Poems: Jessica Powers
Jessica Powers was born less than three hours from our house, in Mauston, Wisconsin, in 1905. In 1941 she entered a Carmelite convent in Pewaukee, where she received the name Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit.
Category: Feature
Wednesday’s Child: Precedent Trump
Doubtless the gentle reader appreciates that in two hundred or more posts published in this space during the term of the outgoing administration I hardly ever mentioned President Trump. Instead I sat on my hands, which kept me from biting my nails, and watched the spectacle unfold. Yet kicking a man when he’s down is hardly comme il faut…
Poetry: Browning at his Best
Oh Galuppi, Baldassaro, this is very sad to find!
I can hardly misconceive you; it would prove me deaf and blind;
But although I take your meaning, ’tis with such a heavy mind!
Clown Country
America zooms – or Zooms – into 2021 the laughingstock of the world. The global Guarantor of Democracy, bombing foreign lands with allegedly faulty elections at the drop of a parasol, continues limping toward a January 5 dual election for U.S. Senators from Georgia, a January 6 possible validation or invalidation of the presidential election by Congress and a January 20 inauguration of somebody who might have won the November 3 election.
A Christmas Story of Anterus Smith as told to Ched Rayson, Conclusion
Coming out of his seclusion, Mickey announced a monster meeting in a field outside of Chequamegon. He did not have time to build a stage, but there was a nice little stream flowing through the field. One side of the ground was flat with room for hundreds of people to stand or spread out picnic blankets, and on the other side, there was a steep bank, which Mickey mounted, to make his pitch, which is why his speech has gone down in history as the “Sermon of the Mountebank.”
Lincoln: A Lying Duplicitous Bigot
This review of David Donald’s Lincoln ( New York and London: Simon & Schuster, 1996) was commissioned and published by the Spectator (London), for which I wrote with some frequency, once upon a time before the world ceased pretending to exist.
Podcast: Blind Faith in Science
Science is not the problem but the blind faith in science that is the religion of Secularism.
A Christmas Story of Anterus Smith, as told to Chad Rayson, Part III
“How about a Bible story, kiddies?”
The children were overjoyed to escape from their monotonous captivity, and their mother was too beaten down to impose her will. Down from the loft they plummeted, stumbling on the steps of the ladder, like three half-grown squirrels on the first day of spring. Evelina started to send them back up but stopped
Announcement: Return to Work
My absence from Fleming.Foundation was initially due to Christmas and the arrival of two our our children, but the prolongation of inertia was the result of an intestinal disease that left most of the family fairly wasted. It matches pretty well the classic symptoms of a noro-virus. The departure of the virus–and the children–has made it possible to return to my labors
Sophocles’ Ajax: The Struggle Over the Corpse
The end of the Ajax is a rhetorical battle over the corpse of Ajax, and, though it is a war of words, it is no less serious than the Homeric conflicts over the battle and armour of a fallen hero. The basic antagonists are three: Teucer, the two Atridae (who make much the same argument, though Agamemnon is more reasonable, perhaps because he is dealing with Odysseus), and Odysseus. Rather than summarize the scene, I’d like to leave it up to the readers to give their response to the following questions: First, what is the nub of each set of...
