• A Treasure

    Malcolm Guite is posting poems he’s collected in his Advent Anthology, Waiting on the Word. I love to hear Malcolm read (and speak). Today’s offerings, a poem by Robert Hayden, and art by Linda Richardson, are particularly lovely.

  • Mind the Gap

    Auto-generated description: A framed painting hangs on a wall, bathed in warm sunlight that casts dappled shadows.
  • Yuck

    I’ve posted about Trump’s unfitness for… well, anything. But how awful is Biden’s statement pardoning Hunter? I understand how, as a father, he might have been compelled to save his son. But to (1) throw his own DOJ under the bus and (2) make the pardon so broad? Nope. It stinks.

  • All Things Come of Thee, O Lord

    Auto-generated description: A vintage-style Thanksgiving card features a colorful turkey surrounded by corn with the phrase Thanksgiving Greeting.

    And we are thankful. Happy Turkey Day, friends!

  • Maybe what most concerns me about these times…

    is the assaults on the truth of truth. The roots run deep – as deep as the modernism? Certainly, deeper than Trump.

    But he’s stormed the battlements, and the breach is wide.

    Helping repair it may be the work of my Third Act.

  • “These things just don’t happen here!"

    Tottenham Hotspur have stormed into the palace of the champions and turned over the furniture!

    COYS(!) ⚽️

  • Leaving and Waving

    For 27 years, I took photographs as I waved good-bye and drove away from visiting my parents at their home in Sioux City, Iowa.

    Deanna Dikeman

  • Pub Name

    If I ever open a pub, “The Dog and Water” might be in the running for a name. 🐶

    A small dog lying in the sun on a teal couch; in the foreground is a glass of water on a table.
  • Sounds About Right

    [W]e are … not going back to a world where there is a set of trusted truth-mediating institutions, core sources of news and information that everyone recognizes and trusts, a “mainstream” of argument and opinion-shaping that sets the parameters of debate. – Ross Douthat, New York Times, 16 Nov. 2024

    If true, then we’ll need to learn to think for ourselves. Not that I believe we will. Which is terrifying.

    But lets work on it:
    Lesson 1: Yes or No: Does hosting a gameshow make a person fit to be the President of the United States of America?

  • What Might This Look Like in America?

    An imaginative conservatism should see in Scruton’s centring of beauty in architecture and design a natural affinity with the articulation of craft as a political and economic ideal in the likes of William Morris. There is a politics and an economics of conservatism to be forged, but it requires making of itself more than an aesthetic gloss of Reaganism.

    Sebastian Milbank, “Don’t Idolise Roger Scruton”, The Critic, 03.Nov.2024

  • Trinity River, Great Trinity Forest, Dallas

    Misty morning at bend in a river.

    📷: Bill Holston

  • RIP, Ted Olsen

    Executive power is important, and we respect it. But it has to be done the right way. It has to be done in an orderly fashion so that citizens can understand what is being done and people whose lives have depended on a governmental policy aren’t swept away arbitrarily and capriciously.

    A principled and gifted lawyer and public servant. Who hath ears to hear, let him hear.

  • Set the Wayback Machine, Sherman

    Say, kids! Remember that old holiday, I think it was called Thanksgiving? It was a personal favorite. So extraordinary to observe a national day of gratitude. Of course, Capitalismmas (i.e., not Christmas) erased that tired old giving-thanks day long ago.

  • Snake on Wheels

  • Laura Olin

    [I keep coming back to] the fundamental text that is “Why must we go on?” / “Because there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.”

    Is all this cringe? Undoubtedly; but I think we’ve entered a time that requires deep earnestness.

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