Beowulf Blog, 5 Years Old Today
Frederic Soulacroix, “The Tea Party” Today is the five-year anniversary of this blog. I can’t quite believe that, in that time, I’ve written close to 1700 posts and probably over a million words. I...
View ArticleSilko Foretells the “Brown Surge” North
The images of children crossing the U. S. border, sometimes accompanied by their mothers and sometimes alone, has gotten me thinking about Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead. The novel is a...
View ArticleClimate Change: Signs of Witchery
Politics these days features a lot of phony hysteria about the death of the republic, the shredding of the Constitution, etc. etc. Meanwhile, an issue that should be generating panic yet is...
View ArticleBlack Friday: Don’t Just Shop
J. D. Roybal, “San Ildefonso Pueblo Corn Dance” (1961) Friday As today is the beginning of the holiday shopping season, it’s good to remind ourselves to resist consumerism and focus on what is truly...
View ArticleThe Peace of Wild Things
Tidewater swamp at St. Mary’s College of MD Spiritual Sunday I focus on humans’ relationship to nature in my Introduction to Literature course, and this past semester many students wrestled with the...
View ArticleMilton’s Satan Invades Charleston
Gustave Doré, “Satan in the Garden of Eden” Spiritual Sunday Ramadan commenced this past Wednesday and I will post an essay next Sunday in commemoration of the month-long Muslim observance. Today,...
View ArticleThis Time Grendel Chose Umpqua
Umpqua College shooting victim Friday Today I run a slightly amended version of the post that I wrote after Dylan Roof gunned down nine parishioners in Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal...
View ArticleFencing People Out & Spiritual Desolation
Friday I’ve been teaching Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977) in my Introduction to Literature class, and although our focus is on humans’ relationship with nature, a political science major...
View ArticleResisting the Witchery of Nuclear Warfare
Obama embraces a Hiroshima survivor during his recent visit Friday Today, in a historically significant moment, Barack Obama will be the first American president to visit Hiroshima. Only one country...
View ArticleHomer’s Warning about Revenge Killings
Slobodna Dalmacija, “Odysseus Kills the Suitors” Monday Far too many times in the past seven years of this blog have I turned to literature to process mass killings such as we saw Friday night in...
View ArticleMilton’s Satan Invades Charleston
Gustave Doré, “Satan in the Garden of Eden” Spiritual Sunday Ramadan commenced this past Wednesday and I will post an essay next Sunday in commemoration of the month-long Muslim observance. Today,...
View ArticleThis Time Grendel Chose Umpqua
Umpqua College shooting victim Friday Today I run a slightly amended version of the post that I wrote after Dylan Roof gunned down nine parishioners in Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal...
View ArticleFencing People Out & Spiritual Desolation
Friday I’ve been teaching Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977) in my Introduction to Literature class, and although our focus is on humans’ relationship with nature, a political science major...
View ArticleResisting the Witchery of Nuclear Warfare
Obama embraces a Hiroshima survivor during his recent visit Friday Today, in a historically significant moment, Barack Obama will be the first American president to visit Hiroshima. Only one country...
View ArticleHomer’s Warning about Revenge Killings
Slobodna Dalmacija, “Odysseus Kills the Suitors” Monday Far too many times in the past seven years of this blog have I turned to literature to process mass killings such as we saw Friday night in...
View ArticleHummingbirds and the Life Force
Monday Happiness is watching hummingbirds feed. The two that visit our feeders—which is to say, the one that feeds and the one that gets chased away—are resplendent in their shimmering colors,...
View ArticleClimate Change Witchery
Monday Now we know how we will experience the end of the world: while we’re being battered to death by extreme weather events, including the hottest summer on record and accelerating arctic melt, we...
View ArticleClimate Change, a Witch’s Curse
Friday The climate change news keeps getting grimmer, leading me to repost an essay about Leslie Marmon Silko’s account of environmental apocalypse. At the end of the post, I also link to other...
View ArticleLight & Dark Wrestle for America’s Soul
Tuesday Yesterday’s Washington Post headline was stark–“Midterms test whether Republicans not named Trump can win by stoking racial animosity”—and reporter Matt Viser listed various ways that...
View ArticleTen Years of Literary Blogging
Picasso, Bust of a Man Writing Friday Unreal though it seems to me, tomorrow marks the tenth anniversary of this blog. To mark the occasion, I scrolled back through the archives to see how it has...
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