Two men

After John 1:1-14 

Two men are sent.

The first is a witness.

The second is the light.

The first announces 

the light is coming.

The second is

the light arrived.

The first is of flesh.

The second is

made flesh.

The first baptizes.

The second is

the baptism.

The first is the herald.

The second is the news.

The first testifies.

The second is

the testimony.

 

Photograph by Rafael Garcin via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Sunday Readings

 

The Kingdom Didn’t Come for Daughters Like Me – Heidi Tai at Letters from Heidi.

 

Essential Church – Stephen Kneale at Building Jerusalem.

 

Pay Attention to What You’re Singing – Todd Alexander at Ligoiner.

 

Storytelling: The Parenting Tool You Didn’t Know You Needed – Betsy Childs Howard at The Gospel Coalition. 

Saturday Good Reads - Sept. 21, 2024

Interest in Sherlock Holmes stories seems to come and go in waves. Steven Doyle at Crime Reads argues that, for the last 50 years, it’s been one big wave that has never stopped – and it started in 1974, with a book: The Seven-Per-Cent Solution by Nicholas Meyer. 

It was one of those headlines that, in these days of carelessly tossing around charges of “Hitler!”, caught my attention: Jonathan Kantor at Listverse cites ten companies that supported the Nazis and that are still around. I expected to see German companies on the list (no surprise there), but the one coming in at Number 10 was a real surprise.

 

Our State Department, back in 2016, the last year of the Obama Administration, got itself in the combating misinformation business. It set up a small center to supposedly counter misinformation on the global scene. Well, like all good government projects, it kept growing and extending its reach, really taking off in the last three years. And much of its activity has gone domestic and is aimed at news media who don’t tow the media narrative. Life is full of surprises. A House committee reports on what the State Department has been up to, despite the ongoing resistance to releasing information it has to under law, and which includes how it has tried to smear journalists for doing their jobs.

 

More Good Reads

 

American Stuff

 

The Spirit of American Constitutionalism – Gregory Ahern at The Imaginative Conservative. 

 

Faith

 

Thinking Biblically in All Areas of Life – Doug Eaton at Fight of Faith.

 

Lose the Gospel, Return to Childishness – Carl Trueman at First Things Magazine.

 

Appreciate the Days He’s Ordained – Melissa Edgington at Your Mom Has a Blog.

 

“I saw myself a mass of sin”: the real battle in Western culture – Michael A.G. Haykin at Historia ecclesiastica.

 

Writing and Literature

 

The Magic of Maigret – A.E. Gauntlett at Crime Reads.

 

Life and Culture

 

Mistaking Politics for Religion – Martin Gurri at The American Spectator.

 

Poetry

 

“Mists in Autumn,” poem by James Thomson – Salley Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Raft – Ted Kooser at Literary Hub.

 

Art

 

The Big Review: Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers at the National Gallery, London and Ten surprises at the National Gallery’s five-Star Van Gogh exhibition – Martin Bailey at The Art Newspaper.

 

Notes on darkness – Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

British Stuff

 

Reject the culture of death – Jacob Phillips at The Critic Magazine.

 

Pastores Dance – Igor Moiseev Ballet

Painting: La Lecture, oil on canvas (1888) by Berthe Morisot (1841-1895). 

All the things

After John 1:1-14 

All the things

the word is:

The word is spoken.

The word is thought.

The word is felt.

The word is experienced.

The word is heard.

The word is read.

The word is shouted.

The word is understood.

The word is convicting.

The word is illuminating.

The word is judging.

The word is saving.

The word is enlightening.

The word is redeeming.

The word is creative.

The word is stabilizing.

The word was in the beginning.

The word is born.

The word always was.

The word always is.

 

Photograph by Bruno van der Kraan via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Friday Readings

 

Reason and Faith – poem by Adam Mickiewicz at Kingdom Poets (D.S. Martin).

 

Who’s Afraid of Romans 1? – Andy Hood at Mere Orthodoxy.

