Category Archives: Authors

At least one new Lewis essay

December 15, 2017 Lars Walker Leave a comment

Over at Christianity Today, Stephanie L. Derrick presents the news that she has found two previously forgotten articles, at least one of which is certainly by C. S. Lewis. Both were printed in The Strand, a preeminent English magazine famous for being the first publisher of most of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. The first article, “A Christmas Sermon for Pagans,” is certainly by Lewis. The second, “Cricketer’s Progress” is signed “Clive Hamilton,” one of Lewis’s known pseudonyms, and has certain Lewisian qualities. However, Lewis’s oft-stated complete apathy toward anything having to do with sports makes me doubt the attribution.

How did these articles remain unknown so long? Derrick explains:

Part of the reason that I found these articles in 2013 is timing. Soon after Lewis died in 1963, his posthumous editor Walter Hooper cataloged all of the Lewis publications he could find (Lewis not keeping a record of his own). The Strand, however, wasn’t indexed until 1983, well after Lewis’s official bibliography was published.

Authors, Religion

A Christian’s Final Rest

December 15, 2017 Phil Leave a comment

Today rebroadcast of Renewing Your Mind asks, “What is the blessed hope? Today, R.C. Sproul explains what we can expect when we reach our ultimate destination.”

From Ligonier’s Flickr Photostream (2010)

BTW, several short books by Dr. Sproul are still available for free for Kindle and audio. They are his Critical Question series, great tools for sound teaching that won’t overwhelm you. Titles include What is Repentance?, What is the Trinity?, How Can I Develop a Christian Conscience?, and Does Prayer Change Things?

Authors, Religion

R.C. Sproul Now Sees the Lord Face to Face

December 14, 2017 Phil Leave a comment

R.C. Sproul (1939-2017) passed away this afternoon at age 78. Go buy three or four of his books for yourself and family.

Stephen Nichols summarizes Dr. Sproul’s life in this post at Ligonier Ministries’ site.

R.C. Sproul was a theologian who served the church. He admired the Reformers not only for the content of their message, but for the way they took that message to the people. They were “battlefield theologians,” as he called them. Many first heard of the five solas of the Reformation through R.C. Sproul’s teaching.

…

R.C. often recalled his first encounter with the God of the Bible. As a new Christian and a freshman in college, he devoured the Bible. One thing stood out from his reading: God is a God who plays for keeps. The Psalms, the story of Uzzah, Genesis 15:17, Mary’s Magnificat, Luke 16:16–17, and, of course, Isaiah 6—the drama of these texts captivated R.C. from the moment he first read them.

May the Lord bless us with 1,000 just like Dr. Sproul in our generation and the next, men and women who will lift up the cross by the power of His Spirit for the perseverance of His kingdom.

Authors, Non-fiction, Religion

New release: ‘The Last Closet,’ by Moira Greyland

December 13, 2017 Lars Walker Leave a comment

The Last Closet

Moira Greyland is the daughter of Marion Zimmer Bradley, the late best-selling feminist sci-fi and fantasy author. A while back I passed along some published revelations about the abusive sexual practices Bradley and her husband indulged in, particularly in regard to their daughter. Just today, Castalia House has released Moira’s book, The Last Closet: The Dark Side of Avalon, in a Kindle edition. [Reviewed here]

Here’s the blurb:

Marion Zimmer Bradley was a bestselling science fiction author, a feminist icon, and was awarded the World Fantasy Award for lifetime achievement. She was best known for the Arthurian fiction novel THE MISTS OF AVALON and for her very popular Darkover series.

She was also a monster.

THE LAST CLOSET: The Dark Side of Avalon is a brutal tale of a harrowing childhood. It is the true story of predatory adults preying on the innocence of children without shame, guilt, or remorse. It is an eyewitness account of how high-minded utopian intellectuals, unchecked by law, tradition, religion, or morality, can create a literal Hell on Earth.

THE LAST CLOSET is also an inspiring story of survival. It is a powerful testimony to courage, to hope, and to faith. It is the story of Moira Greyland, the only daughter of Marion Zimmer Bradley and convicted child molester Walter Breen, told in her own words.

Moira Greyland is a born-again Christian today. I bought her book within minutes of its announcement. This, in my opinion, could be just the book we need at this time in history. If not, it’s a good thing to set the record straight on any day.

Authors

The Author May Be Dead But He Continues to Publish

December 1, 2017 Phil 1 Comment

Here’s a list of new books from dead authors, including an Umberto Eco essay collection taken from L’Espresso magazine, Chronicles of a Liquid Society. Eco “sees with fresh eyes the upheaval in ideological values, the crises in politics, and the unbridled individualism that have become the backdrop of our lives—a ‘liquid’ society in which it’s not easy to find a polestar, though stars and starlets abound.”

