Some passages in Scripture read like thunder: sharp crack, sudden light, then a silence in which something ancient vibrates in the bones. The story of the Gadarene demoniac is one of them. A naked man shrieking among the tombs; chains snapped like wet wool; a village too afraid to bury its dead without one eye … Continue reading The Legion in the Swine: A Short Sermon on Empty Souls and Borrowed Flesh
Author: Robert
A fifty-something, retired Celestial Travel Agent and Afterlife Preparation Specialist. Walked many paths; some good, lots bad. Meandering through a difficult past, plodding in the present, crawling toward the future. I've studied English Literature, and hold a BA (Hons) Hum. (History & Art History) & MA (Humanities with English Literature)
All Day on the Sands: A British Passion Play in Dripping Cardigans
Alan Bennett has never quite been my usual flavour — a bit too cardigan-and-cucumber-sandwich for my tastes. And yet All Day on the Sands, this modest, meandering little play, has fastened itself to me like damp sand between the toes. I suspect it’s because these were precisely the sort of ‘holidays’ we had when I … Continue reading All Day on the Sands: A British Passion Play in Dripping Cardigans
The Laughing Maw: A Fool, His Blind Eye, and the Human Condition
Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen (attributed), The Laughing Fool, c.1500–1510. Oil on panel. Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Enschede. In art some faces smile, and some rupture. Faces that split open into something older than laughter and far more dangerous. The Laughing Fool belongs among these ruptures. He greets the viewer not with the civility of portraiture but with … Continue reading The Laughing Maw: A Fool, His Blind Eye, and the Human Condition
They Flew: A Short Sermon on the Impossible
It’s one of history’s great absurdities that the Middle Ages believed human beings could fly — and one of modernity’s great dullnesses that we no longer permit them to. Carlos Eire, in his magnificent and quietly mischievous They Flew: A History of the Impossible, takes us by the hand and leads us into a world … Continue reading They Flew: A Short Sermon on the Impossible
The Queen in Two Pieces: Mary I, Embalming, and the Illusion of Dignity
I suppose I should confess at the outset that my interest in Queen Mary I’s embalming didn’t spring from some lofty academic impulse, but from years spent in the trade myself — years of sewing mouths shut, persuading stubborn limbs into positions they hadn’t attempted since the Thatcher era, and discovering that even the most … Continue reading The Queen in Two Pieces: Mary I, Embalming, and the Illusion of Dignity
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