 

What Matters Most: The Little Things – poem by Joy Lenton at Poetry Joy.

"Murder at Haggburn Hall" by Roy Lewis

An ambitious Morpeth councilman, eying a close reelection race, takes on an investigation into the bureaucracy, and for some strange reason, the Department of Antiquities & Museums is the first in the barrel. In seemingly no time at all, Arnold Landon’s boss Karen Stannard is suspended with pay pending the investigation’s outcome. That’s followed by the suspension of the director himself. No charges have been made public, but the implications are rather ominous.

 Mild-mannered but stubborn on matters of principle, Landon is incensed at the treatment of his superiors, much as he dislikes both. When he’s offered the interim directorship, he refuses, and punches home the point by asking for two weeks of vacation leave he’s due.

 

At the invitation of his professor friend, he’s off to Haggburn Hall, where Karen Stannard is also temporarily working on a dig. She’s not exactly pleased to see him, but she’s taken aback when she realizes he’s there as a protest against the investigation.

 

Roy Lewis

The Hall is owned by an eccentric elderly lady, who has various hangers-on enjoying her hospitality, including a kind of wastrel nephew who expects to inherit her wealth and a charlatan looking for money to fund his reincarnation study center. When a young man seen hanging around the local village is found in the Haggburn stable with his head bashed in, the signs seem to point to the reincarnation charlatan. But the police are having a dickens of a time determining motive and opportunity.

 

But then, Arnold Landon is on the scene, and it’s Landon who’ll figure out what actually happened.

 

Murder at Haggburn Hall is the 13^th Arnold Landon mystery by British writer Roy Lewis. It represents something of a change from its predecessors. Landon and his boss are becoming something less than adversaries, although animosity is present as an ongoing condition. Ad Landon seems to be moving in a direction away from his museum work. It’s a good story, and it’s interesting to watch the change in Landon.

 

Lewis (1933-2019) was the author of some 60 other mysteries, novels, and short story collections. His Inspector Crow series includes A Lover Too Many, Murder in the Mine, The Woods Murder, Error of Judgment, and Murder for Money, among others. The Eric Ward series, of which The Sedleigh Hall Murder is the first (and originally published as A Certain Blindness in 1981), includes 17 novels. Lewis lived in northern England. 

 

Related:

 

Murder in the Cottage by Roy Lewis.

 

Murder Under the Bridge by Roy Lewis.

 

Murder in the Tower by Roy Lewis. 

 

Murder in the Church by Roy Lewis.

 

Murder in the Barn by Roy Lewis.

 

Murder in the Manor by Roy Lewis.

 

Murder in the Farmhouse by Roy Lewis.

 

Murder in the Stableyard by Roy Lewis.

 

Murder in the House by Roy Lewis.

 

Murder by the Quay by Roy Lewis.

 

Error in Judgment by Roy Lewis. 

 

Murder at the Folly by Roy Lewis.

 

Murder in the Field by Roy Lewis.

 

Some Thursday Readings

 

The Funniest Things Dorothy L. Sayers Said About (and in) Detective Fiction – Olivia Rutigliano at CrimeReads. 

 

Courage in the Swamp: Nicholas Fox’s Port Hudson Medal of Honor – Peter Vermilyea at Emerging Civil War.

 

How to Create a Great Villain – Nathan Bransford.

 

Year of the Monarch – A Visit to the Craik-Patton House – Laura Boggess at Tweetspeak Poetry.

The Random Act of (Finding) Poetry

My love for poetry developed in three critical times. First was discovering T.S. Eliot in high school, introduced by a wild and larger-than-life English teacher who wore turbans and proclaimed that Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann was the greatest work of American literature. Well, no, but she was right about T.S. Eliot.

 

The second critical period was through a friend in the early 1980s, who said I couldn’t be a “real speechwriter” unless I read Eliot, William Butler Yeats, and Wallace Stevens. I don’t know whether he was right or wrong, but I took his advice to heart and started reading them.

