Saturday Good Reads – May 30, 2026

I don’t select my “favorite story of the week,” but if I did, this one would be it. If you read nothing else here today, or anywhere else, read this. Bring tissues. And feel gratitude, and perhaps some wonder: Judson’s Last Ride by Sean Trende. 

You have a book idea. You start researching and perhaps even writing. You’re excited about it. And then, in a bookstore or an online column or post, you see it. Someone has already published a book that sounds like what you’re working on. Your response is something like feeling all four of your car tires deflate at once. What do you do? Writing coach Ann Kroker has some suggestions.

 

The controversy over writing and artificial intelligence continues to rage. A prizewinning article in a literary magazine that may actually have been written by AI. Books in which quotations of other works turn out to be invented by AI, Books written partially or more than partially by AI programs. Writing using what suspiciously looks like AI-pirated plagiarism. But with all this, not unusual when a new technology is developed, Joel Miller suggests that perhaps writers are focused on the wrong AI battle.

 

More Good Reads

 

America 250

 

Why 1776 matters to modern Britain – Clement Knox at The Critic Magazine.

 

This Jewish Community in the Caribbean Smuggled Gunpowder to the Patriots During the Revolution – John Hanc at Smithsonian Magazine.

 

The Sound of Independence – Lois Bliss Herbine at Journal of the American Revolution.

 

The Constitutionalism of The Federalist Papers – William Allen at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

Treason on the Floor: Patrick Henry’s Defiant Challenge to King George – Jason Clark at This Is the Day.

 

Faith

 

What’s Wrong With Boys? – R. Scott Clark at The Heidelblog.

 

American Stuff

 

Property No More: The Quiet Emancipation of Dred Scott – Jason Clark at This Is the Day.

 

Dolley Madison’s World – Catherine Allgor at American Heritage.

 

The Lobby, Fox Theater – Chris Naffziger at St. Louis Patina.

 

Writing and Literature

 

The Return of Buccmaster – Paul Kingsnorth at The Abby of Misrule.

 

An Ounce of Clarity vs a Pound of Cleverness – Samuel D. James at Digital Liturgies.

 

Film

 

“Les Miserables:” A Rousing Tale for Slumbering Souls – Barbara Elliott at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

News Media

 

Stephen Colbert Didn’t Get Cancelled – Mass Culture Did – Aaron Renn.

 

The Media’s Inversion pf Hezbollah’s War Against Israel – John Spencer t the Mir Yam Institute.

 

Poetry

 

“Sea-Shell Murmurs,” poem by Eugene Lee-Hamilton and “The Ecchoing Green,” poem by William Blake – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

The Bell Ringer – David Whyte.

 

Life and Culture

 

The Dignity of Dependence: How the Vulnerabilities We Share Become the Ties That Bind – Alisa Ruddell at Front Porch Republic.

 

Christ Our Hope in Life and Death – Jordan Kauflin

 Painting: Books and Reading, illustration by Norman Rockwell (1894-1978).  

"Mythic Realms" by Bradley Birzer

Hillsdale College history professor Bradley Birzer is a co-founder of The Imaginative Conservative website, which I read daily and have often featured in my weekly Saturday Good Reads. I also read and reviewed his Beyond Tenebrae: Christian Humanism in the Twilight of the West.  

 What I didn’t know was how closely his literary influences (and reading) tracked with my own until I read his newest work, Mythic Realms: The Moral Imagination in Literature & Film. It was almost like reading a list – a long list – of books and writers that I had read myself.

 

Ray Bradbury and his The Illustrated Man and The October Country, and his wonderful Something Wicked This Way Comes. Tolkien. George Orwell. Leon Uris and his Mila 18 and Armageddon. Sherlock Holmes. Willa Cather. A biography series on famous Americans (where I, too, first learned about Lewis and Clark). Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot. Pulp fiction. Science fiction writer Arthur Clarke (whose Childhood’s End is one of the best novels of the 20^th century) (in my own opinion). 

 

But the influences don’t story there. His childhood Mecca was the Hutchinson, Kansas, Public Library, 2.4 miles from his home and where his mother allowed him to ride his bike. Mine was the Kenner, Louisiana, Public Library, about 1.5 miles from my home on one of the busiest highways in the New Orleans area at the time and less than a mile from the airport. My mother allowed me to ride my bike there; I had a library card in first grade (just like Birzer). 

