A World of Speculation

The door remains closed (for now)

At GetReligion, Terry Mattingly posts this photo of a door in Constantinople (Istanbul to those who count the past 550 years as more important than the prior 1450). It’s symbolic, because it’s a door into the Phanar, the headquarters of the Ecumenical...

The Onion Dome is up

This week’s Onion Dome is posted. Alex discovers a convert who doesn’t like Way of a Pilgrim, I’ve covered this week’s lineup on The Orthodox TV Network, and Marie visits But and Mary Jane and Her and Alice at the Summer Festival at St. Serious...

As I Lay Lying

This is the last you’ll see about the Clinton memoir here, but The Minor Fall, the Major Lift has a brilliant parody in the style of William Faulkner: Here are a few paragraphs: There was a fire in it and Vince squatting in his shirt tail in front of it,...

From grammar to voice

I haven’t read the best-selling grammar-advocacy book, Eats, Shoots, and Leaves, not for any reason of taste or principle, but just because it hasn’t risen to the top of my stack (it’s a tall stack). Now Louis Menand in his New Yorker review of the...

The Greater Trumps

I don’t read Charles Williams in quite the same way I read other novels, unless every novel is different, which is a possibility. I don’t read him for the puzzle, for the “Aha! I know that person!,” for the eye-popping descriptions. I know when...

Garage sale

I was out yesterday tending our garage sale. A great day for it–hot, in the sun at least. But in the breezy shade under the tree in the front yard, I communed with Charles Williams (+), Elmore Leonard (-) and then Umberto Eco (!) as the people came, looked over...