Also, Sleep No More: Six Murderous Tales by P.D. James. These are not unpublished stories, but stories written as far back as 1973 that have never been collected.

Authors, Fiction, Religion

Peter De Vries

November 21, 2017 Lars Walker Leave a comment

The other day I recalled – for no reason I can state – a movie I saw in my college days. It was Pete ‘n Tillie, starring Walter Matthau and Carol Burnett. Some friends and I saw it cheap at a second run theater somewhere in Minneapolis. I didn’t like it much.

And yet, having thought of it, I looked it up on Wikipedia. I discovered, to my surprise, that it was based on a novel called Witch’s Milk, by Peter De Vries.

And that reminded me of Peter De Vries. He was a prominent novelist back in those days. A Dutch Calvinist from Chicago, he had served in the OSS in World War II (very hush-hush), and eventually went to the work for the New Yorker, at the invitation of James Thurber.

His Wikipedia article quotes James Bratt, who called him “a secular Jeremiah, a renegade CRC missionary to the smart set.” However, this interesting article from Image Journal describes him as essentially an atheist.

De Vries dwelled in familiar settings because he wanted to dismantle the belief systems that struck him as too smug or self-sufficient. Religion was his enduring target, but he also mocked modern medicine, psychoanalysis, feminism, academia, and the advertising industry.

I’m not really qualified to pass judgment on him. I only read one of his novels, The Glory of the Hummingbird, which left a lasting impression on me, but did not inspire me to read more of his books. He was one of those authors I didn’t feel qualified to grapple with.

The Wikipedia article says all his books were out of print at the time of his death in 1993. I am happy to report that some are now available in Kindle form (like the works of that other brilliant but neglected author, Lars Walker). The Blood of the Lamb is the most famous.

Authors

Richard Adams’s Library Up for Auction

November 21, 2017 Phil 1 Comment

Richard Adams died at the end of 2016. Now his personal library is being prepared for auction.

The auctioneer called his collection “a proper library – not just one to be looked at … There wasn’t a special place for the more valuable books – they weren’t under lock and key, they were there to be enjoyed. I was amazed when I first walked in.”

Authors, Non-fiction

Dennett’s Dizzying Intellect

November 13, 2017 Phil Leave a comment

While he may not repeat a word the meaning of which he is uncertain, Daniel Dennett does exhibit a dizzying intellect. David Bentley Hart reviews his latest book.

The simple truth of the matter is that Dennett is a fanatic: He believes so fiercely in the unique authority and absolutely comprehensive competency of the third-person scientific perspective that he is willing to deny not only the analytic authority, but also the actual existence, of the first-person vantage. At the very least, though, he is an intellectually consistent fanatic, inasmuch as he correctly grasps (as many other physical reductionists do not) that consciousness really is irreconcilable with a coherent metaphysical naturalism. Since, however, the position he champions is inherently ridiculous, the only way that he can argue on its behalf is by relentlessly, and in as many ways as possible, changing the subject whenever the obvious objections are raised.

For what it is worth, Dennett often exhibits considerable ingenuity in his evasions — so much ingenuity, in fact, that he sometimes seems to have succeeded in baffling even himself.

Authors, Poetry

Miłosz: “All I Wanted Was to Get Out”

November 7, 2017 Phil Leave a comment

Someone will read as moral

that the people of Rome or Warsaw

haggle, laugh, make love

as they pass by the martyrs’ pyres.

Someone else will read

of the passing of things human,

of the oblivion

born before the flames have died. (from “Campo dei Fiori“)

David Pryce-Jones reviews a laudatory biography of the great Polish poet Czesław Miłosz and the difficult decisions he had to make as his homeland of overrun by Soviets. He chose to write and compromise where he needed to in order to write.

His biographer notes his depression, even at least one moment of despair.

Half a deadpan paragraph treats as more or less normal the moment when Miłosz swallowed a quantity of vodka, loaded a revolver with a single bullet, and played Russian roulette. Graham Greene, a not-so-dissimilar character, also gave way to this particular form of nihilism—or is it vanity? . . .

The Sovietization of Poland was bound to be fraught with moral choices that would lead either to reward or to punishment, possibly a concentration camp and death. . . . Once he was in the West, Miłosz himself was to observe, “All I wanted was to get out, and see what would happen next,” accepting that this amounted to making “a pact with the devil.”

Brandywine Books

Category Archives: Authors

At least one new Lewis essay

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A Christian’s Final Rest

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R.C. Sproul Now Sees the Lord Face to Face

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New release: ‘The Last Closet,’ by Moira Greyland

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The Author May Be Dead But He Continues to Publish

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Peter De Vries

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Richard Adams’s Library Up for Auction

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Dennett’s Dizzying Intellect

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Miłosz: “All I Wanted Was to Get Out”

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