 

Bradley Birzer

Mythic Realms is a collection of articles, essays, lectures, and book and film reviews Birzer has written over the years and which have appeared in a variety of publications and venues. While our literary influences are remarkably similar, we diverge on most of the films and television series he covers. That’s likely a reflection of the roughly 15 years difference in our ages. Except for the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Birzer’s cinematic influences and interests reflect the late 1970s, 1980s, and later. Mine reflect the 1960s, early 1970s (like Chinatown) and, at the latest, Chariots of Fire. My television preferences tend to the British productions.

 

Birzer writes with insight and verve. Even in short reviews, he sees things that most of us would miss, like finding national greatness in Cather’s O Pioneers! Or the significant contributions that pulp fiction have made to American literature, and how deeply conservative the tradition of Romanticism actually is. 

 

Birzer holds the Russell Amos Kirk Chair in American Studies and is a professor of history at Hillsdale College in Michigan. He received a B.A. degree from the University of Notre Dame and his Ph.D. degree from Indiana University. He serves on the boards of the Free Enterprise Institute and the Center for Cultural Renewal and is a fellow or scholar with the Foundation for Economic Education, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, The McDonnell Center, and the Center for Economic Personalism. His books include In Defense of Andrew Jackson, Russell Kirk: American Conservative, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth, Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson, American Cicero: The Life of Charles Caroll, Neal Peart: Cultural (Re)Percussions, and Beyond Tenebrae: Christian Humanism in the Twilight of the West. 

 

I found myself over and over again in Mythic Realms. I discovered the influence of popular culture. I remembered my own years-long love affair with science fiction. And Birzer reminds us of just how much we share a culture and its films and literature, and why that’s important.  

 

Related:

 

My review of Beyond Tenebrae by Bradley Birzer. 

Saturday Good Reads

“Alfred Hitchcock Presents” was one of my favorite television shows, not the least for the droll commentary offered by the host before and after the program. One show I vividly remember to this day (because it scared my socks off) was the story of two nurses caring for a wealthy invalid. It’s a dark and stormy night, and a serial killer targeting nurses is on the loose. My father loved the program as well; his favorite show was the housewife fixing dinner for the policemen investigating her husband’s murder – and she feeds them the murder weapon. 

Hitchcock has been dead for 40 years, and yet movies like “Psycho,” “North by Northwest,” “The Birds,” and “Rear Window” still resonate. Keith Roysden at CrimeReads looks at “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and how it dominated TV entertainment. David Thomason at Literary Hub explains why Hitchcock’s films still feel dangerous.

 

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the novel by Gonzo journalist Hunter Thompson, has turned 50 years old. David Wills at Quillette revisits what he calls one of the most important but usually misunderstood novels of the 20^th century. 

 

No matter what you think of former President Donald Trump, one of the most remarkable achievements of the last four years was the creation of not one but several vaccines for COVID-19 – in only six months (defying the predictions of Dr. Fauci, the medical establishment, and just about everyone else). Paul Robert Gregory at The Hill describes what the facts are about Operation Warp Speed.

 

More Good Reads

 

News Media

 

When the Narrative Replaces the News – Andrew Sullivan. 

 

Project Veritas Wins Early Round In Defamation Lawsuit Against New York Times – Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist.

 

Poetry

 

Poetry Advice from a Retired Schoolteacher: Robert Penn Warren’s Lost Letter – Leverett Butts at Literary Matters.

 

The Green Man in Spring – David Russell Mosley at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

Listen to a wax cylinder recording of Alfred Tennyson reading “The Charge of the Light Brigade” – Walker Caplan at Literary Hub.

 

Lockdown Anniversary: The Quarantine Quatrains – Malcolm Guite.

 

Faith

 

How Long is the Dash? – Tim Challies.

 

Hot Takes Are Harming Us – Trevin Wax at The Gospel Coalition. 

 

The boredom and the fear of grief: on C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed – Constance Grady at Vox. 

