Category Archives: Blogs, Socials

Hubris alert

In my ongoing effort to overcome the limits of my shyness disorder, and to put myself squarely in a position where failure and humiliation are inevitable, I’ve accepted an invitation (through the good offices of Hunter Baker, who’s written a book called The End of Secularism, in case you hadn’t heard) to become a blogger at Touchstone Magazine’s Mere Comments blog.

That does not mean I’ll be leaving Brandywine Books (which may be good or bad news for Phil). I expect my blogging at Mere Comments to be fairly occasional, proportionate to the frequency with which I have anything to say worth writing. (This qualification doesn’t bother me here, as you’ve already noticed.)

No point looking for anything from me over there just yet. I haven’t even signed up as of now. I’ll do that later this evening, barring a coronary or a home invasion. My plan is to start with a cross-post of my piece on the Great Minneapolis Tornado. This will doubtless provoke numerous angry comments, which will hurt my feelings; I will then retire to my room and refuse to ever post again, and it will be the last anyone hears of me.

But I feel I need to raise my profile a bit, because as far as I can tell the buzz that greeted the release of West Oversea has dissipated like the waves churned up by a very small stone thrown into very deep water, and is gone as if it never were.

Oh, did you know I wrote a book? You can buy it here.

2009 Cybil Nominations

This year’s CYBIL Awards, the Children’s and Young Adult Blogger’s Literary Awards, will start taking nominations for books published primarily this year on October 1. Learn more about the award and how to nominate your favorite book on their website.

“Better is One Day in Your Courts”

Mike Adams over at Townhall.com (sorry for the pop-up rich environment) posts what seems to me a splendid piece today. It’s in the form of an address to his students at UNC-Wilmington, which he plans to give at the start of the school year. In it he throws down a gauntlet, declaring that he plans to violate the school’s speech code, and see how the administration defends the suppression of ideas in an academic setting.

By the time these three speakers are finished, at least one of you will have filed a formal complaint claiming I have created a “hostile environment.” You’ll be relying, of course, on one of our university’s illegal speech codes.

I will respond by doing something that may surprise you: I will use the same illegal speech code to claim that the speech in your complaint is hate speech, which creates a “hostile environment” for people of faith.

Award Nomination and Your Feedback

Brandywine Books has been nominated for an award during Book Blogger Appreciation Week. Our category is “Best Spiritual/Inspirational or Religious Book Review Blog.”

The friendly people behind this award have asked us to give them for their consideration five posts which we believe put our best feet forward. What do you think we should recommend? Since it’s a book review category, I’d prefer book reviews or book-related posts, but Lars post on villains may be a good choice or perhaps his post on Klavan’s crime trilogy a while back. Maybe we should stick to the spiritual-inspirational-religious topics though.

Please let us know what you think, and thank you for nominating us for this award.

“Banned Books Week,” episode 743

I hesitate to call Dennis Ingolfsland, of The Recliner Commentaries, a “fellow librarian,” since he’s the real thing and I’m an on-the-job-trained poseur. But I know enough to recommend this piece about the American Library Association’s “Banned Books Week.”

The fact is that there are no banned books in America. Maybe I missed it but I don’t recall seeing any articles in the Library Journal or American Libraries protesting that other religion and those other countries which really do ban books.

(Picture credit: Jupiter Images)

Alias Smith

Our friend and commenter S. D. Smith has changed his blogging digs from The Maple Mountain Story Club to a blog simply (and modestly) called S. D. Smith. No explanation is given for this change, nor any apology for the inevitable disruption and social chaos certain to ensue.



Update:
Actually he does give an explanation. But it’s pretty unconvincing.