Essay: The old man who was once a boy on the altar
The year is 1962, and a tall, drowsy boy opens the front door of his family’s crowded two-flat to the grey darkness of near dawn. The sidewalk along Leamington Avenue [...]
Poem: The birth of One-Cent
The birth of One-Cent By Patrick T. Reardon We named the baby One-Cent after Oak’s father, a short-hair railroad sweatback I never met but may have seen across the [...]
Book review: “The Least of These” by Celia Dale
Here’s how Celia Dale’s 1943 novel The Least of These ends. I’m going to tell you this because, at the moment, the odds are very much stacked against your ever [...]
Essay: Christianity, a radical endeavor
Christianity is a radical endeavor. Jesus was a revolutionary, not of the violent sort, but a revolutionary of the heart and of the spirit. Just listen to his words from [...]
Book review: “Filippo Lippi” by P.G. Konody
Somehow, somewhere, I obtained a fairly solid copy of P.G. Konody’s small book Filippo Lippi, published in London in 1911 as part of a series titled Masterpieces in Colour. [...]
Poem: Suffer
Suffer By Patrick T. Reardon Suffer the children to visit the prophet. Suffer the shearwaters and other birds to cringe at the raptor sound from a machine. Saint [...]
Book review: “Portnoy’s Complaint” by Philip Roth
In the annals of English-language literature, Alexander Portnoy is one of the great characters — larger than life in his sexual obsessions, his anti-Jewish Jewishness, his psychological complexes, his arrogant [...]
Book review: “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three” by John Godey
A thriller written more than half a century ago, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three by John Godey still thrills today. And it’s also something of a time capsule, [...]
Book review: “Three Roads Back: How Emerson, Thoreau, and William James Responded to the Greatest Losses of Their Lives” by Robert D. Richardson
“Think of them as fellow human beings,” Robert D. Richardson instructs the reader in the preface of his 2023 book Three Roads Back. And that is apt advice although, at [...]
Book review: “The Invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt’s New World” by Andrea Wulf
Historian Andrea Wulf packs a lot into 337 pages in her 2015 book The Invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt's New World, and much of it will be surprising and [...]