Poems of the Week: Light Verse and Doggerel
“The Profane Ballad of Ecclesiastical Reform”
There’s only way with recalcitrant clerks,
Saith experience under the sun:
“The Profane Ballad of Ecclesiastical Reform”
There’s only way with recalcitrant clerks,
Saith experience under the sun:
In Fear, the latest spasm of gossip and fear-mongering by the infamous (among people of sense and decency) Bob Woodward, the gullible American public is given a portrait of the Trump White House as a cross between Bedlam and the palace of Caligula. Trump supporters are outraged.
I laughed when I read ex-CIA Czar John Brennan’s gripe that taking away his security clearance was “part of a broader effort by Mr. Trump to suppress freedom of speech & punish critics.” I once had a security clearance. Although not as high as his, it was pretty high, Top Secret-Special Intelligence. When I was training to be a Russian linguist and radio intercept operator, 1978-89, the FBI talked to everybody in my background, asking such questions as: Did you ever vote for the Communist Party-USA? They talked to my next door neighbor, and receive a glowing report. “He’s been...
From the beginning, the goal that Dr. Fleming and I envisioned for this series was self-knowledge through discovery of the Christians from whom we have come to be alienated by schism. Let us try to understand, then, how it was that brethren and disciples of Jesus Christ became strangers to one another.
I have always thought that Jefferson’s advocacy of the separation of church and state was in part inspired by his distaste for the political power of the Yankee clergy. Remember, the famous letter about “the wall of separation” was addressed to a group of Baptists in Connecticut, who were independent of that State’s established Puritan church. One can still find die-hard Calvinists who denounce Jefferson as an atheist. For some reason they never mention that John Adams became a Unitarian. Through the 19th century Jefferson remained a very popular symbol among the people and occasionally among writers, but New...
A Lutheran pastor from Texas suggested the two poems by Frost. The first makes a wonderful pair to Clyde Wilson’s piece on Jefferson
Then said he unto the disciples, It is impossible but that offences [that is, scandals, stumbling blocks] will come: but woe unto him, through whom they come! It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones.
[Jefferson] thought that Americans had a unique opportunity to preserve free institutions if they were wise and virtuous. He did not believe that Americans were a Chosen People with a divine mission to spread freedom to all mankind. That idea was invented by the New Englanders who hated him and whom he despised.
During the 1990’s, in Rockford, Illinois, an appointed federal magistrate usurped the authority to decide what schools should be opened or closed or built, how much tax money should be spent on which programs in which schools, and how many white children could be admitted to the gifted programs. I was among those who condemned the magistrate’s power-grab as both unconstitutional and immoral, and, although the local powers-that-be–including the newspaper and big business interests–condemned the magistrate’s critics as racists, a federal judge ruled in our favor.