Word: gracefully
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...muster the same enthusiasm for the handwritten inscriptions in books. Reading the inscriptions is like knowing you own a repossessed car; you are profiting from someone’s failure. What sort of ingrates were George and Everett to consign their birthday and Christmas presents from the Glenns and Grace, respectively, to the thrift store where I bought them? Whoever the Glenns and Grace were, they spent some time writing their names and the occasion on the flyleaves of Lone Eagle of the Border and Carl Hall of Tait. And yet their hopes of being remembered by George and Everett...
...These and some 400 more poems about slavery are among the lost writings restored to view by my recent book, "Amazing Grace: An Anthology of Poems about Slavery 1660-1810" (Yale University Press). Together they show the degree to which slavery was part of the shared consciousness and literary imagination of an era often thought to have been universally approving, or at least accepting, of what would come to be known as "the peculiar institution...
...least six of the poets are former slave traders, including John Newton, the slaver turned evangelist amd abolitionist whose famous lyrics about God's "amazing grace . . . That saved a wretch like me" originated as a song of thanks for his deliverance from the sinfulness of slavetrading. Another former slave dealer, James Stanfield, composed an epic of several hundred lines entitled "The Guinea Voyage" (1789), in part of which he depicted the birth of a baby in the wretched squalor of the slave decks. (Art and life were not so distinct: the black poet Ignatius Sancho, who later became a figure...
...There are religious traditions - the Jesuits, the Jews, the Shi'ites, certain suffering segments of Protestantism - for which grace is a constant anguish, a goal never quite attained but approached through learning or good works. "The Evangelicals take their marching orders from Paul, who said you have to 'work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,'" Martin E. Marty, the University of Chicago theologian, told me last week. "The implication is that once you've worked it out, once you've been born again, you don't have to be fearful or tremble so much anymore...
...Does the reprising of his greatest hits mean Chan has run out of ideas? No: only that he takes as much pleasure as his fans do in playing the oldies, and in proving that, as he nears 50, Chan can still display the grace and strength of his younger self. With a little help from the occasional stunt double...