The Garlands of Repose

May 25, 2020

Last week I found myself … well, obsessed might be slightly too strong a word — but let’s say compelled by this three-minute video of English gardening...

Springing Up, Springing Back

May 18, 2020

As promised, Snakes and Ladders is now sponsored by Comment, and I’m really happy about that. If you’d like to know what Comment is all about, you might want...

A Transitional Sort of Message

May 1, 2020

For some time now, I have been proud to be a Contributing Editor at Comment, a fine journal edited by Anne Snyder and published by Cardus, an independent...

In Which This Writer Is Rather Frantic

April 20, 2020

I wrote last time about the cool things that angels do in Arcabas’s paintings, but here’s another: they spring apostles from jail. Some of you are quite...

Easter with Arcabas

April 12, 2020

Today I am remembering Jean-Marie Pirot (1926-2018), universally known as Arcabas. Arcabas, whose work I was introduced to many years ago by my friend and...

Letting Go, Holding On

April 6, 2020

My favorite song by War is “Slippin’ into Darkness” (1971), and one of the things I like best about it is the extremely spare horn chart. Spare but oh so...

Growth and Form, Grief and Love

March 30, 2020

D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860-1948) was a Scottish polymath, a scholar who was in his long professional life offered academic positions in classics,...

Gardens and Books, Crosses and Comforts

March 23, 2020

Charles Mahoney, “The Garden” (1950); see this lovely essay by Jenny Uglow about paintings of gardens; it’s based on this exhibition at the Garden Museum in...

Joyful Sounds and Hidden Lives

March 16, 2020

Let’s start our week off right, and by right, I mean by listening to four transcendent musicians playing with virtuosity and utter joy: There should be a...

Texty and Readerly

March 2, 2020

Here’s a video explaining the making of the Library of Nonhuman Books. And you may purchase some of those nonhuman books here. As for me, I think I’ll save...

Short Stuff

February 24, 2020

Damien Davis, Concealment (Blackamoors Collage #234), CNC routed birch, plexiglass and stainless steel hardware, 30 x 30 inches It’s starting to look like a...

The Value Equivalent of 6000 Words

February 17, 2020

No Nonsense (2020), by Kees Moerbeek The Orient Express is rusting away. I adore botanical and zoological images, and now 150,000 of them have entered the...

Crafty Guitarists, Thankful Villages, A Fading Scream

February 10, 2020

Here’s a fascinating interview with the guitarist Robert Fripp that, among other things, explains Fripp’s curious approach to guitar tuning. As many of my...

The Super Feast of the Presentation of the Groundhog

February 2, 2020

“When I was a kid, I made all these vows: When I’m a grown-up, I’m not going to learn to drive, which I haven’t done. I also vowed I wouldn’t have a...

Mainly Maps, Plus a Lizard

January 27, 2020

Graffiticons From an extraordinary essay by Harold Braswell: I was not alone in discovering a connection between my personal suffering and that of Jesus. At...

Arts and Artists and a Little Hot Chocolate

January 20, 2020

28 Letters (2013), by Islam Aly The loss of Roger Scruton, who recently died at the age of 75, is a grievous one for us all, whether we know it or not....

Timetables, Book-houses, Hidden Rivers

January 13, 2020

Every now and then you come across one of those sites that makes you realize that the World Wide Web is vital and necessary after all. Airline Timetable...

Opinionlessness

January 6, 2020

“Europe divided into its kingdoms” was perhaps the first jigsaw puzzle. Certainly jigsaw puzzles began as a tool for teaching geography. Does anyone arrange...

An Instrumental New Year

January 1, 2020

The Antikythera mechanism The coming of a new year always makes me think about calendars, timekeeping, the measurement of space and time. Though Time is...

Wrapping Up the Year

December 16, 2019

Linocuts by Gail Brodholt This should be my last newsletter of the year — I’m off to London for a week after which, you know, as the old line goes, Christmas...

Advent meditations (and others)

December 9, 2019

It’s Advent, which means it’s time to read Andrew Hudgins’s poem “The Cestello Annunciation.” And perhaps it is also time to read Auden’s For the Time Being:...

Kael, Kane, Ackling, Sodagreen, Pittlecow

December 2, 2019

Last week I published an essay over at LitHub on what Pauline Kael got fundamentally right about Citizen Kane: In a very important sense, the movie is a...

Crowns, Churches, Camps

November 25, 2019

The crown inside the tomb of Frederick III — the last Holy Roman Emperor to be crowned by the Pope. Batya Ungar-Sargon, in the New York Review of Books of...

Mainly Images, and a Little About Me

November 18, 2019

Covent Garden Market in gingerbread Ozu selfie. Before I came to Baylor in 2013, I taught for twenty-nine years at Wheaton College in Illinois. That place...