 

You Aren’t Crazy – And You Aren’t Alone – Rod Dreher at American Conservative.

 

Life and Culture

 

The Enduring Relevance of Czesław Miłosz’s ‘The Captive Mind’ – Robin Ashenden at Quillette.

 

Why Jacques Ellul is Relevant Today – Jacob Marques Rollison at Faith & Leadership.

 

The Freedom to Read Statement – American Library Association.

 

Beware of Books! – The Passive Voice.

 

Writing and Literature

 

Atticus, Scout, and the Gift of Children: On Reading 'To Kill a Mockingbird' with my Daughter in 2020 – Heather Morton at Front Porch Republic.

 

Flannery O'Connor: The American Master – David Griffith at Church Life Journal.

 

American Stuff

 

Remembering Black Wall Street – Urban Faith.

 

How Great Thou Art – Home Free

Painting: Interior with Man Reading, oil on canvas (1898) by Vilhelm Hammershoi (1864-1916).

Saturday Good Reads

I’ve been reading Cometh the Hour, a historical novel of Anglo-Saxon times by British author Annie Whitehead. I’ve previously read her novel To Be a Queen and her non-fiction work Mercia: The Rise and Fall of a Kingdom. Yes, I’m a fan. I’m amazed at how she can take a distant time and turn it into something real and vital. She also writes regularly for the English Historical Fictions Authors blog, and she had a post there this past week on the Battle of Shrewsbury in 1403. 

William McClay, the author of the highly regarded history of America Land of Hope, took aim at The New York Times and its 1619 Project – for distorting American history.

In addition to fighting, try to avoid disease, and sometimes sheer boredom, soldiers in the American Civil War also did some else – write poetry. Sarah Kay Bierle at Emerging Civil War had a story about one of them – Union general Philip Kearney, who wrote poetry about the Battle of Seven Pines.

Back in the 1970s, I discovered the mystery writer Dashiell Hammett, who published a series of remarkable novels in the 1920s, and 1930s, like The Maltese Falcon, Red Harvest, and The Big Knockover. I still have those paperbacks published then – for $1.50. Christie’s, the auction house, has a fine article about Hammett: America’s ‘smartest and most literate detective story author’.

More Good Reads

Faith

Do Not Weep When I Die – Samuel Sey at Slow to Write.

Modern Research about Happiness Repeatedly Parallels Biblical Principles – Randy Alcorn at Eternal Perspective Ministries.

Dear Lonely High School Student: Your People are Out There – Melissa Edgington at Your Mom Has a Blog.

Writing and Literature

A Return to Normalcy? George Babbitt's America – Mark Malvasi at The Imaginative Conservative.

News Media

Long Live the ‘Big Bend Sentinel.’ Viva ‘El Internacional’ – Sterry Butcher at Texas Monthly (Hat Tip: Megan Willome). 

Reading political news in the age of Trump leaves people stressed, angry, and overwhelmed – Joshua Benton at Nieman Lab. 

False charges: Did journalists spot a crucial fact about Karen Pence's Christian school? – Terry Mattingly at Get Religion.

Poetry

Listening to “Dry Salvages” – Dwight Longenecker at The Imaginative Conservative.

Birds and Angels – Eleanor Parker at A Clerk of Oxford.

‘A Breeze Came Out of the North’ – essay by Jack Ahlers at Society of Classical Poets.

Apollo 13 – Lee Oser at Literary Matters.

Film

Revisiting ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’ – Joseph Pearce at The Imaginative Conservative.

American Stuff

Why Patriots Really Fought the American Revolution – Justin Taylor at The Gospel Coalition.

The Changing Use of ‘Evangelical’ in American History – Thomas Kidd at The Gospel Coalition.

British Stuff

The Best Biographies of William Wilberforce – Thomas Kidd at The Gospel Coalition.

The Faroe Islands Trail Runner – The Atlantic

Painting: Interior with a Man Reading a Letter and a Woman Sewing, oil on canvas (1670-74) by Pieter de Hooch(1629-1684).

Saturday Good Reads

Tom Darin Liskey is a Houston-based photographer who travels all over the world. Yet in his own hometown, he found people whose faces tell stories. 

