The Winding Cloth
The electronic revolution increasingly knits us all on planet Earth into a common consciousness, a common memory. It also makes possible an increasing degree of empathy across the barriers of …
The electronic revolution increasingly knits us all on planet Earth into a common consciousness, a common memory. It also makes possible an increasing degree of empathy across the barriers of …
For many of us, the source and power of poetry lies in its oral performance. It is first of all an oral and auditory medium. Indeed, this power of the …
We have just returned from six weeks in the Western Cape of South Africa and ten days exploring central Namibia, its neighbor to the north. While it is the people …
While visiting in Cape Town, I recently had the pleasure of taking a summer school course at the University of Cape Town on Homer’s Iliad, from Professor Richard Whitaker, who …
Sometimes we don’t know where certain messages come from as we muse, fingering some words to give our intuitions substance. I think this poem comes from the haunting reverberations of …
We recently saw an arresting documentary film entitled “Moving Midway,” a story about saving an old North Carolina plantation house and discovering the family histories behind it. Midway was a …
During the Christmas season we are confronted by two texts that not only speak to, but seem to arise out of, the grief that has swept this country in the …
Every Fall for the past five years more than 300 people have convened here for the Lake Junaluska Peace Conference. This posting is a report on that conference. This year’s …
The reactionary impulses of the 2010 elections propelled the North Carolina Republican Party into control of the legislature for the first time in a century. One result was that we …
Last week I joined my friend Michael Beadle to present a few of our poems to a recently formed group concerned with the relation of art to faith. Called “ArtGroup,” …
Is a “blog,” which is what they call these items I post on this site, a “publication”? In confronting recent discussions of this question I began to wonder if there …
Ever since the US Supreme Court ruled in “Citizens United…” that corporations are “persons” who must be accorded all the rights of free speech, non-corporate persons like myself have been …
How amazing! In the midst of the Republican primary circus, the American people are actually trying to debate tax policy. The problem with such debates is that they either drown …
Like most of you, I look out at the political landscape in America and see only “the One” and then the circus of opposition hopefuls, feeding on each other. How …