Category Archives: Authors

Authors

R.I.P., Walter Wangerin, 1944-2021

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The Rabbit Room has announced that the great Walter Wangerin, Jr. passed into glory yesterday, after a long battle with cancer. Article here; I haven’t been able to find much other information.

In my humble opinion, Wangerin’s The Book of the Dun Cow is one of the truly great works, not only of Christian fantasy, but of any fiction of any kind. I never loved any of Wangerin’s other works as well as I loved TBOTDC, but that book is so wonderful all by itself that it ought to secure its author’s standing as a great master until Our Lord returns.

He was a Lutheran, by the way.

Authors, Uncategorized

They Drag Us into Trouble, But What Can We Do?

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No one believes he is living by lies. We think a particular disagreement is inconsequential or that it isn’t our issue. We think we aren’t the ones to speak out, because reasons.

A voice from 1974 calls to us and everyone in our century:

There was a time when we dared not rustle a whisper. But now we write and read samizdat [banned literature distributed in secret] and, congregating in the smoking rooms of research institutes, heartily complain to each other of all they are muddling up, of all they are dragging us into! There’s that unnecessary bravado around our ventures into space, against the backdrop of ruin and poverty at home; and the buttressing of distant savage regimes; and the kindling of civil wars; and the ill-thought-out cultivation of Mao Zedong (at our expense to boot)—in the end we’ll be the ones sent out against him, and we’ll have to go, what other option will there be? And they put whomever they want on trial, and brand the healthy as mentally ill—and it is always “they,” while we are—helpless.

This is how Solzhenitsyn begins “Live Not by Lies,” which he released the day he was arrested, a day before his exile. “We are approaching the brink,” he says, “already a universal spiritual demise is upon us; a physical one is about to flare up and engulf us and our children, while we continue to smile sheepishly and babble:

‘But what can we do to stop it? We haven’t the strength.’”

He says maybe civil disobedience is beyond us. Maybe how the Czechs stood up to their government is too much. What we can do, at the very least, is to reject lies.

“Even if all is covered by lies, even if all is under their rule, let us resist in the smallest way: Let their rule hold not through me!”

Authors, Bookselling

Buy my books. Someday they’ll be worth this much

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Dale Nelson drew my attention to this book offering at AbeBooks.com. It’s an original review copy of C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength (one of my favorite novels in the world), autographed by the author himself to George Orwell and his wife.

Posted price: $30,000.

I’m sure some of our elite blog readers are in a position to purchase this book, and then donate it to the Marion Wade Center or some other worthy institution.

I wish we had a referral arrangement with AbeBooks, as we do with Amazon, so we could get a piece of that action.

In case you’re wondering what Orwell thought of the book, he called it “worth reading,” but was not in love with it.

If you’re on a budget, you can get the book slightly more inexpensively here. We do get some of that.

Authors, Non-fiction

Solzhenitsyn, Now More than Ever?

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A recently released collection of essays from the University of Notre Dame Press on the work and thought of Solzhenitsyn, Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: The Russian Soul and the West, makes this point, among others, as it aims to provide a fuller view of the man while in the process making the case for why not just his work, but indeed his counterintuitively Russian worldview, may be exactly what the West needs to survive.

Perhaps this painful situation is necessary to recover a higher order. It is an unpopular opinion held by Solzhenitsyn. It is, to the point of cliché, a profoundly “Russian” idea. As Joseph Pearce notes in his contribution to the collection, quoting an interview he conducted with Solzhenitsyn:

In the West there is a widespread feeling that this is masochism, that if we highly value suffering this is masochism. On the contrary, it is a significant bravery when we respect suffering and understand what burdens it places on our soul.

Jeremy Kee reviews a new collection of essays on Solzhenitsyn for the Kirk Center.
Authors, Uncategorized

Ancient wisdom

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Many long years ago, in 2002, I gave my very first lecture on the Vikings at Mayville State University in Mayville, ND. The invitation came thanks to my friend Dale Nelson, of the English Department. That culturally significant moment was recorded for posterity, and the video has just been posted at YouTube, as you see above.

The first time I saw this video, some time after the talk, I was impressed with how fat I looked. Now I’m impressed with how young I look.

I can’t guarantee I still stand behind all the opinions I express in this talk. One lives, translates, and learns.

A little over half an hour.

Authors

25 Minutes on C.S. Lewis on BBC Four

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Here’s a segment on BBC Four’s Great Lives program on C.S. Lewis. Suzannah Lipscomb, a historian, says she has not heard Lewis’s voice prior to this, calling it more “plumby” than she had imagined. She talks with Matthew Parris and Malcolm Guite about his faith, books, appearance, his marriage, and how he very much valued his privacy. (via Twitter)

Authors, Fiction, Religion

‘Rings of Love’

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The other day somebody on F*cebook shared a fine article on J. R. R. Tolkien from the archives (2002) of Touchstone Magazine. It’s about love and happens to have been written by Dale Nelson, a Tolkien scholar and a close personal friend of mine:

Tolkien told one of his sons about his young love for Edith in a letter, written after her death. “I met the Lúthien Tinúviel of my own personal ‘romance’ with her long dark hair, fair face and starry eyes, and beautiful voice” in 1908, when he was 16 and she was 19. Very soon after they married, he was captivated by his wife’s dancing, for him alone, when he was an army officer on leave from the Great War, in 1917, and they slipped away to “a woodland glade filled with hemlocks” in Yorkshire. And that moment was the origin of the myth of Beren and Lúthien, Tolkien wrote to another of their sons.

