Old Christ Church in Alexandria. Virginia, attended by General Robert E. Lee in his youth and pictured here in 1911 (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign/Wikimedia Commons)

Divided Providence

Faith’s pivotal role in the outcome of the Civil War

Righteous Strife: How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln’s Union by Richard Carwardine

“The Terrorist, He’s Watching” by Wislawa Szymborska

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Keepers of the Old Ways

Eliot Stein on the people keeping cultural traditions alive

Above the River of Your Longing

Two new prompts

Casa Gorín

“The Purse-Seine” by Robinson Jeffers

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Island Royalty

A new biography of a Caribbean revolutionary

The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe by Marlene L. Daut

The Writer in the Family

The fiction of E. L. Doctorow gave a young man hope of connecting his father and his literary hero

Birthday Boy

“The Horses” by Ted Hughes

Poems read aloud, beautifully

“On the Birth of a Son” by Su Tung-Po

Poems read aloud, beautifully

We Are Still Here

How 10 activists around the world are fighting for a more sustainable future

Listening to the Trees

What the forest can teach us about ourselves

Night Train to Riga

Two stories of love, heartbreak, and escape

Guinea Pigs

“Letter to the Front” by Muriel Rukeyser

Poems read aloud, beautifully

The Inheritance of Nations

To what extent does a work of art belong to the people of the world?

After the Chaos

Who tells the story of Covid and what will it mean?

Has Electronic Dance Music Lost Its Soul?

From acid house to deadmau5

Fashion Forward

Five questions about the future of what we wear

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