Lament for a persecutor

After 2 Samuel 1:17-27 

The wind breathes,

and the flower’s petals

fall and turn brown,

withering into dust.

The mighty one

the king who persecuted

and sought the death

of the anointed one,

the king lies fallen

on the field,

the battle over,

his final battle fought.

The king lies fallen,

dead, uncelebrated,

and so the anointed one

sounds his lament,

his song of sadness

and grief for the fallen

shield, the king lying

dead. He celebrates

his life, he mourns

his death, paying him

the honor he was due.

 

Photograph by Margaret Polinder via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Sunday Readings

 

Homebound – poem by Jeffrey Essmann at Society of Classical Poets.

 

A Song of Joy in a Moment of Sadness: A Friend of C.S. Lewis Goes Home – Joseph Pearce at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

Change – poem by Jody Collins at Poetry & Made Things. 

 

Our godless era is dead – Paul Kingsnorth at UnHerd. 

Saturday Good Reads - Jan. 13, 2024

Fifty years ago, I was reading the fiction of John Gardner. My first encounter was Nickel Mountain, followed by what I think is still his best book, October Light. He was known for a work called The Sunlight Dialogues. His last novel was Mickelsson’s Ghosts, which I liked but it had a bit of a contrived ending. Gardner was not popular with the literary theory set in the 1980s, enchanted as they were with deconstruction and related ideas. He died in 1982 in a motorcycle accident in New York; he’d been teaching at Stoney Brook. It turns out I wasn’t the only one who liked his fiction; Bill Kauffman at The Spectator has a remembrance.  

Dwight Lindley is an English professor at Hillsdale College; I recently completed his (free) online course on A Christmas Carol. He has a wonderful article at Notre Dame’s Church Life Journal, connecting an author with a completely unexpected subject: Homer and the Poetry of Forgiveness.

Aaron Renn is one of the most independent thinkers, and independent Christian thinkers, you can find today. He read a book to review it for the conservative Claremont Institute, and he discovered it included an in-depth behind-the-scenes (and somewhat sympathetic) discussion of the “evangelical resistance movement” opposed to Donald Trump. This group has been at it long before Trump became a serious candidate way back in early 2015. It turns out that Anti-Trump evangelicals may be small in number, but they are very well organized and well-funded, including some non-Christian money. Read Renn’s “The Resistance Will Be Organized.”

 

More Good Reads

 

Writing and Literature

 

The Killer Angels Revisited – Part 1 and Part II – Evan Portman at Emerging Civil War.

 

Exploring the Isolation of the British Countryside – Stig Abell at Crime Reads.

 

‘A Desire to Constantly Learn’: A conversation with Tsh Oxenreider – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review.

 

Who is Reading What and Why – Lincoln Michel at Counter Craft.

 

Poetry

 

Poetry for Children: Seven Great Poems to Read to Your Kids – Shaun Duncan at Society of Classical Poets.

 

Faith

 

These Fragile Remembrances – Kathryn Butler at Story Warren. 

 

Let Us Become Like Little Children – Vanessa Le at Gentle Reformation.

 

Foreign Territory: A year of loss and finding the way – Mindy Belz at Globe Trot.

 

Life and Culture

 

Christopher Lasch on the Elites’ Betrayal of Democracy – Chuck Chalberg at The Imaginative Conservative. 

 

Why I Quit My Dream Job at MIT – Mauricio Karchmer at The Free Press.

 

Why the left poses a greater threat to civic disorder – Lionel Shriver at The Spectator. 

 

Orf vs. the Memory Hole: Anthony Fauci’s Pandemic Follies – Matt Taibbi at Racket News.

 

Who wants to be the next British Museum director? Post advertised with a salary of £216,000 – Gareth Harris at The Art Newspaper.

 

The deafening, disgusting silence of women’s groups on Hamas rapes continues – Mark Penn and Andrew Stein at New York Post.

 

The Windmills of Your Mind – sung by Noel Harrison for “The Thomas Crown Affair”

Painting: Man reading by lamp in interior, oil on canvas by Victor Lecomte (1856-1920).

Atonement

After I Samuel 25:19-35 

Insulted by the man,

the man who was a fool,

the anger burned 

and heaved within 

him. The man’s wife

knew the consequences,

knew the family and

all they knew faced

destruction. She

gathered bread and

sheep and wine and

took it all to the man

insulted. He watched

her approach, anger

still burning, until

she threw herself

at his feet and begged

forgiveness. She

transformed insult

into blessing, and

his anger died,

flooded by her wisdom,

her meekness, her

words of contrition.

 

Photograph by Dingzelu Li via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Friday Readings

 

Hope – poem by Ruben Dario at Kingdom Poets (D.S. Martin).

 

“The Old Native Chieftain” and “When I First Saw My Baby Boy” – poems by Corey Elizabeth Jackson at Society of Classical Poets.

 

Word of the Year – Megan Willome at Poetry for Life.

 

The Darkened Hill – poem by Adam Wasem at Society of Classical Poets.

 

Five Fears of Old Age – John Piper at Desiring God.

Some Thursday Readings

Murders for the New Year – Jeremy Black at The Critic Magazine. 

