• #Devotions: Another Sampling from Mary Oliver

    Spring is in the air! Here in Western Pennsylvania today, the temperature reached 71 degrees. We opened the windows and savored the fresh air and song of the birds. It reminded me of a welcomed distraction from earlier this week when I sat down to breakfast: a finch…

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  • Photo of the Day Poems – Stripping the Veil of Familiarity

    C. S. Lewis once addressed the topic of whether one should continue learning in the midst of troubled times in his sermon “Learning in War-Time” given at St. Mary the Virgin Church, Oxford, on Sunday, October 22, 1939. He would argue that, yes, we must continue to learn…

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  • Ducks and Debris: On Freshet’s Flow #Poetry #Creek #Life

    Sitting down to breakfast early on February 18th, God served up a fresh poem just outside my windows. Wolf Creek had leapt its bounds and was slowly creeping up the lawn as a result of the hard rains and melting snows of multiple weeks. In the midst of…

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  • Photo of the Day Poems – The #Hart and the #Tortoise

    Returning to The Guardian photo of the day poems I penned three years ago, I found the play on Aesop’s “The Hare and the Tortoise” a fitting theme for tonight’s post. Like the classic fable, there is a moral to be found in each poem. Yet unlike that…

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  • #LovePoems: A Tale of Two Sonnets

    On this auspicious day, allow me to submit my two favorite love poems. I teach these side-by-side in my British Literature course when we begin discussing the impact of relationships and romance on our lives. Unlike the allusion to Dickens’ classic A Tale of Two Cities, what I…

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  • Photo of the Day Poems – #Birds #Bikes #Bots

    Tonight’s collection of photo poems comes from the week of January 31st through February 8th of 2019. I’ve affectionately titled this collection Birds, Bikes, and Bots, though the photographs themselves didn’t appear in that order on The Guardian website. Besides just enjoying the sound of that alliterative title,…

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  • Rather than add a few more photo poems today (I may add some later this week), I turn to the newest song in my constellation series. It’s been six months since I last wrote something musically, a sad commentary on the pace and priorities of my life from…

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  • As we continue to experience the weight of winter weather here in Western Pennsylvania, my thoughts returned this morning to the Photo Poem series I wrote two years ago, inspired by the The Guardian‘s “Best Photographs of the Day.” Like the chap from Turkey in the first image,…

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  • Sitting here in my library, I notice a book my wife has set out on one of the mini-easels propped up on the corner bookshelf: The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise by Robert Cardinal Sarah. I have never read the book myself, but its title…

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  • We’re a month away from Valentine’s Day, but it’s never too early to share some of the most beautiful love poetry ever written. Admittedly, the love poem I quote the most is Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 116” followed closely by Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Sonnet 43,” and who can speak of…

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