For example, he [William Godwin] was opposed to marriage. He was not aware that his preachings from this text were but theory and wind; he supposed he was in earnest in imploring people to live together without marrying, until Shelley furnished him a working model of his scheme and a practical example to analyze, but applying the principle in his own family; the matter took a different and surprising aspect then.

Not one to sit on his duff when justice can be served, Captain America begins preparing to do his thing. "Wait," Black Widow says. "You might wanna sit this one out, Cap. These guys are basically gods." To which, the Captain replies, "There's only one God, ma'am. And I don't think he dresses like that." And out of the plane Captain leaps, his fall to earth surely cushioned by his ideological purity.

"...They even make virtues out of 'humility' and 'turning the other cheek' and 'loving everybody.' Because it alleviates their guilt. It's much nicer to pretend to yourself that your passivity makes you a saint, rather than just another gutless puke who won't take a stand for what's right."

HUNTER: A Thriller

They say that anything worth doing is worth doing badly. This is as true of filmmaking as it is of anything, and it's the final thing that I'd say to a Christian who wants to be the next Spielberg or Soderberg. If you want to make films, then make films. Make them badly. Make them with iPhones and flip cameras, edit them on a laptop or in a computer lab at your middle school. Make lots of them and don't worry about whether or not they're good until you've made 10 or 20. Even then, don't worry when they're bad. Look for the things you've done well and figure out how to apply those lessons to the entire next project.

The exhibition "Shelley's Ghost: The Afterlife of a Poet," now at the New York Public Library, is the sort of exhibit that doesn't necessarily tell you anything you didn't already know about this poet's short and messy life. What it does do, by virtue of placing the manuscripts and artifacts into a relatively confined space (the smallish gallery to the left of the main exhibition room on the ground floor of the Library), is give us the facts in a more concentrated and vivid way than we might otherwise receive them. The exhibit demonstrates, with dramatic succinctness, that Percy Bysshe Shelley and some of those he hung out with were pretty [expletive deleted] people.

[Sendak] says he was greatly influenced by his father, who told the sickly child stories when he was bedridden. They weren't pretty stories -- they were real-life and vividly imagined tales from his father's life as a boy living in a little Jewish shtetl in Poland. ``What I liked about his stories ... they were real and true, and he could tell us them without cleaning them up.''

"Most of my important books are threaded with the Holocaust. I try not to make it obvious and bang the drum, but it's there. My whole life was the Holocaust, unfortunately. And Brundibar seems to be maybe the place where I can stop and bring peace to myself and the subject. It's the perfect subject: of children who lived through the worst things, who were tough, who sang and then were sent to Auschwitz to die.''

Simply put, we need many, many more e-books like this one. Walker writes from a distinctly Christian worldview, but is able to avoid so much of the sentimentalist and moralistic errors of the majority of Christian fiction. This is a novel about the law and about grace. This is a novel about forgiveness and justification by faith, and about unmerited favor. That Walker is able to accomplish these things without being preachy and actually telling a compelling story is a testament to his growth as a writer and storyteller.