Had he done it then

After I Samuel 24:1-12 

Had he done it then,

they would have known,

they would have grasped,

they would have accepted

and recognized and

applauded and even

cheered, celebrating

the death of a crazed

king who somehow

justified evil as good.

He could have done it then,

and the world would have

rejoiced. But he refrained;

his purpose was not

to please the world but

to please something else,

someone else.

 

Photograph by Chandan Chaurasia via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Sunday Readings

 

Part of a Christian’s Job is to Point Out That Modern Life Stinks – Samuel James at Digital Liberties.

 

Return to Chesterton – Maisie Ward at The Imaginative Conservative.

The First Sunday of Epiphany: Jesus' Baptism -- poem by Malcolm Guite.

Saturday Good Reads - Jan. 6, 2024

A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn, first published in 1980, has proven to be one of the most influential books of the last 50 years. It became something of a standard textbook in U.S history classes in universities across the country. I never read it; my own college history textbook was the two-volume A History of the United States to 1877 and The History of the United States Since 1865 by a group of historians led by T. Harry Williams. (It probably didn’t hurt that Williams taught at the university I attended.) What I didn’t know was that the Zinn history reflects a Marxist perspective, emphasizing the struggle of oppressed peoples against their oppressors. As Paul James Macrae points at Front Porch Republic, this kind of “history” is still being published. 

There is something to be said for classical poetry. At the Society of Classical Poets, poet Andrew Benson Brown reads Aesop’s “The Tortoise and the Hare,” Michelangelo’s “Sonnet XVII,) and Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” 

 

Following the events this week at Harvard University, and following the events last week at University of Pennsylvania, I ask myself a fundamental question: is it even possible for our elite universities to recover from this state of affairs? The cost to the county is incalculable, and it’s my children and grandchildren who are going to pay it. Bill Ackman, the financier and hedge fund manager who helped lead the charge against Harvard’s president, has a plan to fix Harvard. 

 

More Good Reads

 

Life and Culture

 

The Element of Crime, Part Two – Brian Patrick Eha at City Journal.

 

Why Good Men Are Hard to Find – Joshua Herring at Law & Liberty.

 

The Least Resolution for 2024 – Peter Mead at Biblical Preaching.

 

Art

 

The imagination of Ensor – William Cook at The Critic Magazine.

 

No-one has ever made photographs like these – Andrew Eberlin at Photos, photographers, and photobooks.

 

News Media

 

Can Evangelical Journalists Say Anything Good About Evangelicals? – Andrew Walker at National Review.

 

Faith

 

Open Letter – The family of Ravi Zacharias.

 

Storms or Doldrums: Which Is More Dangerous? – Helen Louise Herndon at The Aquila Report.

 

Poetry

 

The Bird in the Tree – Ruth Pitter via Malcolm Guite.

 

T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets Lecture Series – James Matthew Wilson.

 

Undecorating on Twelfth Night – Jody Lee Collins at Poetry & Made Things.

 

Writing and Literature

 

Bombs Away, a short story – Etgar Keret at Alphabet Soup.

 

I Will Follow Him – Valley Rock Voices, South Wales

Painting: The Fireplace, oil on canvas (1901) by Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940); St. Louis Art Museum.

Cutting corners

After I Samuel 24:1-12 

He could have had

it all, the kingdom,

the power, the glory,

respect, admiration.

He could have ended

the threat to his life,

the threat ongoing,

right there and

at that moment.

He could have made

a simple thrust, 

a surprise, and

they all knew

the king would do

that in his place.

Instead, he cut

a corner, a corner

of the robe, a cut

that said he could

have killed a king,

but refrained, that

said that, in God’s

time the piece,

the corner becomes

the whole.

 

Photograph by Erol Ahmed via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Friday Readings

 

A not so exhaustive list of male Christian fiction authors – Mark at Thoughts of a Sojourner.

 

Can you share a lesson from American church history? – Stephen Nichols at Ligonier Ministries.

 

“Mother of God,” poem by William Butler Yeats, and “Magnificat,” poem by Megan Willome – at Poetry for Life.

 

Attentive Parenting in the AI Age – Scott Hurst at Mere Orthodoxy.

