Paul Tripp has written a good book on marriage, which we pointed out a while back. Desiring God has a live discussion right here, right now.
Category Archives: Authors
Mark Twain's fight with God
Phil linked to a story yesterday, about the impending release of the first volume of Mark Twain’s Memoirs, withheld from publication, at the author’s request, since his death in 1910. People speculate that the reason for the embargo was that Twain (Sam Clemens) didn’t feel the world was ready for his freethinking ideas.
I think they’re probably right. I suspect he figured mankind would be rid of this Christianity nonsense by 2010.
My own history with Mark Twain has been complicated. I read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn in school, as pretty much all kids did in my day. And somewhere in my high school years, somebody gave me a copy of The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain for Christmas (I got the old hardcover Doubleday edition; you can get the current version in paperback here). At the beginning, my delight was great. Here were hilarious stories, crafted in masterful English (only P.G. Wodehouse has ever impressed me so with his ability to wring hilarity out of simple word choice), that made me laugh out loud, stories I had to read to my long-suffering brothers. Continue reading Mark Twain's fight with God
Twain on Twain After a Long Silence
Mark Twain’s autobiography, which he forbid to be published for 100 years after his death, will be released in three books UC-Berkley. The first will come in November.
Books, The End of the Making of
Mark Bertrand has an essay on the printed word.
When Ken Myers interviewed me for Mars Hill Audio Volume 90, for example, he kept asking about the decline of literacy, only to have me scoff at the pessimism. Little did I know that the flipside of Volume 90 would feature an extended chat with Dana Gioia about the NEA’s depressing literacy study. Fortunately that part of my interview was excised from the final version, sparing me the indignity of appearing unsuitably optimistic and glib. Ever since, I’ve kept what little optimism I possess to myself.
(via S.D. Smith)
From C. S. Lewis
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.” (From “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,” paragraph 8, from God in the Dock [Eerdmans, 1970]. p. 292.)
Picture credit: Getty Images.
Sigrid Undset
It was some time ago that Bill Bennett, on his morning talk show, asked, “Who is Sigrid Undset?” I tried to call in and help him out, but there wasn’t time.
The fact that Bennett, an extremely erudite Roman Catholic, knew nothing of Sigrid Undset, saddened me. (I’m not a Catholic myself, but no man is an island, and all that).
Gone are the days when a popular writer like Ogden Nash could say, in the midst of a light poem:
“Or you stand with her on a hilltop and gaze on a winter sunset,
And everything is as starkly beautiful as a page from Sigrid Undset….”
…and everybody would know what you were talking about.
That’s a tragedy. Not just for Catholics (like Bennett) or Norwegian buffs (like me), but for all lovers of great Christian prose. Continue reading Sigrid Undset
Interview on Acting White
Blogger and scholar Stuart Buck has a book on American education coming out this month. Acting White: The Ironic Legacy of Desegregation
Rod Dreher of BeliefNet has a three part interview with Stuart starting here, continuing here, and concluding here (these links will help when the navigation on BeliefNet is challenging). I will review Acting White for BwB later this month.
Secular Praise in 'End of Secularism' Interview
Hunter Baker gives the full details behind his interview with Harvard Political Review. “Somewhat to my chagrin,” he says, “it is primarily about how great secularism is with a couple of statements by me and Herb London, president of the Hudson Institute, suggesting the self-congratulation is not warranted.”
Net Radio Interivew with Larry Crab
On Monday, May 17th (at 9:30pm EST), T. M. Moore and Jimmy Davis will interview Dr. Larry Crabb live on the Worldview Network internet radio program.
P.D. James on Detective Fiction
Author P.D. James has a book about detective fiction with an excerpt here. She writes:
And why murder? The central mystery of a detective story need not indeed involve a violent death, but murder remains the unique crime and it carries an atavistic weight of repugnance, fascination and fear. Readers are likely to remain more interested in which of Aunt Ellie’s heirs laced her nightly cocoa with arsenic than in who stole her diamond necklace while she was safely holidaying in Bournemouth. Dorothy L. Sayers’s Gaudy Night doesn’t contain a murder, although there is an attempt at one, and the death at the heart of Frances Fyfield’s Blood from Stone is a spectacular and mysterious suicide. But, except in those novels of espionage which are primarily concerned with treachery, it remains rare for the central crime in an orthodox mystery to be other than the ultimate crime for which no human reparation can ever be made.