Back in 2007, spent a week in Williamsburg. I was biking a lot at that time, and I was able to rent a bike at a local shop. I biked the historic triangle – Williamsburg to Yorktown, and Williamsburg to Jamestown. The parkways connecting them had little car traffic and were generally flat. We visited all three by car as well; 2007 was the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown. If you can’t go, Christopher Klein at History.com explains how the three towns shaped the course of American history.
It’s been less than week (it seems like months) since the Cities Church in St. Paul, Minn., experienced a serious disruption in its worship service by protestors looking for a pastor supposedly involved with ICE. We learned a lot of things from that disruption, including protestors were unaware of the FACE Act and former CNN anchor Don Lemon didn’t understand the First Amendment. Several people had some thoughtful responses. Samuel D. James at Digital liturgies wrote that we have to let the church be the church. Jesse Johnson explained that the First Amendment doesn’t give anyone the right to disrupt a worship service. And Al Mohler, often controversial across the evangelical spectrum, wrote in World Magazine that the disruption should be a wake-up call for the church.
While we wait to see what happens next in Iran, reporter Ashley Rindsberg at The Free Press took an unexpected look, not at Iran but in her own media world. And she discovered that, for the past year, Wikipedia editors have been helping Iran rewrite its record on human rights.
There was a thing last week, I think somewhere on Substack, about “10 books that changed my life.” I tried to find the specific article again, but Google produced an abundance of listings about 10 books, 37 books, 100 books, 20 books, 23 books, 77 books, 25 books, 40 books, well, you get the picture.
I asked myself the question. Could I identify 10 books that had changed my life?
My answer was no, I couldn’t, at least, not in the sense of some transformational change from what I was before reading the book and what I was after reading the book. But I could identify 10 that had influenced me, in some cases profoundly.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.
A little over three years ago, I read a rather startling book by Martin Gurri. Entitled The Revolt of the Public, it was a revision of an earlier edition and concerns the struggles between societal elites and, for want of a better term, normal people. My review, posted on Amazon, has earned the largest number of “helps” of any review I’ve ever done, which is more a measure of the book than the review. And Gurri has a new article, consistent with his book. See “Scenes from a Global Struggle: Elites vs. the Normies” at Discourse Magazine.
My story connected to the Civil War has passed the 70,000-word mark, and the ending is in sight. I’m not sure when it was that I realized I was writing about something I had only the most surface understanding of, but I did. The only solution was to start reading and researching.
Many blogs and web sites have been helpful, but two especially so. Emerging Civil War, edited by Chris Mackowksi, is written by historians, National Park guides, and other who know their stuff. Most have published books. Civil War Books & Authors, penned by Andrew Wagonhoffer, posts notices of new books and full-length book reviews focused solely on the Civil War, its causes, and its aftermath. Both sites have been at this work for years, ECW for more than a decade and CWBA since 2005.
What was also a treat was discovering and visiting the Missouri Civil War Museum, located adjacent to the Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery here in St. Louis.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.
Top photograph, courtesy Wikimedia Commons: The Wilderness site, sometime after the battle. The dense scrub wasn’t conducive to fighting, but the dry weather made it conducive to being ignited by sparks from artillery fire.
I read a lot of e-books. Reviewing poetry forTweetspeak Poetrymeans I’m read a lot of collections in pdf or e-book formats. Reviewing books on myFaith, Fiction, Friendsblog means the same thing, although almost all of those books are e-books and specifically books found on Amazon Kindle.
I like my Amazon Kindle Fire (I also have the Kindle app on my laptop and phone). It saves considerable bookshelf space, for one thing. Many of the books I have there will be read once and not likely read again at some time in the future. While the prices of some Kindle books, particularly more academic ones, are eyebrow-raising, most Kindle book prices are reasonable and usually cheaper than the hardback or paperback.
Two recent books I read, however, reminded me of the pleasures of holding and reading a physical book.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.
