History, Real Life and Faith
Several years ago I took my daughter-in-law to visit a cathedral, St. Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh. She’d not traveled a great deal and had grown up in non-denominational church settings. When we entered the tall church, she began to cry. She’d never seen such a beautiful place to worship God before. I remembered her appreciation during a recent visit to…
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Several years ago I took my daughter-in-law to visit a cathedral, St. Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh. She’d not traveled a great deal and had grown up in non-denominational church settings. When we entered the tall church, she began to cry. She’d never seen such a beautiful place to worship God before. I remembered her appreciation during a recent visit to…
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As I rode the train from Reading to Oxford, I opened the Kindle app on my phone and began to reread Carolyn Weber’s lovely Surprised by Oxford. It’s the memoir of her first year as an Oxford graduate student in English Literature 20 years ago, when Weber thought she was meeting the great writers of the canon (which did happen), but in…
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Graves and memorials along the western front of World War I abound. They range from the enormous Villers–Bretonneux Australian National Memorial (those are adults standing at the base of the stairs), to gravestones and markers to unknown soldiers. There were many unknown soldiers in northeastern France 1916-1918. Some were unknown because spates of machine gun bullets obliterated their bodies. Bodies disappeared into the…
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We headed to the western front to see the land and explore the trenches. We’d visited museum examples of World War I trenches in the Auckland (New Zealand) War Memorial Museum; at the Musée de l’Armé in Paris; at the Imperial War Museum in London and I’d stood in one in downtown Indianapolis’ World War Memorial just last month. It’s the miserable trench warfare people…
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We went wandering the Somme battlefields one day, looking for a sense of what life was like there a century ago. When you say World War I, people immediately think of the trenches and the dreadful killing machines. They weren’t there, but their memory echoed through the beautiful landscape and as our guide recounted miserable story after dreadful event, our spirits…
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