Summer Reading in the House of Curiosities

Not that all of this is either explicitly religious or — any of it — kitschy; it’s just what there is to write about today, while I wait for the next person to send in some oddity or other. The Five- and Six-Year-Olds (who get read aloud to together): Secret Water by Arthur . . . . Continue Reading »

Heirs to the Kingdom

I can’t talk about the material culture of religion without, at least sometimes, talking about homeschooling. Of course, all stereotypes aside, homeschooling is not exclusively a religious phenomenon; when we began homeschooling, it was not for religious reasons, but because our oldest . . . . Continue Reading »

Note to Bill

The comment you left asking me if I knew of a source for those ribbon-bookmark thingies got lost in the blog-changeover shuffle, and I’m worrying about the repetitive-stress-injury potential which your breviary poses. Might these be what you’re looking for? You can order them from St. . . . . Continue Reading »

To the Summit

I’m not a musician in any real sense of the word, only an enthusiast. In good choirs I’ve sung in, my contributions have been limited to reasonably non-incompetent alto-line filler, for pieces like Mendelssohn’s Richte mich Gott. That’s one kind of good choir: the choir which . . . . Continue Reading »

Specialty Bibles

A While We’re At It in this month’s edition of The Public Square, the popular column at the end of First Things:Intelligent and entertaining are two adjectives that go together far too rarely, but they belong in company when speaking of our contributing writer Alan Jacobs. He has in this . . . . Continue Reading »