John George Francis

“Wood Music: A PlaylistFoals, ‘Birch Tree’, 2015Arnold Bax, November Woods, 1917The Beatles, ‘Norwegian Wood’, 1965Igor Stravinsky, ‘Berceuse’, from The Firebird, 1910A Woodland Reading ListWilliam Boyce and David Garrick, ‘Heart of Oak’, 1760 George Butterworth, The Banks of Green Willow, 1913”

“ANYONE WRITING ABOUT Francis Marion immediately confronts the task of sifting fact from folklore. The mythmaking began with the first and highly embellished biography of him, written in 1809 by Mason L. “Parson” Weems, the same man who fabricated the famous story of George Washington chopping down the cherry tree. The romantic tradition continued with the Walt Disney television series that ran from 1959 to 1961, starring Leslie Nielsen as the Swamp Fox, and took another turn in 2000 with the popular film The Patriot, in which Mel Gibson portrayed a Rambo-like action figure loosely, if inaccurately, based on Marion. As stated on an interpretive marker at Marion’s gravesite in Pineville, South Carolina, much about the Swamp Fox remains obscured by legend, even though his achievements are “significant and real.””

“John XXIII convoked the Second Vatican Council and gave it a pastoral purpose: to change the relationship between the Church and the world, so that the world could come to know its savior and there might be peace among all those whom Christ died to save.””