I Have Not Yet Stopped Shivering

Well, a new decade for us all! 'Tis the season for evaluating our pasts and for making goals for the future. In that spirit, I want to present a couple of "Top Ten" lists.

First, here is the Top Ten list of books that I have read over the past decade. It is not the top ten books written in the past decade, but rather ones that I have read. I'm not so big on reading all the new books, I like to read and re-read books that have timeless authority and that give me a larger vision of life, this world, and God's hand in the lives of his people.

So, without further ado:


10. The Rabbit Proof Fence,

Like A Pressed Flower

INKSPELL, the second in the INKHEART trilogy, is already fascinating in the first few chapters. Cornelia Funke's THE THIEF LORD is among my very favorites, so I went looking to see what else she has available.

INKSPELL is remarkably set simultaneously in two different worlds. Her debt to CS Lewis is obvious, but she doesn't live their as a burglar. Instead she moves into (what seem to me) completely new realms of imagination. Her first world is ours,

Happy Birthday to Two!

Today would be the 110th birthday of CS Lewis and the 90th birthday of Madelein L'Engle, both among the ten best Christian writers of fiction in the 20th century.

In THE LAST BATTLE, after the true Narnians all enter the stable and find it bigger on the inside than it was on the outside, they move off to discover this new and surprising land. They meet up with Susan and Peter, who had not been with them when they entered but had come here directly from another world.

How Can The Gods Meet Us?

I am in actual physical pain, wanting to quote sections out of Till We Have Faces. But to make any quotes from it makes no sense unless one reads them in the context of the book as a whole. They make sense in their rightful place in the story. Not out here in the cold airless space of the blogosphere.

It is the story of Orual; to be exact it is the story of the complaint that she prepared to bring before the gods, to accuse the gods.

Thick and Dark Like Blood

Rosa recently had an interesting post in which she talked a little about Hildegard von Bingen. I have never read Hildegard's writings, but I have listened to some of her music. It is lovely and enchanting, but also somewhat disorienting and unnerving. It does not calm my fears; it does not comfort me; it does not say, "I'm OK, you're OK." In a word it is holy music in exactly the same way that most of the Christian music we hear on the radio is not holy music.

Her music reminds me of CS Lewis's TILL WE HAVE FACES.

Fire-Featuring Heaven

Here is part (slightly revised for this blog) of an article I wrote a few years ago for CHRISTIANITY AND SOCIETY JOURNAL. I wanted to include it here in part because it has to do with a sonnet written by Gerard Manley Hopkins: Spelt From Sibyl's Leaves. This sonnet does not conform to the standard of five stressed syllables per line; it goes for eight. Yet he wrote it as a sonnet and it has been generally so accepted. There is room, even in so strict a form as the sonnet, for some deviation.

Reading Difficult Poetry as a Christian Endeavor
Tears began welling up in my oldest daughter's eyes.