Ed Simon

1 week ago | jacobin.com | Ed Simon

A saga that ended with the rebel preacher Thomas Müntzer beneath an executioner’s axe in Mühlhausen on May 27, 1525, began not with his radical Protestant preaching or his apocalyptic visions, but rather a year before with snails. Helix pomatia, better known as the Burgundy snail, is common throughout Europe and found in the town of Stühlingen just below the Black Forest. Among other uses, it is prized for its large, brownish-cream-colored spiral shell that can be useful as a thread spool.

3 weeks ago | 3quarksdaily.com | Ed Simon

When critics describe Philip Levine as a "working class poet," normally they have in mind his Detroit-upbringing, or his effecting verse about rarely discussed subjects such as laboring on the assembly line of a Ford factory. Often, there is a sense that the former Poet Laurette of the United States is particularly working class not just because of his subjects, but because of his style as well; that Levine writes in an unaffected, unadorned, and unpretentious manner.

3 weeks ago | lithub.com | Ed Simon

Chicago was illuminated in a million alabaster lights for several enchanted months in 1893 at a fair commemorating the quadricentennial of America’s discovery. A glowing magical city arose in South Chicago—Jackson Park transformed into the Midway Plaisance—where the domes, bridges, arches, and pavilions of the World’s Columbian Exposition were decorated with twinkling white lights installed by the Westinghouse Electric Company.

3 weeks ago | religiondispatches.org | Ed Simon

During the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore, where bishops, archbishops, and abbots convened in 1884 to, among other issues, discuss the establishment of the Catholic University of America, the Archbishop of Minneapolis John Ireland delivered a star-spangled homily.

1 month ago | hyperallergic.com | Ed Simon

The most representative photograph of Pope Francis — then just Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Argentina — captures him sitting on a simple, slatted wooden bench on the subway in his native city. An oblivious crowd of commuters and students stands and shifts around the future pontiff, who wears the simple black shirt and Roman collar of the Society of Jesus in which he was ordained, staring at the photographer with piercing brown eyes and maybe the slight hint of a smile.