spirit is a potent reminder of what we have had, what we’re risking, and what we might need to do to recover.

Top photograph by Frank McKenna via Unsplash. Used with permission.

A Small Volume of Essays, A Larger World of Poetry

In 1916, Oxford University Press published English Critical Essays: Nineteenth Century, selected and edited by Edmund Jones. It was volume 206 in “The World’s Classics.” This kind of series was once common, especially in the 19^th and early 20th centuries in both Britain and North America. The rise of the middle class and the explosion in literacy fueled the printing of sets like “The World’s Greatest Literature,” “The World’s Greatest Speeches,” and similar works.

These kinds of books were also used in high school and college classes. I’ve seen many of similar size and content that bear educational inscriptions. These works include essays, poetry, short stories, and sometime single works like a Shakespeare play.

Jones (1869-1941) was known as something of a pioneering schoolmaster. He was born in Wales, and attended schools there, but went to Oxford for his M.A. degree, which he received in 1894. He was headmaster of the Barmouth Intermediate School from 1894 to 1931, when he retired. He edited a number of books for English grammar schools on art, poetry, this volume of nineteenth century essays, and another volume in the Oxford series on essays of the 1th, 17^th, and 18^th centuries. After his retirement, Jones was a Sunday School teacher – clearly, education was important to him, something to which he dedicated his entire life.

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