Author Archives: Doug Cumming

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About Doug Cumming

Doug Cumming is an associate professor emeritus of journalism at Washington & Lee University with 26 years experience at metro newspapers and magazines. After getting a Ph.D. at UNC-Chapel Hill in mass communications, he taught multimedia reporting and feature writing at Loyola University-New Orleans and at W&L in Virginia. Earlier, he worked at the newspapers in Raleigh, Providence and Atlanta; was editor of the Sunday Magazine in Providence; and helped launch Southpoint monthly magazine in Atlanta. He won a George Polk Award and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard.

1690: Two obscure beginnings of public trust

Posted on June 25, 2025 by Doug Cumming

How do you know . . . that South Korea had an authoritarian president named Yoon, and that Yoon declared martial law last December to shut down critics, an independent media and the National Assembly? Or that he was ousted … Continue reading →

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Outage

Posted on May 6, 2025 by Doug Cumming

Our April morning peace was ripped—   A boom and then the dark. What now?Outside the squirrels began to mourn.We know how lightning strikes have clipped   These trees, blazed black trails to burnDown mountain houses. AnyhowThis was no bolt, but just a tripped … Continue reading →

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Walker Percy: my favorite philosopher-novelist

Posted on April 24, 2025 by Doug Cumming

I’m offering another course at OLLI-Emory, the adult education program that has created a lively community of Baby Boomers who love teaching and learning, mostly in retirement. I don’t know if anyone will be as interested in this as they … Continue reading →

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Waves

Posted on March 14, 2025 by Doug Cumming

I miss waves. When my love and I transplant to Italy, it will be on the Adriatic. Waves there are small, but they have a lot of history. I look forward to walking the beaches of the Marche where Romans … Continue reading →

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Sparks from Ignatius

Posted on February 19, 2025 by Doug Cumming

I have had brief brushings with a 484-year-old club called the Society of Jesus. My first university job at age 51 was at Loyola in New Orleans, which was run by this club of Catholic priests called “Jesuits.” Ignatius de … Continue reading →

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Not the End of Civilization (only a re-start)

Posted on February 18, 2025 by Doug Cumming

The Middle Ages weren’t all bad. There was a beauty in what C.S. Lewis called “The Discarded Image,” the orderly cosmology that connected the heavenly bodies with our own bodies and with Heaven itself (until science displaced these connections with … Continue reading →

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Editors needed

Posted on January 17, 2025 by Doug Cumming

President Biden, in his farewell address warning of a new American oligarchy that owns a “tech-industrial complex,” talked about the threats to a free press. He mentioned that “editors are disappearing.” I have often told people who worry about evils … Continue reading →

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Pluralism

Posted on December 14, 2024 by Doug Cumming

I have been thinking of boundaries, those imaginary lines that our public life has constructed. In the poetry of Robert Frost, whose entire body of work I will never stop learning from, boundaries are the rock wall he and his … Continue reading →

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Three Poems

Posted on November 25, 2024 by Doug Cumming
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A freedom song, for Election Day

Posted on November 5, 2024 by Doug Cumming

On this morning of Election Day, 2024, I am waving the flag of a poem by Richard Wilbur called “On Freedom’s Ground: A Cantata.” Read it aloud, slowly with a touch of drama. Record yourself doing so, as I did … Continue reading →

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