Essays

Riding along with Harry Bailey and his impromptu gathering of pilgrims on the way to Canterbury, we feel like neighbors among these thirteenth century characters, which should strike us as odd. That we understand them with a degree of intuition and a comfortable assurance that we ‘know how they feel’ is a testament to Chaucer,…

Reading through Goethe’s Faust over the years, I’ve gradually understood more of what the octogenarian poet was bringing across in the second part of his play, a work of his lifetime, begun in his twenties. Faust is increasingly agitated over the divide between his everyday concerns and the underlying realities that continue to plague him.…

Here I raise mine Ebenezer Victrix causa diis placuit sed victa Cateni Lucan, Pharsalia I.128 This quote from Lucan‘s Civil War is inscribed with irony and meta-historical flair on a forgotten monument in Arlington Cemetery. The inscription on the Confederate war memorial, placed in 1912, was within sight of the U.S. Army Band building and…

“When I was a little girl, my mama used to lock me in the attic when I was bad, which was pretty often. And I would- I would pretend I was a princess… trapped in a tower by a wicked queen. And then suddenly this knight… on a white horse with these colors flying would…

The stump of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream is a monument to something.  As we think of it, we picture again the tree that once stretched toward the heavens, sheltering the birds and shading creatures below.   The tree stretches between heaven and earth in its solid trunk, to dig deep into the soil with roots, and gather…

The book of Judges is the record of human failure in the face of God. Disturbing, lurid, and jarring, attempting to equate the records of the judges of Israel to some sort of ethical fable reminds us of the dog that returns to his vomit, as the fool to his ways. Should we look at…