I listened through Out of the Silent Planet the other day, because I’ve been reading That Hideous Strength with friends for a few months and we took a couple weeks off for multiple reasons. It’s a fun adventure that spends a good bit of time on details like the space ship and experiencing interplanetary travel with a Wells or Verne feel. It would probably make a good launchpad for discussing Lewis’s ‘scientific’ observations in contrast with current views. Science is always changing, always correcting itself or arguing over what is correct.

You could also walk away from that book with idea that submitting to God could be a very big deal. Or you could be thinking, “Words are cool.”

Here are a few, loosely related links.

Off-road: Professor Christopher Yuan notes a troubling bent in a post yesterday from theological publisher Eerdmans. Recommending reading for this month, the publisher of the theology text I used in college says, “We find ourselves at a time again where we should be willing to listen and seek to understand those in the LGBTQ+ community who are simply fighting to be seen and heard, cared for and loved.” Yuan sees this as a sign the once theology powerhouse has steered in the direction of declining mainline denominations everywhere.

Yuan’s own book on sexuality would be more insightful than any of these.

Reading Life: “[Dana] Gioia describes his ‘odd and bookish’ childhood growing up in a working-class family in Los Angeles. . . My parents never knew what to make of a kid obsessed with books.”

Interplanetary: Space opera is resurging. “Typically seen as (and often being) the least literary form of SF, space opera hasn’t gone out of style since Buck Rogers began battling galactic evils in the 1920s and ’30s . . .” (via ArtsJournal)

Children Should Know the Truth: We shouldn’t keep life realities from our children by pretending everything will be okay. “It is likely that today’s children will inherit a world more violent and more precarious in every way than the one experienced by post–Cold war generations. The belief that everything will be all right was always a recipe for fragility; now it is simply a fantasy.”

Photo: Smalley’s Jewelry Store sign, Ogden, Utah 1980. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.