What do you do?

After Revelation 2:18-29 

What do you do about

heresy? You believe,

and do what you

believe, and do what

you should, even as

heresy is practices

in the place you

believe, in the place

you live. You hold true,

even as the false and

untrue are tolerated 

and flourish all around

you.

 

Keep on keeping on.

Hold fast. Hold fast

to the true; keep

to the true always

and to the end. It

won’t be easy; it

never is. But it is

your path; hold 

fast and keep

walking your

straight line.

The authority will

come to rest on you.

The reward will

come to you.

 

Photograph by Patrick Fore via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Sunday Readings

 

Redeeming the Time This New School Year – Kristen Hatton at CDM Women’s Ministry.

 

Ways to See and Support Foster Families – Melissa Edgington at Your Mom Has a Blog.

 

The Scandal of the Evangelical Heart – Doug Eaton at Fight of Faith.

 

‘And lead us not into distraction’ – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review.

 

Britain’s incredible Christian revival: Why young people are returning to church in their droves and putting faith in Christ– Ed Griffiths at GBN News.

 

 

Saturday Good Reads – August 16, 2025

The culture wars raged this week, sparked by President Trump’s takeover of the police function in Washington, D.C. and bringing in National Guard troops to get crime under control. The red side cheered, while the blue side screamed “fascist takeover” and “crime there is at its lowest point in 30 years.” But what if the crime statistics themselves were unreliable? Anecdotal evidence would say carjackings are up, muggings are up, armed robberies are up, but then, statistics say otherwise. Was it just a matter of perception? Then, I ran into this story, from – of all places – Washington, D.C.: in July, a police commander was suspended, accused of changing crime numbers. So, before we start shouting “crime rates are down,” don’t forget the propensity of some officials to make sure crime statistics seem to be down. And the people who live there might have an entirely different perspective.  

I tended to discount reports of paid protesters being bused in for whatever the latest cause or outrage might be. Shows you how much I know: Crowds on Demand CEO provides insight as protester requests up 400% under Trump. So now I have to wonder about all those aging Baby Boomers holding protest signs – are they real protesters or is this just a quick money-making gig? And who's paying for hiring protesters?

 

A Facebook friend, Matthew Kaboomis Loomis, posted this video about the Worst Trend on the Internet Right Now. It’s entitled “You’re Being Played,” and it’s about the outrage machine – someone is making money every time you click or comment on what appears to be awful, political, shocking, “bombshell,” and similar accounts guaranteed to raise your blood pressure or set off your “infuriate” genes. At best, these reports are grossly exaggerated; at worst, they’re outright lies. 

 

Something more uplifting: T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” turned 100 years old this past week. British poet laureate Simon Armitage composed a poem, “In Retrospect,“ to commemorate the 80^th anniversary of VE Day and VJ Day (and he talks about it at the Tower of London; see the video below). And Joseph Bottum takes a look at “Fire and Ice” by Robert Frost.

 

More Good Reads

 

America 250

 

Weapons of the American Revolutionary War – Lesson plan from C-Span Classroom, from a lecture hosted by the St. Charles County (Missouri) Historical Society.

 

The Pests That Plagued Colonial America – Jack Tamisiea at History.

 

Vandalia Colony: American Triumph or Folly? – Jason Cherry at the Journal of the American Revolution.

 

Life and Culture

 

The World Says Quit, But I’m Not Done Yet – Anthony Giardina at The Free Press.

 

Lying Increases Trust in Science, Says Academic – William Briggs at Science Is Not the Answer.

 

Russiagate Releases Lifting a Veil on Surveillance State Abuses – Matt Taibbi at Racket News. 

 

American Stuff

 

The Klan and Coolidge: Birth of a Smear – Coolidge Review.

 

Writing and Literature

 

The 25 best (British and Irish) novels of the 21^st century – from Kazuo Ishiguro to Hillary Mantel – The Times of London. 

 

Why You Should Still Build Your Raft in the Sea of Slop – Lincoln Michel a Counter Craft.

 

Poetry

 

The Wartime Admissions of T.S. Eliot – Craig Raine at The Spectator.

 

“I Can in Groups These Mimic Flowers Compose,” poem by Charlotte Turner Smith – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Four Walks in Central Parks – excerpts from a Poetic Guide to the Park at New Verse Review.

 

Mid-Lake – Andrew Roycroft at New Grub Street.

 

Faith

 

On the Day Everything Changes, Remember What Hasn’t – Michael Kelley at Forward Progress.

 

The Great Commission Became His Ambition: Adoniram Judson’s Stirring Legacy – Ryan Griffith at Desiring God.

 

Israel

 

A Chosen State? – Michael Oren at Clarity.

 

The Art of Remembrance – Simon Armitage at the Tower of London on VE Day Anniversary

 Portrait of Efim Repin, the Artist’s Father, oil on canvas by Ilya Repin (1844-1930).

So much right, yet...

After Revelation 2:18-29 

So much can be right,

and is, your works,

your love, and faith

that produce those

works, your patient

endurance, and your

ever-growing acts

and works of faith.

 

And yet.

 

You have a heresy

in your midst, not

hidden but openly

practiced, celebrating

self-indulgence and

all the sins of self.

You allow its leader

to practice her ways

and call herself

a prophetess, dishonoring

the word, dishonoring

the church. Heresy has

no place here, neither

does its toleration.

 

Photograph by Dan Cristian Paduret via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Friday Readings

 

“Ah, Christ, I love you rings to the wild sky,” poem by Allen Tate – D.S. Martin at Kingdom Poets.

 

In My Father’s School Are Many Classrooms – Tim Challies.

 

The Eyes of the Old and the Young – Seth Lewis.

Visitors to the Ce-Ment Pond: The Poetry of Birds

Last year, my wife decided she wanted a bird bath in the kitchen garden. She found one she liked, of concrete construction and simple in design. Our two sons helped move the bowl and pedestal from the car to the garden. It looks light – deceptively light; I can barely manage to empty the bowl when I clean it. 

I named it “the ce-ment pond,” in honor of one of my favorite childhood television shows, The Beverly Hillbillies. It has become an avian gathering place, a community center, a source of water in the St. Louis summer heat, and a communal bathtub. 

 

It’s also a source of discord. The birds fight over it.

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

Some Thursday Readings

 

Constantine Cavafy: The Making of a Poet – Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys at Literary Hub.

 

Spring Thaw – poem by Maureen Doallas at Writing Without Paper.

 

“A Farewell,” poem by Charles Kingsley – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

The Dinners of Old London – Spitalfields Life.

How a Book Inspired a Character

I was struggling while I was writing the manuscript of what would become Brookhaven. I was up to my eyeballs in research; I had the overall story arc in my head. I knew it would be 1915, and the character of Sam McClure would be explaining his life during the Civil War. 

I had one problem.

 

What would he be telling the story in the first place? Why would he be recounting both what he had previously told his family and what he hadn’t told them? I knew that in the 1890-1920 period, memoirs of the Civil War were a major genre of autobiography, but this wasn’t a case of Sam writing his story or dictating his story for it to be published as a memoir. The whole idea was him to tell the story not as it happened or chronologically, but how different events of the war shaped the rest of his life.

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

Photograph: Lucile Morris Upton about 1915. She would be about six years younger than the character of Elizabeth Putnam in Brookhaven.

Poets and Poems: Wendell Berry and “Another Day”

Eleven years ago, I read and wrote about a then-new collection of poems by Wendell Berry. Simply named This Day, it was a collection of old and new poems – what Berry called “Sabbath poems” – published between 1979 and 2013. He suggested reading these poems in a quiet place – the woods, a quiet room – because that’s where poems of rest and reflection should be read. 

Now we have the sequel – Another Day: Sabbath Poems 2013-2023. Berry turned 91 this month (Aug. 5, to be precise), and he’s still writing poems just as good as they were almost half a century ago. The poems are also just as consistent as they were in 1979; he has never tired of writing about the themes of family, relations, community, land, and landscape, all of it embodying the sense of place. His fiction, notably the Port William novels and short stories, are about the same thing; he even has a new Port William novel publishing Oct. 7, entitled Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story. 

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

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Come, Jeffers: Poetry of Old Age #1 – Lucas Smith at The Sprawl of Quality.

 

A Chinese Poem on a Greyhound Bus – Joseph Massey at The Free Press.

 

Four Walks in Central Park by Aaron Poochigian – Review by Carla Sarett at New Verse Review.

 

Scrutiny – poem by Teow Lim Goh at Every Day Poems.

 

“I Shall Go Back Again to the Bleak Shore,” poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

“The Fall Guy” by Simon Michael

Barrister Charles Holborne finds himself caught up in the world of 1960s pop music. 

An American pop group has started its British tour, the prelude to a longer European tour. A British promoter is handling both the British and European itineraries. That is, until a 15-year-old-girl is found dead where the pop group is staying, with a heroin needle hanging out of her arm. And it’s the promoter who’s charged with her death and related crimes.

 

Holborne smells a rat. This is a period when the London Metropolitan Police is riddled with corruption of all kinds – drugs, shakedowns, blackmail, and organized theft rings. Through his contacts, detectives, and friends, the attorney learn his client is innocent, but he’s going to have to dip into the criminal world of the police to prove. And that can be as dangerous as the “regular” criminal underworld itself.

 

But if the music promoter is willing, there’s an opportunity to rip the lid off the entire mess.

 

Simon Michael

The Fall Guy is the 10^th Charles Holborne legal thriller by British writer Simon Michael. It’s a doozy of a story, based like its predecessors on real events and real people (London’s police was indeed riddled with corruption in the 1960s). A former practicing attorney, Michael knows his police procedure, law, and criminal trials, and that understanding undergirds each of the Charles Holborne stories.

 

Michael studied law at Kings College, London University and was called to the Bar in 1978. He worked primarily in the field of criminal law until the late 1990s, when he focused his practice on clinical negligence. He began writing in the 1980s and resumed it when he retired from legal practice.

 

Each of the Charles Holborne novels has been a consistently enthralling story. Michael draws his characters deeply and well, including the minor characters. Details matter. And the stories make you care about what’s happening, what should happen, and what will happen. The Fall Guy is yet another great story about crime, the law, and the people who try to navigate both – for good and for bad.

 

Related:

 

My review of The Brief by Simon Michael.

 

My review of An Honest Man by Simon Michael. 

 

My review of The Lighterman by Simon Michael.

 

My review of Corrupted by Simon Michael.

 

My review of The Waxwork Corpse by Simon Michael.

 

My review of Force of Evil by Simon Michel.

 

My review of The Final Shot by Simon Michael.

 

My review of Nothing But the Truth by Simon Michael. 

 

My review of Death, Adjourned by Simon Michael.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

The shameful wat the BBC covers the migrant protests – Chris Middleton at The Critic Magazine.

 

Neil Postman’s Tips for Tech – Joshua Pauling at Modern Age.

 

Tindals Burying Ground (Bunhill Fields) – A London Inheritance.

 

Sweet Thames run softly while I sing my song – Henry Oliver at The Common Reader.