For a few years before 2022, I’d been occasionally reading about the American Civil War. It’s something I grew up with; my grandparents were all born after it was over, but their parents lived through it. Tw sets of great grandparents lived through the Union occupation of New Orleans; one set lived in an unoccupied part of Louisiana; and one set survived the war as parts of Mississippi were ravaged by war (and often repeatedly).
This last group was the Youngs. Three sons and a son-in-law all enlisted in the Confederate army. One, the youngest, was too young to enlist when the war began but somehow signed up as a messenger boy. He was the only one to survive, and he was my great-grandfather Samuel. Not long after the wat, his father died, and Samuel became the family patriarch at the ripe old age of 23 or 24. Samuel lived until 1920; my father was four years old when his grandfather died.
To continue reading, please see my post day at Dancing Priest.
Photograph: Camp scene, Union soldiers guarding Confederate prisoners; National Archives.
Years ago, in 1980 to be exact, I read a collection of letters between C.S. Lewis and his long-time friend Arthur Greeves, entitled They Stand Together. They became friends as children and began a correspondence in 1914 that lasted until Lewis died in 1963. Most of the letters in the book are by Lewis, because Greeves kept them. Most of the letters sent by Greeves were destroyed by Lewis’s brother, Warnie, who burnt a considerable amount of Lewis’s correspondence after his brother died. Harry Lee Poe at Desiring God takes a look at Lewis’s teenage years, and those letters to Greeves are an important source.
When it comes to the coronavirus, we’ve all heard more contradictory statements and claims made by experts who all say they “follow the science.” How can science be all over the map when it comes to masks, youth sports, routes of exposure, church meetings, BLM protests, and just about everything else? Patrick Pierson at Front Porch Republic takes a look at “following the science” in a polarized age.
My three grandsons attend a classical Christian school, and I can’t say enough good things about this particular form of education. It’s reminiscent of the kind of education that was common in public schools 50 and 60 years ago; it’s also better than that. It may be important for another reason besides education. Richard Hughes Gibson at Plough Books notes how important Christian education has become for keeping faith alive.
I was an early reader. I don’t recall how early, but I do remember riding my red bicycle to the dime store when I was six, to spend 59 cents to buy Trixie Belden and the Secret of the Mansion. It was the first of many such trips, for more Trixie Belden mysteries, Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island, Black Beauty, and Tom Sawyer, among others, published by the Whitman Publishing Company of Racine, Wisconsin.
When fourth grade arrived, I could participate in the monthly Scholastic Book Club. Few things in school were as exciting as the teacher handing out the four-page order form for the new books available. Most were priced at 25 or 35 cents. One or two would be 50 cents. My mother allowed me a monthly budget of $1.50.
Scholastic Book Club ended with sixth grade, so I was more on my own. I found my way to and around the book sections of department store and local bookstores, including the ones opening at the new shopping malls sprouting all over my suburb of New Orleans. I still have great memories of one called the Dolphin Book Shop at Lakeside Shopping Center.
To continue reading, please see my post today at the ACFW Blog.
Photograph by Annie Spratt via Unsplash. Used with permission.
In
the past week, I’ve read a biography of Gino Bartoli, the Italian cycling
champion; two novellas by noir detective writer Dashiell Hammett; three books
of poetry; a children’s novel; and a book about a mission project in Uganda.
It
was a slow week for reading.
My
earliest memory of reading is sitting next to my mother as she read Grimm’s Fairy Talesto me, a child’s reading edition
originally published in the 1920s. The story that stood out was “Hansel and
Gretel,” with the children getting lost in the woods because the birds ate the
bread crumbs they left for a trail. I believe I was three.
I
still have the book, an oversized volume with a green cover and considerably
“child-worn,” including my Crayola drawings on the inside covers.
The
moral collapse of the West seems to proceed apace; medical ethicists at Oxford
University argue that there is just as much reason to kill a newborn as there
is for an abortion. That is not a
Saturday Good Read.
And
then Rebecca Reynolds at The Rabbit Room writes about the new movie version of
Cinderella. We saw it; it was entertaining but not “great film.” Reynolds saw
something else, though, and what she found in the production directed by
Kenneth Branaugh was a rather surprising encouragement.
