Perhaps by doing the work of Truth and Goodness, which too many people reject out of hand.
All posts by Phil
Interview with J.C. Hallman
The Thinklings have a good, long interview with the author of The Chess Artist: Genius, Obsession, and the World’s Oldest Game and The Devil Is a Gentleman. In the second book, Hallman says he toured the religions of the world with William James as a type of guide. “It’s kind of a revisitation of the basic thinking of William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience,” he says. Is chess a religion? Find out in this interview.
Rode the One Hundred
Marvin Olasky has listed his favorite 100 books from the past seven years. I wonder if he read “The Charge of the Light Brigade” during those years.
The Dark River by JXIIH
The splash made two summers ago by The Traveler from John Twelve Hawks (JXIIH) is about to return with his next book, The Dark River. From the publicity poster anonymously pasted on a brick wall outside Brandywine Books International Headquarters and Yogurt Emporium:
In a post-9/11 world, The Traveler struck home with its disturbing yet familiar themes of state-sponsored paranoia, the dismantling of individual privacy and the ever-increasing number of personal liberties a society is willing to relinquish in return for a sense of security. Picking up where The Traveler left off, The Dark River follows the Harlequin warrior Maya and her charge, Gabriel Corrigan – one of the fabled and endangered mystics known as Travelers – from New York’s Chinatown to a thousand year old Irish monastery, from the catacombs in Rome to the ruins of WWII bunkers in Berlin, as they race to stop the Tabula from unleashing a powerful weapon of surveillance that will change the balance of power across the globe.
A Publishers Weekly reviewer recommends reading The Traveler before diving in to The Dark River, which I don’t plan to do in order to give this book a chance to stand on its own. Maybe that’s a bad idea.
The Six Hundred
“Who hath a book
Hath friends at hand . . .” quoth Sherry about a mysterious league of 600.
“Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred. . . .
When can their glory fade?”
Just What Is Captivating?
Writer Agnieszka Tennant, a self-described feminist, doesn’t like the Eldredge book on women, Captivating: Unveiling the Mystery of a Woman’s Soul. She says it’s simplistic. The gist of the book, she believes, is the stuff of little girl dreams: “Every woman longs for three things: to be swept up into a romance, to play an irreplaceable role in a great adventure, and to be the Beauty of the story.” Ms. Tennant writes:
But there’s so much more. Beauty draws blood to the heart and speeds up the pulse; sometimes it evokes repentance. I wish more Christians were comfortable with its pull. Too often, beauty raptures us so forcibly that we fear it will lead to temptation. So we avert our eyes. What if we turned our ecstasy into worship?
I don’t get it. Yes, beauty can be enrapturing, and since we’re talking about feminine beauty, not the gorgeous melodies of Dvorak’s New World Symphony or the rich landscapes of Albert Bierstadt, I will say that my wife is simply enchanting. Captivating, even. For more common ground on profound female beauty, I remember feeling quite moved by a scene with Grace Kelly in the middle of Rear Window, and I remember thinking I might jump through the screen to rescue a vulnerable Ingrid Bergman in Notorious. Call me impressionable, but I was captivated by them for a time.
But I don’t think I get the point of Ms. Tennant assertion about worship or about a deeper beauty than advocated in Captivating. What do you think?
Norwegian Wins World’s Largest Literary Prize
From the AP–“Norwegian author Per Petterson won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award on Thursday for his novel, Out Stealing Horses, which charts how a child’s death and a family breakdown end a teenager’s innocence and haunt him into old age.” Out Stealing Horses is favorably reviewed here by The Complete Review.
A Worthy Post
Ed Pettit is rereading his reviews. “Worthiness isn’t such a bad trait . . .”
Tibetan Singing Bowl ‘Like Something on Oprah’
Read about neopagan meditation in public schools. And I don’t want to hear about the separation of church and state, because this obviously does not have anything to do with church.
Why Not a Dangerous Book for Girls?
Tony Woodlief, author of “Raising Wild Boys into Men,” blogs about a response to The Dangerous Book for Boys in Reason magazine. The response asked why the book was not for kids. Why boys only? Woodlief says give it to the girls who want to read it. “To complain about titles of books, it seems, is to give far too little credit to these brave little girls, wherever they are hiding, who want to blow things up and learn how to spit,” he blogs.
(via Kevin Holtsberry)