Julia Albu drove through Africa from South Africa to Egypt, making it through dangerous terrain (not to mention civil unrest) by explaining she was driving to London to have tea with the Queen. Ms. Albu is 80 years old.

Students at Manchester University painted over a poem by Rudyard Kipling because he was imperialist, racist, etc., etc., and they felt offended. The university, like universities tend to do these days, agreed. Carl Trueman at First Things Magazineasks if anyone bothered to read the poem first. 

Scrolls buried by ash during the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 A.D. are being read for the first time, and the Smithsonian has a fascinating story on the work of the scientist (an evangelical Christian, no less) who helped that to happen. Miles Russell at the BBC asks why we’re so mesmerized with King Arthur. Many of the surviving members of the Romanov family turned to art to help cope with dynastic tragedy. Bradley Birzer on C.S. Lewis in wartime. And a 1909 recording of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, singing “Sweet Low, Sweet Chariot” – the earliest known recording of the hymn. And more.

Poetry

Star Dust Lilies - 2 poems – Michael Dykel at Meta/ Phor(e) /Play. 

The edges of the earth rush in – Joe Spring.

How to Write a Poem, Part I and Part II - Kelly Belmonte at All Nine.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree by William Butler Yeats - recited by Sandra Heska King.

Writing

The Guilt of the Hustle – Aaron Earls at The Wardrobe Door.

What Do You Do with Story Ideas? – Ann Kroeker.

Art and Photography

The Romanovs’ Art of Survival – Anastasia Edel at The New York Review of Books.

Post No. 601: Sugar Creek Preserve – Tim Good at Photography by Tiwago.

Wings of Angels? – Susan Etole.

Unrehearsed (Portraits) – Tom Darin Liskey via Facebook.

Life and Culture

Two Nations, Revisited – Mary Eberstadt at National Affairs.

From Africa to tea with the Queen – BBC (Hat Tip: J of India).

If…Only They Would Read the Poem – Carl Trueman at Manchester University.

History

Buried by the Ash of Vesuvius, These Scrolls Are Being Read for the First Time in Millennia – Jo Marchant at Smithsonian.

British Stuff

Sudeley Castle and the People Who Lived There – Judith Arnopp at English Historical Fiction Authors. 

The real King Arthur: why are we so obsessed with trying to solve the mystery? – Miles Russell at BBC History Extra.

C.S. Lewis in Wartime: Patriot & Prophet - Bradley Birzer at The Imaginative Conservative.

Faith

How Are We to Pray? – Lynn Mosher.

Jesus Is like topsoil – Dan King at Bibledude.

A Prayer for Those in Need of Goodness and Mercy – Diana Trautwein at Just Wondering.

Ben Franklin’s Kite and the Providence of God – Thomas Kidd at The Gospel Coalition.

Film

Black & White, But Gray All Over: Two Films by Graham Greene – Dwight Longenecker at The Imaginative Conservative.

Swing Low, Sweet Chariot – Fisk Jubilee Singers (1909)

Photograph by Kyle Wagner via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Going to the Movies

The first movie I can remember seeing is Walt Disney’s Bambi. My mother took me to the theater to see it, and I cried when Bambi’s mother was killed. I was about five.

That first movie experience contained two themes that affected the rest of my movie-going life. The first is that I cried; I am a schmuck when it comes to crying at movies. I have embarrassed myself countless times with dates in high school and college and my wife for the last 40 years. I cry at movies.

The second theme is “my mother took me.” From That first experience with Bambi until I was about 12, I was my mother’s movie partner. She loved movies (she called it “going to the show”); my father did not. The two movies that had shaped her adolescence and movie-going life were The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind. Consequently, they shaped mine as well.

The last movie I can recall her taking me to was Mary Poppins. I can still sing most of the lyrics from the movie’s songs. The same is true for the lyrics for The Sound of Music and Hello Dolly.

By the time I was in high school, movies were changing. The Sound of Music gave way to The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde. My college years brought Easy Rider and Deliverance, although I did manage to sneak in Man of La Mancha (Peter O’Toole and Sophia Loren) and Cabaret.