Nature and Worship

November 11, 2019

A northern saw-whet owl ready to be tagged. There’s a Ruskin exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art that I’d love to see but, alas, probably can’t....

A Few Words about Bibles

November 4, 2019

In a previous newsletter I mentioned the beautiful work Dana Tanamachi did for Crossway’s Illuminated Bible. In this edition I want to say a little more...

Cinematically Yours

October 25, 2019

A place I want to visit: Benmore Botanic Garden in Argyllshire. Did you know that that part of Scotland is a temperate rain forest? Now you do. In the...

Back in the Saddle Again

October 15, 2019

Good — and unexpected — news! A generous patron has stepped forward to pay the costs of this newsletter for some time to come, so the transmissions will...

Planning for the Future

October 14, 2019

Friends, I have had a wonderful time writing this newsletter, and I want to keep doing it. Your responses have been consistently positive — very generously...

My Sound Opinions

October 8, 2019

Hello friends! This installment is a little late because I spent the past few days at my beloved Laity Lodge, leading a church retreat. Though I had to work,...

Another Miscellany from My Cabinet of Curiosities

September 28, 2019

The spectrometer for the KATRIN experiment, moving threateningly through the narrow streets of Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen towards the Karlsruhe Institute of...

The Island and the Lion

September 21, 2019

In a couple of days as I write this — on Monday, September 23rd to be precise — I’ll be talking with David Brooks here in Waco about his recent work. If...

Fairs

September 16, 2019

PSA: Next Monday Baylor’s Institute for the Studies of Religion will be hosting a conversation between David Brooks and me on his recent (and maybe...

Ireland and Dessert

September 10, 2019

Thomas Flanagan (1923-2002) was an American professor of literature who, in his fifties, turned his hand to writing novels, and wrote three of the finest...

A Little Something Extra: Design

September 6, 2019

Lotería is a Mexican game, sort of like bingo but played with colorful cards rather than ping-pong balls. This year the San Antonio Spurs — my favorite NBA...

Language, Language!

September 1, 2019

One dyadic station shopping head elects. Victor Mair is the Sherlock Holmes of Chinglish, but this time he’s faced with a devilishly clever challenge to his...

Jubilee, and Knell

August 26, 2019

Giorgio de Chirico, Metaphysical Interior with a Factory (1969) An except from Memory Police, by Yoko Ogawa: The disappearance of the birds, as with so many...

New Model Protest

August 20, 2019

In my last newsletter I mentioned the hand signals that the Hong Kong protestors have developed. But that only scratches the surface of their ingenuity and...

The Human as Machine, and Addict, and Friend

August 12, 2019

The analogy of man to machine was a widespread cultural trend in the 1920s and 30s. The explosion of industry and consumer technology in the early 20th...

Cups, Bees, and an Angry Playwright

August 6, 2019

This is one of those design ideas that you perceive the absolute genius of at your very first glance: The most recent episode of the ReWork podcast tells the...

A Miscellany of Trivia

July 30, 2019

Perhaps you’ve always wanted to see a copy of Brian Eno’s synthesizer license: You can tell that it’s authentic by the way it incorporates all the initials...

Caine and Kane and Kavalier

July 23, 2019

The Caine Mutiny is a great movie for our moment, because it’s a story that has a kind of relentless moral momentum. You can see almost from the beginning...

A Great Historian and a House that Learns

July 17, 2019

Gilbert White was an eighteenth-century cleric and naturalist whose book The Natural History of Selborne is one of the classics of nature writing. His home...

Grace, Beauty, Misery, and Other Dances

July 10, 2019

My brilliant friend Adam Roberts in Image, on the possible theological implications of space travel: Grace seems to me a good way of approaching First Man;...

Going to Titan and Giving Thanks

July 3, 2019

A little early this time, but the quiver is full, so what the heck. Dragonfly is headed for Titan. Ted Gioia: Especially over the last five years...

The Work of the Three Minds

June 28, 2019

Margaret Chodos-Irvine, illustrations for Always Coming Home A conversation between Pandora and the Archivist in in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home:...

To Utopia and Back

June 21, 2019

That’s the sun rising on a hill above Laity Lodge, one of my favorite places, one of the most thoroughly peaceful spots on this planet. Every time I’m there...

Found Coins and Lost Rivers

June 12, 2019

Here’s another single-theme newsletter — arriving a little early, because I’m about to leave for a week of writing and thinking and praying at my beloved...

Unexpected Discoveries and Unnoticed Pleasures

June 9, 2019

Milan’s vertical forest In 1964 an Edinburgh antiques dealer dropped five quid on a small carved figure which he kept around the house. His children and...

Summer Edition: Trees, Islands, and a Game of Base Ball

June 3, 2019

John Constable, Trees at Hampstead, in the Tate On September 21, 1868, a man named Peter Doyle wrote a letter to his friend Walt Whitman and described an...