Apr 28, 2026
🎧 Listen Here What Four Weeks of Close Reading Actually Does For the Writer: Lawyers, I suppose, were children once. We began with that quote and I want to come back to it one more time before we close because that quote is not just about Atticus Finch. It is about every one of us who has spent time inside these two books over the last four weeks. We came in with assumptions, opinions and if we read To Kill a Mockingbird in high school we also came in thinking we knew what it was. Myself...
Apr 21, 2026
🎧 Listen Here Lawyers, I suppose, were children once. ~ Charles Lamb Harper Lee uses this quote at the front of this book for a reason. Not as decoration. Not as a charming literary gesture. But as a thesis. Because To Kill a Mockingbird is not about race in Alabama in the 1930s. That story is present and it is real and must be named. But underneath, running the full length of this novel quietly, is a story about what a man loses when he becomes a man. What gets left behind in the long...
Apr 14, 2026
🎧 Click here Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather, the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer’s day; boney mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men’s stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three...
Apr 8, 2026
🎧 Listen Here “Respect for a person’s conscience does not mean accepting moral relativism.” ~ John Paul II, 1993, para. 32-34 Ask yourself a couple questions: Are moral standards culturally-defined making it impossible to determine what is truly right or wrong? Or, is it true that each person created “in the image of God” and so possess both the capacity and responsibility to seek moral truth and follow it? Where do you land and why? These questions matter because...
Apr 1, 2026
She heard her father’s voice, a tiny voice talking in a warm comfortable past. “Gentlemen, if there’s one slogan in this world, I believe, it is this: equal rights for all, special privileges for none.” ~ Go Set a Watchman 🎧 Listen Here There is a moment in Go Set a Watchman that most readers never reach, that you might not have reached, where Jean Louise Finch stands in the balcony of the courthouse in Maycomb, Alabama. The same balcony she sat in as a child. But now,...