Movies have helped shaped my life, as they have most of us alive today. I still go to the movies. My wife and I prefer “smaller” art house movies like Babette’s Feast and Chocolat; this past weekend we saw Philomena with Judy Dench and enjoyed it. But we also like the bigger blockbusters, too, like Chariots of Fire (perhaps my all-time favorite movie), Slumdog Millionaire (I love the Bollywood ending) and The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

We’re both more discerning about movies now than we used to be. We’re more conscious of propaganda masquerading as art, although I think that’s more common to commercial television entertainment than to movies. I don’t like movies with violence, especially violence involving children (although that was certainly a theme of Slumdog Millionaire). I don’t generally like war movies, although The Lord of the Rings movies were filled with it, and I thoroughly enjoyed The Book Thief recently. But I pay attention to reviews and movie trailers, both of which help the decision-making process for what movies to see.

I don’t participate in movie boycotts. If something seems blasphemous or offensive or disgusting; I simply don’t go to it, no matter what the local and national critics might say. But I don’t sign petitions and all the rest of that stuff; they only serve to give publicity to what otherwise will likely sink out of sight into the pit of mediocrity and bad films.

In Gray Matters: Navigating the Space Between Legalism and Liberty, Brett McCracken truly shines in his three chapters devoted to movies. He loves the cinema; he’s been a movie critic since his college days; and the reader can sense his deep, profound engagement with film. But that doesn’t mean he embraces everything, regardless of content. In fact, he offers what he calls “five considerations for how far is too far” in choosing to watch a movie (or a TV program):

·       What is your own weakness, one that may be affected by what you see?

·       What are the weaknesses in your community?

·       Is it beneficial?

·       Has the filmmaker earned the right – does the content serve an aesthetic purpose?

·       Have you prayed about it?

Those are necessarily easy questions to answer, but they are good questions for determining what movies to see.

Over at The High Calling, we’re discussing Gray Matters. To see what the discussion is this week, and what others have to say about movies, please visit The High Calling.

Photograph by TaniaMaria Cabrera via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission. 

Navigating the Gray

One of the movie critics in our local newspaper always provides guidance for us in how we approach movies.

If he likes a movie, we know the film will be generally edgy, with some violence and an “anti” kind of message, as in “anti-establishment” or what the critic (and the movie) had determined to be “anti-establishment.” Like Pulp Fiction.

If the movie is about values (family and otherwise) or is life-affirming, we know the critic will usually pan it. Like Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln.

In other words, his movie reviews often if not always reveal more about the critic than the movie, and that may be true of most criticism in the arts. It’s not that our local critic is always wrong, but I’ve read enough of his reviews to understand his worldview, and I know how and when it differs from my own.

What’s clear is that, in his writing his reviews and my reading them, we are both engaging in the business of culture.

In my own writing, and people’s reading and responding to it, we are all about the business of culture – making it, consuming it, understanding it, becoming part of it. We Christians, says Brett McCracken in Gray Matters: Navigating the Space Between Legalism and Liberty, tend to have one of two responses to culture. We see it as godless, heretical, blasphemous, and abominable. Or we saturate ourselves in it to get as far away from our Christian upbringing as possible.

Few of us, McCracken says, attempt to understand it. Discern what if anything is worthy, and celebrate the beauty of what is good in culture. Man is created in God’s image, and he made us to be creators, and that original impulse can be found across humanity.

What we have largely done is to wall ourselves off from popular culture, even as we embrace (and often unwittingly embrace) many of the forms that popular culture takes – art, rock music, radio, television, movies magazines, novels, self-help books. We have Christian versions of virtually every form of popular culture available.

What we have not done is to ask whether these forms of culture change what we try to say and communicate. The reality is that they do change the message, and often in profound ways; some messages are better suited to certain forms rather than others. And they change what we say in exactly the same way they changed what is said and communicated in the popular culture.

For the next four Mondays in December, TheHigh Calling will be discussing Gray Matters. McCracken examines four manifestations of how popular culture manifests itself – food, music, film, and drinking, and he considers each from the perspective of both creation and consumption. Each Monday the discussion will focus on a different manifestation. Check out The High Calling to see where the discussion is going. It promises to be lively.

Related:

Jonathan Merritt at Religion News Service interviewed Brett McCracken earlier this year.

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.