"The White Priory Murders" by Carter Dickson

It’s the early 1930s. An English actress has become an American movie superstar. She is wowing the public with her return to England, intent on appearing in a West End play of the type she was booted from years before. She attracts admirers, crowds, and reporters wherever she goes (not unlike a Depression-era Taylor Swift). She’s also attracting danger, as in the arrival of a poisoned box of chocolates. 

The actress and some of her immediate circle are invited to spend a long week at White Priory, a 17^th century estate with supposed connections to Charles II and his mistress. She insists on having a large, enclosed pavilion as her room. Separate from the house, it’s next to a small currently frozen lake. 

 

When the actress is found bludgeoned to death in the pavilion’s bedroom, the most obvious fact is that the murder couldn’t have happened. There is only one set of footprints in the snow leading to the pavilion, and none returning. The snow on the frozen lake is undisturbed. So how could she have been killed?

 

Carter Dickson, aka John Dickson Carr

The White Priory Murders by Carter Dickson (aka John Dickson Carr) was first published in 1934; the mystery novel has now been republished by the British Library Crime Classics. It’s billed as a Christmas mystery, although the only connection to the season is that the story happens near Christmas. It’s the second novel in the Sir Henri Merivale detective series. As British author and crime story expert Martin Edwards notes in the introduction, Merivale became a major player in the stories almost by accident; the first in the series was supposed to feature another detective but Sir Henri kept butting his nose in, and the author gave the character his head and let him go.

 

Carr (1906-1977) write under his own name and four pseudonyms – Carter Dickson, Carr Dickson, and Roger Fairbairn. One of the Golden Age mystery writers, he’s best known for his Gideon Fell and Sir Henri Merivale mysteries. He’s often grouped among British authors, and while he lived in England for many years, he was actually an American (in the story, Merivale talks like an American and his nephew is an American). He was also known for an esteemed biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Even after suffering a stroke and some paralysis in 1963, he continued to write stories and a column for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. He published some 73 mystery novels, numerous collection of short stories, several stage and radio plays, and three works of non-fiction.

 

If you like locked-room mysteries, The Murders at White Priory, with its slight variation on that theme, might be your cup of tea (if you’re British) or coffee (if you’re American). 

 

Some Thursday Readings

 

Paradise for the broken – poem by Franco Amati at Garbage Notes.

 

The 1954 London Yearbook – A London Inheritance.

 

I Keep Pretending – poem by Paul Wittenberger at Paul’s Substack.

 

Old Trees in Greenwich Park – Spitalfields Life.

 

Keep or Toss? My Personal Criteria for Culling a Library – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review. 

A Year of Reading (and Writing) the Civil War

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.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

The Boy at the Front Desk – Havalah Peirce at Story Warren. 

 

Wheeler Catlett: Law and Community – James Decker at Front Porch Republic. 

 

The Courage to Admit You’re Wrong – Jamie Reed at The Free Press.

 

Stones River Aftermath – Bert Dunkerly at Emerging Civil War.

 

A Letter from Arles – Andrew Roycroft at Rabbit Room Poetry. 

 

Inspired to Draw “Dracula” Daily – 200 Times

Bram Stoker (1847-1912) was an Irish theater critic and writer who became friends with Sir Henry Irving (1838-1905), one of Britain’s leading stage actors of the late 19^th century. A favorable review of Irving in Hamlet led to the friendship between the two men and eventually Stoker becoming business manager of Irving’s Lyceum Theatre in London’s West End.   

It was Irving who suggested that Stoker and his family visit Cruden Bay in Scotland, which Stoker would use as the setting for two novels (and eventually architectural inspiration for Dracula). Irving also suggested a visit to Whitby, on the coast of northeastern England, the port from which Captain James Cook set forth on his worldwide voyage and the site of St. Mary’s Church and the ruins of Whitby Abbey. The church and abbey, despoiled by Henry VIII during the dissolution of the monasteries, become one the significant settings in Dracula. 

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

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Revelation Must be Terrible – poem by David Whyte.

 

City of Ashes, City of Ghosts – poem by Paul Wittenberger.