The Genius of John Dickson Carr – Rian Johnson at CrimeReads.

 

Blake Reconsidered – Julia Friedman at New Criterion on the exhibition at the Getty Center.

 

How an Obsession with Art Crime Became a Thriller – Jonathan Santlofer at CrimeReads.

 

Santiago – poem by David Whyte.

Painting: Poet and artist William Blake.

"Little Women" by Louisa May Alcott

I was in 9^th grade, at the time part of the middle school where I grew up. Our English teacher assigned our all-boy class two papers about authors – one English and one American. We were required to read one work by each author for our papers. She had a list of 35 English writers and 35 Americans, one for each person in our class. Our choices, however, were determined alphabetically, which meant whoever was last would get the two no one else wanted. Which meant me.

No one wanted to read a play by William Shakespeare, which meant he would be my English author. And the last American author on the list (remember this was an all-boys class) was Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888). 

When my name was called, general laughter erupted. The teacher, with her soft Alabama accent in a roomful of New Orleans boys, was irate. She loved Alcott, she said, and she loved Little Women. And if any of us ever wanted to understand girls, we should read the Alcott novel. I knew what I had better read for my report. 

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

Some Wednesday Readings

 

Lincoln’s God: How Faith Transformed a President and a Nation by Joshua Zeitz – review by Max Longley at Emerging Civil War.

 

By Hard Fighting: Morgan’s Raiders at Vienna and Vernon – Caroline Davis at Emerging Ciivl War.

Poet Laura: In the Quiet - Poetry and Invitation -- Michelle Rinaldi Ortega at Tweetspeak Poetry.

It's Poetry at Work Day 2024!

I had lunch with a friend and former colleague last week. We hadn’t worked together since 2015, and I hadn’t seen her since 2018. But we were Facebook friends, and in the intervening years stayed aware of families and careers.  

While we talked, I was reminded of a year in both of our lives, and the lives of some 23 other colleagues. From 2008 to 2009, the group of us were part of something not seen before and never seen again in our company – the almost overnight creation of a 25-person department focused on new technologies, straightforward communications with employees, and dealing in a new way with issues (of which there were a multitude) besetting the company.

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

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Realism in Modern Art – Joseph Pearce at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

Poetry Prompt: Journeys! Or…Veni, Vidi, Vici – L.L. Barkat at Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

Boxing – poem by Zack Eswine at Rabbit Room Poetry.

 

The Kingdom of the Hwicce – Annie Whitehead at Casting light upon the shadow. 

"The Street Children of Dickens's London" by Helen Amy

In many of Charles Dickens’s novels and stories, you’ll find street children. Oliver Twist may be the most famous of these stories, describing the band of young children organized by Fagin to be pickpockets and thieves.  

Dickens wasn’t writing in a vaccum or solely from his imagination. He was known for his long walks through London, including into areas like Whitechapel and the East End, which had hordes of children, some as young as toddlers, living on the streets. But it wasn’t just the East End; street children showed up wherever slums were to be found – the Strand, Seven Dials, and Westminster with a stone’s throw of the Abbey were famous, or infamous, for their slums.

 

British author and researcher Helen Amy tells the story of these children in The Street Children of Dickens’s London. She divides the narrative into two successive chronological periods – from 1837 to 1870, and from 1870 to 1900. The first period covers the adult life of Dickens; the second is focused on what was required to fully address and solve the problem. And solutions took decades. 

 

She sets the stage by describing life in Britain and London in 1830 and beyond. As agriculture became more mechanized and the Industrial Revolution reached its peak, hundreds of thousands of displaced rural workers crowded into the country’s cities, and especially London. Many were exploited by slumlords, with single rooms often housing 15 or more people. Added to that were the poor public health conditions – unsafe drinking water, untreated sewage dumped into the Thames River, and little money for nourishing food. It was often a public health catastrophe waiting to happen, and it did happen with plagues like cholera outbreaks. 

 

Helen Amy

Amy discusses the journalists and writers who covered the street children and the conditions they lived and worked in; Dickens was one of many. She explains who the street children were, how they made a legitimate living, how many turned to crime and prostitution, where they lived, and the first sputtering attempts to help them that eventually came to resemble crusades. And she also describes how the problem was eventually solved.

 

In addition to this book and Everyday Life in Victorian London, Amy has also published seven books on Jane Austen: the biography Jane Austen, Jane Austen in Her Own Words and the Words of Those Who Knew Her, Jane Austen’s England, Jane Austen’s Men, The Austen Girls, The Jane Austen Files, and The Jane Austen Marriage Manual. She received B.A. and M.A. degrees in history and literature. 

 

The Street Children of Dickens’s London is told straightforwardly and dispassionately, but it still is often an eye-opening shock. Using statistics, government reports, newspaper and magazine articles, and other sources, Amy paints a picture that is as heartbreaking as it is informative.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

The Threat of Free Speech, Yesterday and Today – Adam Tomkins at Law & Liberty on Jonathan Swift.

 

An Exclusive Jack Reacher Christmas Story – Lee Child at The Spectator.

 

A Wet January in the City, and the Festival of Britain – A London Inheritance.

 

Partings and Reminders – Brian Miller at A South Roane Agrarian.