Read the whole thing here.

Authors

Pit Orwell against Hemingway, Englishman Wins

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John Rossi compares George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway, noting the similarity of their styles and differences in career and influence.

Although made famous by his two political allegories, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell’s mastery of English prose shows best in his essays. In “A Hanging,” and “Shooting an Elephant,” Orwell produced little morality tales filled with vivid concrete images.  . . . However, it was through his essays and his political journalism that Orwell left his most lasting mark. “Politics and the English Language” became a kind of Bible for a generation of political writers, with its simple rules for good writing.

Hemingway is largely unread today except for short stories, and he is easy to parody. In fact, in some ways he was parodying himself after World War II. His novel Across the River and Into the Trees—E.B. White spoofed it with “Across the Street and Into the Grill”—is an example of the worst excesses of Hemingway’s prose. 

I remember thinking, as a young man, that my prose style was sparse like Hemingway’s, but it’s closer to the truth that my style is sparse as in lack of effort. And lest I slip into musing over my failures, let me ask what you’re read of Hemingway and Orwell. I remember reading a Hemingway’s short story in college and getting a lower grade on the analysis than I expected. I felt I had too little to go on to judge the meaning of the story. Still bitter about it.

I don’t think I’ve read anything by quotes by Orwell, though I may have seen an adaptation of Animal Farm.

Authors, Publishing

Baen Books under attack

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As you may be aware, I have been and am one of Baen Books’ authors (in electronic form in recent years). Going back to the time of the late Jim Baen himself, Baen Books has always honored the classic view of First Amendment freedom — they publish authors who run the political gamut from me (a Christian conservative) to Eric Flint, who is a Communist. All Jim ever cared about was telling a good story, and his successor Toni Weisskopf has carried on that tradition, in a way every American should approve.

Today we learned, via bestselling author Larry Correia, that Baen has come under attack as a threat to national security. (Cautions for language.) The precise target of the attack was Baen’s Bar, a free-wheeling online forum in which readers and authors interact. The Bar has always been an unrestrained sort of place, where people felt free to engage in hyperbole and “hold my beer and watch this.” Today, of course, you’re only allowed to hyperbolize if you have a government-issued Hyperbole Permit, so an effort is being made to close it down.

Because nothing is more offensive to a Leftist than any talk of revolution.

Anyway, if you’d like to stand up for free speech, you might want to buy a book from Baen. One of my e-books, even.

Authors

Ravi Zacharias Stained His Name Forever

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I hate this so much.

After news broke of women accusing the late apologist Ravi Zacharias of sexual and spiritual abuse, the ministry he founded, Ravi Zacharias International Ministries, hired an team to investigate the claims. They released the report this week. It has details I don’t want to think about or repeat here.

But people have been able to talk about this for a few months now with some humble, biblical reflection. Artist and author Jackie Hill Perry notes that “orthodox teaching” is not “proof of righteous living.” Demons could teach us the Bible accurately and King David understood the prophet Nathan’s parable before recognizing himself in it.

https://twitter.com/JackieHillPerry/status/1360217209872785410

This is true. Anyone who was inspired by the Bible they heard in Zacharias’s messages or was brought to faith in connection to them suffers no loss in the life they now have. But when you’re able to hear how a man spiritually abused his victims, how they prayed beforehand, how some didn’t come forward because who would believe them, then you can easily start to wonder if the truth you hear from such a man is, in fact, true. Maybe it’s off somehow. Maybe the conviction you should doubt is not your own, but his.

Joe Carter, who summarized the details I linked to above, draws it down to this. “I believe it was because of a dangerous mix of inflated entitlement, unwarranted secrecy, and cheap grace.”

On entitlement, he says, “They begin to think the sacrifices they make for the job should be offset by making allowances for their behavior—including sinful behavior—because they are ‘Great Men.’ They begin to develop a sense that their great achievements for the kingdom entitles them to the spoils that are due all such Great Men.

“It is this Great Man mentality, not celebrity (which many disgraced leaders don’t have), that tends to lead to their downfall.”

Let me add more to this by bringing in Rachael Denhollander’s tweets. You should remember her name as one of many victims in large abuse scandal in U.S. gymnastics. She has become a voice against the abuses of powerful people in the subsequent years.

Speaking to Christian leaders who are decrying Zacharias this week, she says their voices were needed in 2017 when the first accusation came forward. That’s when it would have cost something to call for accountability.