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Authors, Fiction

CT Book of the Year: Evangellyfish

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Christianity Today has announced their book awards for 2013, and their fiction pick is Douglas Wilson’s satiric novel, Evangellyfish.

Wilson says he wants to “intelligent readers” to find his book “funny, dark, and redemptive.”

Joel Miller has a short interview with Wilson on his Patheos blog, in which he asks: “I wonder about the characters’ moral literacy. The cast is primarily Christian but many behave entirely other. How do we land in a world wherein self-gratification seems the highest virtue? And is that our real state of affairs?”

Wilson replies, “Let me start with the last question. No, it is not our real state of affairs across the board, but it is our real state of affairs in certain quadrants of the church. A few years ago, I got a rejection letter for this manuscript because the set-up for the plot was so ‘out there.’ After having received that rejection letter, the Ted Haggard scandal broke, which put my puny efforts into the shade. That made me happy.”

Poetry

“Man’s Maker was made man”

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Man’s Maker was made man

that the Bread might be hungry,

the Fountain thirst,

the Light sleep,

the Way be tired from the journey;

that Strength might be made weak,

that Life might die.

~ St. Augustine (via Relief Journal, Painting by Guido Reni) Continue reading “Man’s Maker was made man” →

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Merry Christmas

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Candle in Abstract

Tina Clarke’s Christmas Candle in colored ink

Sailing Under the Christmas Sail

Christmas Sailboat by Delilah Smith

The Three Wise Guys

The Three Wise Guys by Brenda York

Ending with something completely different:

The Single Sister's House

“The Moravian Single Sisters’ House on Church Street was used as a combination dormitory, industrial and religious center for single women within the community.”

Creative Writing

Family Reunion: Advent Ghosts 2012

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“Not this again!” William growls.

The traditional roasted chicken and dressing, gravy, green beans, and corn sit steaming on the table while his wife glides about the room, bringing honeyed ham, broccoli casserole, rolls and muffins, tomato and squash soups—everything as overabundantly perfect as it had been every Christmas. Beautiful, but ethereal.

His sons and daughter, their bodies scorched from the fire three years ago, quietly urge him to eat “to forget this weary world.”

Eyes burning, he throws a coat over his pajamas and stumbles into the icy street. His wife follows with a cup of flaming cider.

(Index of all stories submitted to the Advent Ghosts Storytelling Fest)

Bookselling

Best of 2012

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Sam Storms has an 11 book list of his ten best books of 2012, included two books on, if not actually by, Jonathan Edwards. He also worries that D. A. Carson’s The Intolerance of Tolerance will not find the readers who need it.

Crossway has a butt full of recommendations for serious readers (I’m sorry. I meant to type heart-full, but a Twitter trend got in my way #replaceheartwithbutt So juvenile.) Crossway’s staff recommend serious titles each, from John Frame’s The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God to Ender’s Game. They also asked their authors to recommend reading for the coming year, and of course after removing all of the self-promotion, they had a pretty good list.

For more non-fiction recommendations, Tony Reinke of Desiring God Ministry has a list of twelve.

If you haven’t perused the fun novels, etc. at The Rabbit Room, you should.

Authors, Religion

Tolkien Takes Lewis to Task on Marriage Laws

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“My dear L.,” Tolkien writes in a draft letter from 1943. “I have been reading your booklet Christian Behavior. I have never felt happy about your view of Christian ‘policy’ with regard to divorce.” Tolkien did not send this letter to his friend, C.S. Lewis, but it was found and published after his death.

[Y]ou observe that you are really committed (with the Christian Church as a whole) to the view that Christian marriage—monogamous, permanent, rigidly “faithful”—is in fact the truth about sexual behavior for all humanity: this is the only road of total health (including sex in its proper place) for all men and women. That it is dissonant with men’s present sex-psychology does not disprove this, as you see: “I think it is the instinct that has gone wrong,” you say. Indeed if this were not so, it would be an intolerable injustice to impose permanent monogamy even on Christians.

…

Toleration of divorce—if a Christian does tolerate it—is toleration of a human abuse, which it requires special local and temporary circumstances to justify (as does the toleration of usury)—if indeed either divorce or genuine usury should be tolerated at all, as a matter of expedient policy.

Jake Meador discusses this disagreement more in his article for Christianity Today.

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How to Roast a Goose

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Maybe in your Christmas reading, you have wondered about cooking a goose. You’ve read about the Cratchit’s Christmas dinner: “There never was such a goose. Bob said he didn’t believe there ever was such a goose cooked. Its tenderness and flavour, size and cheapness, were the themes of universal admiration. Eked out by apple-sauce and mashed potatoes, it was a sufficient dinner for the whole family; indeed, as Mrs Cratchit said with great delight (surveying one small atom of a bone upon the dish), they hadn’t ate it all at last. Yet every one had had enough, and the youngest Cratchits in particular, were steeped in sage and onion to the eyebrows.” Here, Isabella Beeton writes on how to choose and prepare this bird.

Don’t forget the Smoking Bishop drink, which is not the same as the cheese Stinking Bishop. Honestly, I don’t think I would like either of them.

Authors

W.H. Auden, Tolkien Fan

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“[W.H.] Auden became a close friend of Tolkien’s and an ardent champion of his work, defending him in public and in print against a host of early skeptics; he was one of the first serious writers (along with C. S. Lewis) to ask whether Tolkien’s narratives of heroic quests and imaginary worlds could be considered something more than simply escapist reading,” writes Erin Overbey at The New Yorker

Auden praises Tolkien for succeeding where Milton failed, that is in showing an absolutely powerful God who has allowed us to reject him.