 

Third was the year 2009. Idly searching on the web for something unrelated, I found The High Calling Blog, which mostly focused on the daily practice of faith in our work but also had a regular poetry feature, “Random Acts of Poetry.” 

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

Some Wednesday Readings

 

Twenty-six Theses on Textual Technologies – Jeffrey Bilbro at Front Porch Republic.

 

A Popular Defense of Our Undemocratic Constitution – Pavlos Papadopoulos at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

To All the Books I Published Before – Ann Patty at The Millions.

 

The Melancholy Year is Dead with Rain – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

Poets and Poems: Tina Barry and "I Tell Henrietta"

I Tell Henrietta by Tina Barry may win my “most creative idea for a poetry collection” award for the year. 

It is a poetry collection, comprised of free verse and prose poems. 

 

It also might be a collection of micro-fictions. 

 

And it is a collection of arresting and often startling artwork by artist Kristin Flynn. The artwork might illustrate the poems, or the poem might explain the artwork. Maybe both. 

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

Some Tuesday Readings

 

The Collected Poems of J.R. R. Tolkien, edited by Christina Scull and Wayne Hammond – Adam Roberts at Adam’s Notebook.

 

Gather Ye – poem by Ryan Wilson at First Things Magazine. 

 

The Word within the World – James Matthew Wilson at Plough on four new poetry collections. 

 

“The Highwayman,” poem by Alfred Noyes – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Checkpoint – poem by Jeffrey Johnson at Every Day Poems.

 

Glass and Gardening: Interview with Poet Jules Jacob – Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

The Beauty and Importance of Gratitude: “My Heart Overflows”

Our world seems a little short on gratitude. We have expectations and demands, and we have entitlements. But we have so much to be thankful for. Perhaps that’s the problem – so many blessings and forgetting what the source is. 

My Heart Overflows: A Treasury of Readings, Poems, and Prayers on Gratitude is a relatively small but beautiful book that reminds us to be grateful. Assembled by the editors of Paraclete Press, the work is 144 pages of artwork and text that each speaks to gratitude, why we feel it and show it, and how we can be thankful for it.

 

You can pray with Francis of Assisi, observe Walden Pond with Ralph Waldo Emerson, celebrate beauty with Gerard Manley Hopkins, consider what you mother has done for you with Maya Angelou, and be thankful for the rain with Luci Shaw. Helen Keller is here, as is John Greenleaf Whittier. 

 

You can feel the evening wind with William Cullen Bryant, read what G.K. Chesterton said about St. Francis, see why you should enjoy life (Charlotte Bronte did), and discover what George Washington was grateful for about his new nation. Emily Dickinson believed there was nothing without gratitude (and she wrote a poem about it). And you can pray and be thankful with Jane Austen and the church father Clement of Alexandria and discover what Abraham Lincoln was so thankful he declared a national day of Thanksgiving (as did James Madison). 

 

The paintings included in the artwork includes those by Childe Hassam, Winslow Homer, Claude Monet, Albert Bierstadt, Jan Steen, Vincent Van Gogh, Henri Matisse, Gustav Klimt, Giotto, and John Constable, among many others. The book is profusely illustrated, each painting chosen to illustrate the themes of thankfulness and gratitude.

 

I love beautiful books, and My Heart Overflows is a beautiful book. In fact, you could say I’m grateful for the time, care, and attention the editors at Paraclete used to create this volume.

 

Painting: The Thankful Poor, oil on canvas (1896) by Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937), one of the illustrations used in the book. 

Some Monday Readings

 

Chaos in Aurora – Christina Buttons and Christopher Rufo at City Journal. 

 

The Imminent Russia-US War – Christopher Caldwell at Compact Magazine.

 

Kristallnacht – The Night of Broken Glass – poem by Brian Yapko at Society of Classical Poets.

 

Writing for an Audience of One – Terry Whalin at The Writing Life.

 

Things Worth Remembering: The Imperfection of America – Douglas Murray at The Free Press.