Writings

WASHINGTON - The U.S. ambassador to Malta, an important Roman Catholic supporter of President Obama, said Sunday that he would resign after a State Department report criticized him for spending too much time writing and speaking about his religious beliefs. In letters to Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Douglas Kmiec said he would step down Aug. 15. He said in an interview that no one pressured him to leave. Kmiec was a well-known conservative law professor and commentator before taking the job in 2009.

"But have you actually read her writings?" That was trump question that supporters of Lani Guinier would ask. And, tactically, it was a safe one, because just about the only people who read articles in law review journals are law students doing research, and lawyers working in the field who have a lot of spare time (or frequent bouts of insomnia.) A friend of mine who was intimately involved in the organization of the Clinton administration Justice Department said he had never read her writings.

When Rozalind Davis' sister, Yvette, died of a drug overdose three years ago, Davis felt she had few ways to deal with the grief. But Davis, of Kennett Square, has discovered a way to ease the pain: writing. Phyllis McFarlin had spent most of her 59 years rarely speaking unless spoken to. McFarlin, who was born and raised in Malvern, said she had little confidence. That changed after she learned to read and write. Both Davis and McFarlin said the adult literacy program offered through the agencies and libraries that make up the Chester County Adult Literacy Consortium have done much for them, including turning them into published authors.

Gloucester County prosecutors said yesterday that Robert "Mudman" Simon, the Warlocks motorcycle gang member charged with the murder of a South Jersey police sergeant, has made admissions of guilt in at least one letter bearing his name and sent from the prison where he's being held. Now, prosecutors and investigators want Simon to complete a writing sample so they can match his style and prose against those found in the letter. "These writings contain certain statements which I believe are incriminatory of defendant Simon in the murder case," county investigator Alex Illas said in a motion filed yesterday in Gloucester County Superior Court.

In a lifespan of just 39 years, Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer lived the kind of grand drama that becomes legendary. A scion of German affluence, he became a pastor, an outspoken critic of Nazism, and a co-conspirator in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. He was hanged in a Nazi concentration camp less than a month before the end of World War II. But Bonhoeffer's legacy is more than the fascinating story of a martyr's death in a time and place where Christian heroes were few. It is his writings, which insist that authentic faith entails courageous service to the needy and oppressed, that have placed him among the most important religious thinkers of the 20th century.

A Montgomery County Court judge refused Friday to dismiss charges against accused child-killer James Lee Troutman despite defense claims that writings seized by police from the defendant's jail cell last year prejudiced the case. After the body of 9-year-old Skyler Kauffman was found at a Souderton apartment complex in May 2011, Troutman was arrested and charged with first- and second-degree murder, kidnapping, and rape. He is held in the Montgomery County prison. Part of his time has been spent writing down his thoughts for his lawyers, psychiatrist, and another inmate.

State Rep. Daylin Leach decided yesterday to permanently pull the plug on his Web site that had catalogued years' worth of his humor columns that some readers found funny and others criticized as insensitive and racy. The move - announced in a brief letter on his site, www.leachvent.com - comes a day after the Montgomery County Democrat said he would have his blog back up and running as soon as he found a way to secure it from possible hackers. "After much thought, I have decided to take this site permanently offline," Leach wrote on his site.

A Montgomery County Court judge refused Friday to dismiss charges against accused child-killer James Lee Troutman despite defense claims that writings seized by police from the defendant's jail cell last year prejudiced the case. After the body of 9-year-old Skyler Kauffman was found at a Souderton apartment complex in May 2011, Troutman was arrested and charged with first- and second-degree murder, kidnapping, and rape. He is held in the Montgomery County prison. Part of his time has been spent writing down his thoughts for his lawyers, psychiatrist, and another inmate.

Benjamin Franklin once advised: If you would not be forgotten, As soon as you are dead and rotten, Either write things worthy reading, Or do things worth the writing. Franklin did both. His "doings" and writings are combined in a charming, candid autobiography that takes us from his birth in 1706 to his emergence as a diplomat in 1757. There it breaks off, although he lived until 1790. In his lifetime, Franklin was many things: scientist, scholar, inventor, philosopher, printer, publisher and ladies' man. He tells of both his successes and his "erratum" with wit, wisdom and even a bit of humility.

