Educational experts have long been concerned about the large numbers of underachieving boys in our school systems.
My wife, once a public school teacher and now a member of our Education Department, provided me with some of the explanations. She notes that, of the three learning styles—aural, visual, and kinesthetic—the first two tend to get [...]
Many readers of Huckleberry Finn enjoy laughing at Miss Watson’s approach to teaching Huck. She tries to use the Bible to scare him into good behavior, insists that he sit still, and prohibits him from smoking and drinking. Romantics that we are, we make fun of her educational philosophy and find her a hypocrite, especially [...]
Cain, Connery, The Man Who Would Be King
I was rereading Rudyard Kipling’s entertaining story The Man Who Would Be King the other day, and it got me thinking about some of the Tea Party candidates for Senate, like Sharron Angle in Nevada and Rand Paul in Kentucky. Allow me to explain.
Kipling’s 1888 work is about [...]
Morgan Freeman, Matt Damon in Invictus
Since the World Cup is underway in South Africa, I watched Clint Eastwood’s Invictus last week, about the 1995 World Cup Rugby Tournament held in South Africa. Based on a true story, the film notes that, while in prison, Nelson Mandela, like many black South Africans, would root against the [...]
Also posted in poetry, politics | Tagged "Invictus", Alfred Lord Tennyson, Apartheid, Clint Eastwood, Faisal Shahzad, John Milton, Nelson Mandela, Paradise Lost, politics, Sports, Timothy McVeigh, Ulysses, William Ernest Henley |
I am writing today about an image that gripped me as a child and that has proved a comfort to me since losing my oldest son ten years ago. I encountered it in The Princess and Curdie, a Victorian children’s fantasy novel by George MacDonald. I use it differently than the author does but it [...]
As it turns out, I am not the only person looking to literature in order to get my mind around the recent oil disaster. Randy Kennedy has written a superb article in the New York Times that points out parallels between the Gulf oil spill and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Kennedy says that, in the 19th century, [...]
“The world is filled with the grandeur of God.”
“The sounding cataract haunted me like a passion.”
In my last two posts, I reported how poetry sprang to mind as I walked through some of California’s natural wonders, specifically Big Basin Redwoods State Park and Yosemite National Park. Today I meditate on the relationship of natural beauty [...]
Ansel Adams, Yosemite Falls
Julia, Toby (our youngest son) and I visited Yosemite National Park for the first time last week, and I am still vibrating from the stunning rock faces and gorgeous waterfalls. It was remarkable to see what seemed, at a distance, to be thin, almost delicate, streams of water pouring from great heights—and [...]
Spiritual Sunday
Julia and I have been in Davis, California seeing our son this past week (he is a graduate student in English at the university there) and took the occasion to visit Big Basin Redwoods State Park. As I walked through the silence of the forest and gazed up in awe at the mammoth trees, [...]
The bobolink, Dickinson’s sexton and chorister
Spiritual Sunday
“Remember the Sabbath Day and keep it holy,” instructs the fourth commandment. How are we to keep it holy? Emily Dickinson, a writer who wrestled with the stern Calvinism of her day, observed the sabbath in her own way. She was a private person who was skeptical of doctrine as she sought communion [...]
