‘All by Myself’— Norwegian Orchestra Pajama Party
The Best Quarantine Song So Far—-‘Life in Quarantine’
‘Love Is All You Need’
As commercials go, this one provides a remarkable Greek lesson……..I call it a love assurance commercial not a life insurance commercial. Read more
Tolkien’s The Great Tales— Part One– The Children of Hurin
For diehard Tolkien fans like me, it was a no brainer that I would buy and read the Silmarillion many years ago, as a labor of love of Christopher Tolkien sifting through the many unpublished stories and manuscripts of his father. We owe Christopher a considerable debt because his father was, to be blunt, a tinkerer. He would create multiple versions of the same story, and in the case of the stories in the handsome 3 volume set called The… Read more
‘The New Normal’?
In days of sadness, In days of loss, We share our problems, But at what cost? With social distance Alone, together We try resistance To viral weather. And yet by breathing Instead of living We spread contagion So unforgiving. It fells the old ones, It fells the young It fells the strong ones And it’s not done. A curse has fallen On all the land Without a cure It’s out of hand. What Fiend beguiles us What anger riles us… Read more
C.S. Lewis’s ‘Spirits in Bondage’
Long before he was a Chronicler of Narnia or wrote his Space Trilogy, C.S. Lewis was a poet, and though his original early pre-Christian poems have been published and reprinted various times before, there is now a new edition, beautifully done, with a fresh Introduction by Karen Swallow Prior. This comes courtesy of the ambitious folks at Lexham Press who are doing some really interesting things. This work was originally published in 1919 under the name Clive Hamilton (the last… Read more
Steven Wright’s Out of the Box Humor
Steven Wright is one of the most original comedians of the modern era. He’s from Cambridge Massachusetts, which in itself breeds all sorts of offbeat and eccentric folk, not to mention geniuses at Harvard. I should know I spent time there at Harvard Div school. Here is a sample of his wit. It does not include some of my favorites when he deals with non sequiturs like ‘why do we drive on a parkway and park on a driveway’!!! Good… Read more
Helen Bond’s The First Biography of Jesus– Part Three
BEN: One of the salient points you make early on in your new book, is that genre is not merely a matter of form, or indeed an identity marker unto itself but rather the genre of a work affects how the reality and truth being dealt with in the work is presented. Form affects not only function but content and meaning. Why do you think it is that various previous discussions of the genre of Mark have been satisfied with… Read more
