Short Stuff
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
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
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
“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
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
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
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
“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
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
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)
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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,...