StephenBarkley.com

You’ve got to love it when a scholarly book makes you want to stand up and cheer. I was reading Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God tonight and came across just that sort of passage at the end of a chapter entitled “Time to Wake Up”: The biblical language of resurrection (‘standing up’, [...]

Lies have an awkward way of snowballing. Most begin simply. Did you eat those chocolate chip cookies we were saving for dessert tonight? No. Then you need more lies to cover up the first one. That’s funny—it looks like you’ve got chocolate smeared around your mouth. It’s not chocolate, it’s . . . um . [...]

Peer Gynt Rolf Fjelde trans. © 1964 Signet Classic Edition xxx + 253 pages Music made me read this play. Have you ever heard these songs? They were written by Grieg, along with many other songs as the incidental music for Ibsen’s play. It’s a great experience to read the words that inspired those famous [...]

I’m still working through Dr. Eliot’s Five Foot Shelf.  My reading slowed when I got to Marcus Aurelius. The translator called Aurelius “one of the loftiest, of the pagan moralists” (George Long). I find that since our worldviews are so fundamentally different, reading Stoic philosophy is aggravating. That said, I came across a line by [...]