 

Nothing – poem and artwork by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

The Darkling Thrush – poem by Thomas Hardy via Malcolm Guite.

 

Sound Over All Waters – poem by John Greenleaf Whittier at Kingdom Poets (D.S. Martin)

 

Reading Resolution for the New Year? – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review.

Stories I Read This Christmas

I usually read some Christmas-related stories during December. Sometimes it’s to help feel the season; sometimes simply to see how others are writing about Christmas. One year I focused on Christmas romance novellas, and I must have read 20 of them. 

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens is an old standby. Last year, I read the TS Poetry edition of the 1843 work, introduced by Megan Willome. This year, I read the facsimile edition published by the Charles Dickens Museum in London. It’s about as close as you can get to the original edition without having to spend a fortune on the first edition. It includes the original illustrations by John Leech. If you want to hold and read something very close to what the readers in 1843 experienced, this is it.

 

I’ve probably read the story a dozen times, and each time I find something new, or almost new. The official title is A Christmas Carol in Prose, A Ghost Story of Christmas. And Dickens meant exactly that – it was both a carol, or song, and a ghost story. To drive home the musical point, he didn’t use the word “chapters” for the five divisions of the book but instead the word “stave.” The British meaning of “stave” is “staff,” or the five lines and four spaces between them (says the Cambridge dictionary) on which musical notes are written. Dickens was writing a song, a song that was also a ghost story.

 

The Dickens Museum edition is a joy, and it’s reasonably priced (and you can’t buy it on Amazon, unless you find a used copy somewhere). 

 

A second story I read this year was On Christmas Day. It is a longish short story jointly published by Spitalfields Life and Burley Fisher Books. The editor (and, in this case, the author) doesn’t publicly disclose his name, simply calling himself “The Gentle Author.”

 

This edition is more life a poetry pamphlet or chapbook in design. It includes two delightful woodcuts of a snowy landscape by Reynolds Stone (1909-1979). It’s a story of a young boy, an only child, traveling with his parents to visit his maternal grandmother for Christmas. His parents consider the visit something of an ordeal and are filled with a palpable dread. The grandmother is quite the character.

 

The story has echoes of Dickens, Dylan Thomas and his A Child’s Christmas in Wales, and George Mackay Brown and his Christmas Stories. I was also reminded of A Christmas Memory by Truman Capote, to add an American connection. The Gentle Author’s story is a bittersweet one, in which the last surviving descendant on both sides of the family remembers a particular Christmas. (And like the Dickens facsimile edition, this one is only available through the Spitalfields Life link.)

 

The third and final story I read was Skipping Christmas by John Grisham. I found it at the sale shop at the Kirkwood Public Library; a first edition, it was published in 2001and looks brand new. Years ago, I’d been a Grisham fan, devouring his legal thrillers like A Time to Kill, The Client, and The Pelican Brief. I didn’t know he’d written a Christmas story.

 

Skipping Christmas is something decidedly different. Luther and Nora Krank, who live on Hemlock Avenue in a suburb of any city, see their daughter off to Peru for work with the Peace Corps. Luther calculates how much they spend each year on Christmas, some $6,100, and he suggests that they skip Christmas altogether and use half of that money for a Caribbean cruise. Nora finally agrees.

 

Like all firm resolutions, skipping Christmas is easier said than done. They must contend with neighbors, stationers and other merchants, co-workers, and everyone else who has a vested personal or financial interest in Christmas. Cultural and commercial Christmas keeps intruding on their plans, and the story becomes a test to see how long they can hold out. And what the final straw might be.

 

It's a simple, intriguing story, but it lacks a sympathetic character, even a minor one. Luther is not surnamed “Krank” for nothing, and even the street name of Hemlock is not only a tree but a poison. I think I understand why the story is not well-known.

 

Do you read any stories or novels for Christmas, or have any particular favorites? 

 

Top photograph by Roberto Nickson via Unsplash. Used with permission.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

The Weird and Wild Mind of Charles Williams – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review.

 

Shane Skull: A Christmas Fairy Tale – Martin Shaw at The House of Beast & Vines.

 

A Prayer After the Moon Landing – Douglas Murray at The Free Press on the poem by W.H. Auden.