Poem: “Then”
At Christmas, there is me. Then David. Then Mary Beth. Then Eileen. Then Tim. Then John. Then Rosemary. Then Laura. Then Marie. Then Kathy. Then Teri. Then Geri. Then [...]
Book review: “The Poets’ Jesus: Representations at the End of a Millennium” by Peggy Rosenthal
Peggy Rosenthal’s book-long meditation on how poets around the world and over the centuries have encountered Jesus — The Poets’ Jesus: Representations at the End of a Millennium — was [...]
Book review: “The Sellout” by Paul Beatty
The Sellout, Paul Beatty’s 2015 novel and winner of the Man Booker Prize, is a wildly free-wheeling satire of race relations in the United States that seems designed to offend [...]
Book review: “C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity: A Biography” by George M. Marsden
Three years ago, during the annual NCAA basketball March Madness, there was a parallel online tournament in which participants voted for the best Christian book of all time. The brackets, [...]
Book review: “Big Bosses: A Working Girl’s Memoir of Jazz Age America” by Althea McDowell Altemus, edited and annotated by Robin F. Bachin
In 1922, after working more than four years in Florida as an executive secretary, Althea McDowell Altemus took her eight-year-old son Robert and headed for home territory: Chicago. For a [...]
Chicago history: When the Tribune’s home was covered in “deep chocolate” soot
With great fanfare, the Chicago Tribune celebrated its new headquarters on the southeast corner of Dearborn and Madison Streets on July 23, 1902. It was the seventh location for the [...]
Poem: “Absent angel”
Absent angel Mary on the hill, her dying son, her aching bones and flesh, her flock of his friends looking to her for what? She endured. The next [...]
Poem: “David Reardon (January 23, 1951-November 21, 2015)”
David Reardon (January 23, 1951-November 21, 2015) You were there, David, with me. I was there with you. We were drawn together and pushed apart by circumstances, our [...]
Book review: “Pagan Babies” by Elmore Leonard
When is a priest a priest? And when is he not? In Elmore Leonard’s 2000 novel Pagan Babies, Terry Dunn is a Detroit boy who, five years earlier, came to [...]
Book review: “Rodin: The Gates of Hell” by Antoinette Le Normand-Romain
I’m fascinated by the Falling Man near the top of Auguste Rodin’s masterwork The Gates of Hell, just to the left of The Thinker. It’s featured in a full-page photograph [...]