Longer reflections on education, scripture, and the shape of a life given to attention.
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Chaucer’s Gentle Synthesis
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…
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On Anxiety
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…
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Monumental Irony
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…
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Romantic Feminism and La Traviata
“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…
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The Dream of Nebuchadnezzar
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…
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The Story of Jepthah
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…