Category Archives: Uncategorized

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 →

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

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 →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

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 →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

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 →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

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 →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

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 →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Three Poems

Posted on November 25, 2024 by Doug Cumming
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

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 →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Brief candle, against dark politics

Posted on October 24, 2024 by Doug Cumming

On April 3, 2008, a mother I did not know held her newborn daughter for 27 minutes of life in a Virginia hospital. The newborn, in utero, had developed with a chromosomal disorder called Trisomy 18, or Edwards Syndrome. The … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Sam Hose case, 1899

Posted on October 4, 2024 by Doug Cumming

In a 1963 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, I read an account by Ralph McGill, who was editor and publisher of the Atlanta Constitution when I was growing up in Atlanta, of his interview with the distinguished black scholar W.E.B. … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment