Church Avenue between the Circuit Court and the Texas Tavern. The impressive church that you see (this town has a lot of them) is Greene Memorial United Methodist Church.
DC Comics. Part of the “Batman: Year Two” storyline.
I keep thinking of Todd McFarlane as a 90’s phenomenon, because that was when I started reading comics. It’s weird seeing a cover by him that was published when I was in high school.
5th Street Overpass near the Virginia Museum of Transportation. Mill Mountain is in the background. If you look closely at the sixth photo, you can see what looks like a gutted fighter jet to the right of the two antiquated trains. I can only assume those are connected with the museum. (So, too, is the rusting hulk in the seventh.)
The coming together of hands
in prayer, falls somewhere along
the spectrum of comfort and peace
as if someone else is there, as if
anyone else can see.
The coming together of hands
in a way that Jesus’s own could not
in the end
are we not all just like we were
when we sat cross-legged on the
wooden floor and before reciting the
words we knew, we would contemplate
whether the thumbs should cross over,
securely folded, or align side by side
and we looked to our peers as they
sat beside us heads bowed, to copy
their finger formations and wonder
whether they were properly praying
or simply waiting for the teacher
to say ‘amen’ and for it all to be over.
The coming together of hands
as if in prayer, but not, just a brief pose like revisiting the street where we…
“It was C. S. Lewis who, in his unforgettable Screwtape Letters, wrote: The greatest evil is not done now in those sordid `dens of crime’ that Dickens loved to paint. It is not even done in concentration camps and labor camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried and minuted) in clear, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.”
“Well, because these quiet men do not raise their voices, because they sometimes speak in soothing tones of brotherhood and peace, because, like other dictators before them, they’re always making their final territorial demand, some would have us accept them at their word and accommodate ourselves to their aggressive impulses. But if history teaches anything, it teaches that simple-minded appeasement or wishful thinking about our adversaries is folly. It means the betrayal of our past, the squandering of our freedom.
“So, I urge you to speak out against those who would place the United States in a position of military and moral inferiority. You know, I’ve always believed that old Screwtape reserved his best efforts for those of you in the church. So, in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride — the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.”
— President Ronald Reagan, addressing the National Association of Evangelicals, March 8th, 1983
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 