Essay: God Is the Ocean in Which We All Swim
I have gotten to a point that I can’t go along any more with Michelangelo’s God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Great art, but, gee, God as [...]
Book review: “Soul Seeing: Light, Love, Forgiveness” by Michael Leach and Friends
Brian Doyle’s essay “The Day I Stood Shimmering in Shame” begins this way: Committed a sin yesterday, in the hallway, at noon. I roared at my son, I grabbed [...]
Book review: “Through the Bookstore Window” by Bill Petrocelli
I picked up Bill Petrocelli’s Through the Bookstore Window in the midst of reading David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. I wasn’t looking for a break, but I had already [...]
Book review: “Barons of the Sea…And Their Race to Build the World’s Fastest Clipper Ship” by Steven Ujifusa
Steven Ujifusa’s Barons of the Sea ends with a quote from Captain Charlie Porter Low, a man who had run away to sea and spent his life as [...]
Poem: We are all Elijah on the mountain
The still, small voice is still an itch in the corner of the skull, a catch of breath, a comma, a hesitancy, a heartbeat, a hush, a [...]
Book review: “The Talmud: A Biography” by Barry Scott Wimpfheimer
In 1997, near the end of the long-running television comedy Seinfeld, Larry Charles said that, when he and the other writers would sit down to produce a script, it was [...]
Book review: Three books about Shakespeare —3— “Religion Around Shakespeare” by Peter Iver Kaufman
On the first page of Religion Around Shakespeare, Peter Iver Kaufman makes it clear that he’s not writing about Shakespeare the believer, Shakespeare the adherent to this or [...]
Book review: Three books about Shakespeare —2— “Lear: The Great Image of Authority” by Harold Bloom
Twice, King Lear says, “Nothing will come from nothing.” It is one of the most striking of the many striking lines in William Shakespeare’s masterpiece King Lear. Harold [...]
Book review: Three books about Shakespeare —1— “Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics” by Stephen Greenblatt
Donald Trump looms over Stephen Greenblatt’s Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics like one of the Bard’s ghosts, unavoidable, untouched, a dark dream of dread too fearsome to face. In his [...]
Book review: “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” by Joseph Campbell
There is much about Joseph Campbell’s 1948 book The Hero with a Thousand Faces that I find problematic. Campbell displays amazing erudition in this book and a vast [...]