The English Standard Version of the Holy Bible is now fully online.
Free access to the ESV Online is now available by signing up at www.esvonline.org. Users are able to customize their own interface, highlight and mark verse numbers, add bookmark ribbons, search the ESV text, and manage personal notes. The free version also includes a variety of daily reading plans and devotional calendars.
Author P.D. James has a book about detective fiction with an excerpt here. She writes:
And why murder? The central mystery of a detective story need not indeed involve a violent death, but murder remains the unique crime and it carries an atavistic weight of repugnance, fascination and fear. Readers are likely to remain more interested in which of Aunt Ellie’s heirs laced her nightly cocoa with arsenic than in who stole her diamond necklace while she was safely holidaying in Bournemouth. Dorothy L. Sayers’s Gaudy Night doesn’t contain a murder, although there is an attempt at one, and the death at the heart of Frances Fyfield’s Blood from Stone is a spectacular and mysterious suicide. But, except in those novels of espionage which are primarily concerned with treachery, it remains rare for the central crime in an orthodox mystery to be other than the ultimate crime for which no human reparation can ever be made.
The Rabbit Room artists are holding a creativity conference in August. They are calling it Hutchmoot, and Walter Wangerin, Jr. is coming. Wow. I need to pray about attending this.
“If I can’t stand up and show you how the gospel is smashing my idols, you’re never going to believe this stuff is real.” Tullian Tchividjian of Coral Ridge PCA is preaching on Jesus’ sufficiency, claiming the hard truths of the gospel for himself. He says, “I never realize how reliant I had become on human approval and acceptance until it was taken away from me.” This is real Christianity.
Jesus + Nothing = Everything (Part 5) from Coral Ridge on Vimeo.
Stuart Brown talks about the science of play and why we need to keep playing as adults.
Be sure to vote for BwB as the best blog by a heretic on The Crescat.
Like great men before me (Lars, for one), I am taking leave of the blog for a few days. In the words of Longfellow:
The Landlord ended thus his tale,
Then rising took down from its nail
The sword that hung there, dim with dust
And cleaving to its sheath with rust,
And said, “This sword was in the fight.”
The Poet seized it, and exclaimed,
“It is the sword of a good knight,
Though homespun was his coat-of-mail;
What matter if it be not named
Joyeuse, Colada, Durindale,
Excalibar, or Aroundight,
Or other name the books record?
Your ancestor, who bore this sword
As Colonel of the Volunteers,
Mounted upon his old gray mare,
Seen here and there and everywhere,
To me a grander shape appears
Than old Sir William, or what not,
Clinking about in foreign lands
With iron gauntlets on his hands,
And on his head an iron pot!”
All laughed; the Landlord’s face grew red
As his escutcheon on the wall;
He could not comprehend at all
The drift of what the Poet said;
For those who had been longest dead
Were always greatest in his eyes;
And be was speechless with surprise
To see Sir William’s pluméd head
Brought to a level with the rest,
And made the subject of a jest.
The City, a publication of Houston Baptist University, has its Spring edition out using zmags.com as a delivery platform. Read it here, and note the poem, “Fairy Tale Logic” by A.E. Stallings.
Rachel Starr Thomson has a good interview with Jeffrey Overstreet in connection with a blog tour on his book, Raven’s Ladder. Here’s a portion:
Rachel: You’ve pointed out before that there are some amazing writers working in fantasy, some real depth and artistic merit. Why does the genre still get such a bad rap?
Jeffrey: Well, trashy book covers don’t help. And in a consumer-driven society, people will exploit their audiences by fashioning their work to appeal to our baser appetites. Thus, most fantasy takes from Tolkien the violence, the epic battles, the grotesque monsters, but they don’t carry on the grand and glorious ideals that stand in such stark contrast to the darkness.
Our imaginations are more easily dazzled by perversion, by what is lurid and twisted and shocking, than by what is true and beautiful. Beauty requires us to do some work to comprehend it. In our busy culture, where so much is competing for our attention, whatever is loud and shocking will win out. So a lot of fantasy writers and illustrators, as in any genre, exaggerate whatever will grab people’s attention.
But I also think that as people get older, they feel threatened by the mystery of fairy tales. They grow to prefer portrayals of a world that they can understand and control. So they write off fairy tales as childish, because their ego has a desire to feel very grown up, sophisticated, and in control. Not me. I like Madeleine L’Engle’s perspective: I’m 39, but I’m also 5, and 7, and 14, and 21.
Read the interview in part one, part two, and part three.
Links to the many reviews are here. And the same blog tour has coordinated other reviews of books I’m interested in. Andrew Peterson’s book North or Be Eaten! was reviewed by the blogger squad here. Athol Dickson’s book Lost Mission was reviewed here.
“Poetry should be rather like a coranto, short and nimbly-lofty, than a dull lesson of a day long.” Patrick Kurp talks about poetry a bit.