Adam Patric Miller: Next Year’s Words
I scroll down and am stunned to see a large ad sponsored by The Jewish Agency for Israel featuring a former student who is going to share his “powerful story of strength, sacrifice, and service” fighting as “a lone soldier” for the IDF.
Sandy Solomon: While You’re Away
Were it a question not of days but weeks
I’d learn, I’m sure, to sprawl mid-bed, the way,
before we met, I did.
Charles Davidson: Reflections on “Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin.” (the Movie and the Man)
Despite the film’s deficiencies, excesses, and flagrant exploitation by those willing to corrupt Bonhoeffer to their own sinister purposes, there is something to be said for the film’s implied warning about the rising tide of authoritarianism in America.
Susan Kelly-DeWitt: Psalm for Sunrise
Let the horses of dreaming ramble
home slowly from their sweet dark pastures.
Vox Populi: The Most Popular Posts of 2024
Thank you so much for helping to make Vox Populi a success in 2024. Since our founding 10 years ago as a newsletter for anti-fracking activists in Western Pennsylvania, we’ve accumulated more than 5,000,000 visits. We now have over 20,000 daily subscribers, about 35% outside the United States.
Video: Traveling Man, A Fable
A man meets a stranger in the park who has unusual powers.
Dennis Wilson Wise: The woman who revolutionized the fantasy genre is finally getting her due
Arthur C. Clarke called her the “most brilliant editor I ever encountered,” and Philip K. Dick said she was the “greatest editor since Maxwell Perkins.”
Chana Bloch: The New World
That’s the old country for you:
they ate with their hands, went hungry to bed,
slept in their stink. When pain knocked,
they opened the door.
Charles Reznikoff: The lamps are burning in the synagogue
Let us begin then humbly. Not by asking:
Who is This you pray to? Name Him;
define Him. For the answer is:
we do not name Him.
Once out of a savage fear, perhaps;
now out of knowledge—of our ignorance.
Cecilia Zavala: Pardon Me | Ending the Stigma That Harms Generations
When we reduce people to their convictions, we fail to see their humanity, their potential, and the harm this judgment causes not just to them but to their families.
Joseph Bathanti: High Mass
Winter Sundays,
when my father was on strike from steel,
he and my mother woke late,
then rose and prepared for high mass at Saints Peter and Paul.
Linda Parsons: Two Poems for Christmas
the light hasn’t always been easy to find—
haloed fires of childhood, my walk
on coals to the marriage pyre, parents
passed to flame and ash. All have sparked
the change ahead, all have lit the way.
Video: Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer
Grandma got run over by a reindeer
Walking home from our house Christmas Eve.
You can say there’s no such thing as Santa,
But as for me and Grandpa, we believe.
William Butler Yeats: The Magi
Now as at all times I can see in the mind’s eye,
In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones
Appear and disappear in the blue depths of the sky
