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

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

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. 🐶

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