Essay / Literature

Let Us Now Praise Study Bibles

The ESV Study Bible is soon to be released, and from the plentiful pre-release materials that I’ve seen online, this promises to be a great resource. The editors seem to have crammed a lot of helpful things into a single volume, including background info, maps

Essay / Literature

Housekeeping

Like her biblical namesake, the Ruth of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping (1980) is a sojourner among strangers. The almost misleading title of the novel suggests that the novel will be concerned with the daily habits that constitute and stabilize domestic life. Instead, the novel’s protagonists inhabit

Essay / Literature

Such Pride is Praise: Spenser’s Amoretti #5

RVDELY thou wrongest my deare harts desire, In finding fault with her too portly pride: the thing which I doo most in her admire, is of the world vnworthy most enuide. For in those lofty lookes is close implide, scorn of base things, & sdeigne

Essay / Literature

New Love to Entertain (Spenser’s Amoretti #4)

NEW yeare forth looking out of Ianus gate, Doth seeme to promise hope of new delight: and bidding th’ old Adieu, his passed date bids all old thoughts to die in dumpish spright. And calling forth out of sad Winters night, fresh loue, that long

Essay / Literature

Sovereign Beauty (Spenser’s Amoretti #3)

THE souerayne beauty which I doo admyre, witnesse the world how worthy to be prayzed: the light wherof hath kindled heauenly fyre, in my fraile spirit by her from basenesse raysed. That being now with her huge brightnesse dazed, base thing I can no more

Essay / Literature

By the Book

“The B-I-B-L-E” doesn’t really pack the same punch for adults as it does for the pre-K Sunday school crowd. But gussied up in the dignity of an Elizabethan homily, the admonition to read my Bible once again demands my attention. “A Fruitful Exhortation to the

Essay / Literature

Unquiet Thought (Spenser’s Amoretti #2)

VNQUIET thought, whom at the first I bred, Of th’ inward bale of my loue pined hart: and sithens haue with sighes and sorrowes fed, till greater then my wombe thou woxen art. Breake forth at length out of the inner part, in which thou

Essay / Literature

Leaves, Lines, and Rymes (Spenser’s Amoretti #1)

HAPPY ye leaues when as those lilly hands, which hold my life in their dead doing might shall handle you and hold in loues soft bands, lyke captiues trembling at the victors sight. And happy lines, on which with starry light, those lamping eyes will deigne

Essay / Literature

Kit Smart: Crazy Praise

Christoper Smart (1722–71) , known to companions as Kit, was a learned poet who wrote plenty of poems which are mostly unreadable now by anybody outside the guild of English literature studies: Ode to the Earl of Northumberland, To Ethelinda, and Lines After Horace —that

Essay / Literature

Literary Nicknames

When a nickname really fits somebody, it catches on and comes to mind easily. But when somebody doesn’t have a good nickname, it’s no good forcing things. I was recently leafing through a fun book, Asa Don Dickinson’s 1931 list of classics called The Thousand

Essay / Literature

Michael Ward Has Found the Secret of Narnia

George MacDonald once wrote, “It is not the things we see the most clearly that influence us the most powerfully; undefined, yet vivid visions of something beyond, something which eye has not seen nor ear heard, have far more influence than any logical sequences whereby

Essay / Literature

To Judge the Quick and the Dead

I usually keep quiet my liking for musical theater. But this summer I discovered that what I took to be my uniquely under-refined taste is actually common in my eccentric community. On a sailboat moored along the Turkish Coast of the Aegean Sea, I sang