Gregory Wolfe observes how many tributes to Ray Bradbury praise his humane vision of the world, and he asks, “In order to have a humane vision, do you have to have an understanding of what constitutes humanness?” He says he did. From one of Bradbury’s stories, “We lost our faith and went around wondering what life was for. If art was no more than a frustrated outflinging of desire, if religion was no more than self-delusion, what good was life? Faith had always given us answers to all things. But it all went down the drain with Freud and Darwin. We were and still are a lost people.” (via Prufrock)

I wonder what the author would have said about Faber’s book of loss and strange new things, in which a missionary to an alien world called Oasis discovers another missionary has preceded him. The Book of Strange New Things is World Magazine’s fiction book of the year.

Below is the Ray Bradbury Tree in Disneyland’s Frontierland, inspired by his novel, The Halloween Tree, and decorated for the season. Bradbury loved Disneyland and even helped design some of the attractions, notably Spaceship Earth in Epcot.