Category Archives: Uncategorized

Indian Summer

Posted on November 13, 2025 by Doug Cumming

The fall sings in full chorus, but it speaks in a whispered word. A scarlet leaf of a sourwood tree whirls in the front yard, then smacks against the porch screen. It holds there, flattened and pinned by the warden … Continue reading →

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For Better or Verse

Posted on October 28, 2025 by Doug Cumming

Living for a couple of seasons in forested hills, our miniature “lake country” of North Georgia, is more than poetic. It is where we turn around on a trail when we hear the low growl of a mama bear, or … Continue reading →

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Pickens Progress

Posted on September 15, 2025 by Doug Cumming

My wife and I are living for a time in an Appalachian corner of Pickens County, Ga., watching sunsets over a 2,800-foot-high lake. They talk about “two Georgias.” This is the “other” one — rural, heavily for Trump in the … Continue reading →

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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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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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