In its mission to draw inspiration from black culture in Philadelphia, an arts organization is offering its yearly breakout conversation among artists, writers and citizens. The 28th annual Celebration of Black Writing, which began Monday and continues until June 2, attracts creative people from many realms - performance and spoken-word artists, authors, editors, journalists, musicians and other cultural craftspeople. Its events cover a wide window of African-American artistic expression and technique, including performances, readings and film screenings, chick lit, advocacy journalism, urban fiction and black mental health.

As the common thinking goes, Philadelphia's suburbs are home to just the sort of moderate Republican who is comfortable with Mitt Romney: well-educated, well-off, and well-disposed to his business background. But if Romney's last major challenger, Rick Santorum, is to secure the home-state primary win he describes as crucial to his campaign, the former Pennsylvania senator can't afford to count those suburbs out. So far, local Republican leaders say, Santorum has shown signs of doing just that.

By Jeanette Winterson Grove Press. 224 pp. $25 Reviewed by Joelle Farrell In her breakthrough novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit , Jeanette Winterson called the coming-out, coming-of-age story "semiautobiographical. " The fictional bits, it turns out, were those characters who helped Jeanette, the teenage main character who suffered under her Pentecostal adoptive mother. In real life, Winterson had no such allies. Winterson titled her new memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

David Woods is a Philadelphia writer When the body of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar is brought before the Romans, does the bard have them say, "Who dunnit?" No, he has Mark Antony deliver the eloquent "Friends, Romans, Countrymen" speech. And the Roman poet Horace showed his lyrical skill with: "Pick today's fruits, not relying on the future in the slightest. " Carpe Diem . He did not, you will note, say, "Have a nice day. " In both cases, the writers knew a simple truth: that language matters.

JERUSALEM - He's considered to be one of the greatest scientists of all time. But Sir Isaac Newton was also an influential theologian who applied a scientific approach to the study of scripture, Hebrew, and Jewish mysticism. Now Israel's national library, an unlikely owner of a vast trove of Newton's writings, has digitized his theological collection - 7,500 pages in Newton's own handwriting - and put it online. Among the yellowed texts are Newton's famous prediction of the apocalypse in 2060.

A Montgomery County Court judge refused Friday to dismiss charges against accused child-killer James Lee Troutman despite defense claims that writings seized by police from the defendant's jail cell last year prejudiced the case. After the body of 9-year-old Skyler Kauffman was found at a Souderton apartment complex in May 2011, Troutman was arrested and charged with first- and second-degree murder, kidnapping, and rape. He is held in the Montgomery County prison. Part of his time has been spent writing down his thoughts for his lawyers, psychiatrist, and another inmate.

A Montgomery County Court judge refused Friday to dismiss charges against accused child-killer James Lee Troutman despite defense claims that writings seized by police from the defendant's jail cell last year prejudiced the case. After the body of 9-year-old Skyler Kauffman was found at a Souderton apartment complex in May 2011, Troutman was arrested and charged with first- and second-degree murder, kidnapping, and rape. He is held in the Montgomery County prison. Part of his time has been spent writing down his thoughts for his lawyers, psychiatrist, and another inmate.

* THE FIRM. 10 tonight, NBC10. PASADENA, Calif. - You might not think of a TV show about a lawyer who's on the run from the mob - and possibly his own partners - as showcasing the benefits of a legal education, but a Temple law degree's worked out pretty well for Lukas Reiter, who developed an update of John Grisham's The Firm for NBC. And Reiter, who's spent more years working as a writer on shows such as "The Practice" and...

Andrew McCarthy - St. Elmo's Fire , Weekend at Bernie's , Pretty in Pink, Mulholland Drive - never actually left acting. He's still at it. Very much so. But along the way, the reluctant former Brat Packer, now 49, picked up another gig: as a foremost U.S. travel writer, with credits in places like the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, Travel+Leisure, Bon Appétit, and Slate. He'll talk about his singular career track - make that tracks - at the Philadelphia Inquirer Travel Show from noon to 1 p.m. Saturday at the Pennsylvania Convention Center.