“If I can’t stand up and show you how the gospel is smashing my idols, you’re never going to believe this stuff is real.” Tullian Tchividjian of Coral Ridge PCA is preaching on Jesus’ sufficiency, claiming the hard truths of the gospel for himself. He says, “I never realize how reliant I had become on human approval and acceptance until it was taken away from me.” This is real Christianity.
Jesus + Nothing = Everything (Part 5) from Coral Ridge on Vimeo.
Stuart Brown talks about the science of play and why we need to keep playing as adults.
Cover of Conan the Phenomenon, by Sammon and Frazetta.
He was an artist, not an author, but I suspect he was responsible for more fantasy book sales than any single person except J.R.R. Tolkien.
Frank Frazetta died today, after an extended illness. Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1928, he attended the Brooklyn Academy of Fine Arts and went on to work in comics and commercial art. He was an assistant to Al Capp on the classic Li’l Abner comic strip for several years, specializing in voluptuous female figures. In the late ’60s, he began doing the classic book covers for collections of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories, which is where guys like me first became wonderingly aware of him. He did lots of book covers, some for good books, some for garbage, but in my opinion there was a synergy between Howard’s lean, evocative prose and Frazetta’s original combination of textures and a limited palette that worked reading magic. Especially for adolescent boys, which was what I was at the time. Still am, for all practical purposes. Continue reading Frank Frazetta, 1928-2010
Be sure to vote for BwB as the best blog by a heretic on The Crescat.
Joseph Bottum at First Things doesn’t like the Kindle.
Why is the text on Kindle so awful—hundreds of years of lessons about typesetting, lost in an instant? Bad line breaks, bad hyphens, bad page composition, bad times.
Much of the column is devoted to his affection for Terry Pratchett.
I’ve never gotten Terry Pratchett. I suppose I didn’t give him enough chance. People told me how great he was, so I picked up the first Discworld book, The Color of Magic, to start at the beginning. Didn’t get very far. I couldn’t see what everybody was so enthusiastic about.
I don’t even get the point of most of the citations Bottum includes. I can only assume there’s something very wrong with me.
Besides the passive-aggressive fishing for reassurance, I mean.
Photo credit: Getty Images.
The new Christianity Today came to the library today, and I had to stop and read the cover story, by Wess Stafford of the Christian charity Compassion International.
Stafford tells a harrowing story of years of abuse in an African boarding school for the children of missionaries (if you’re not aware, the standard practice for most Western missionaries in “the bush” has traditionally been to send the children to boarding schools for months of the year). The people who ran the school, as he remembers them, were people who’d wanted to be “real” missionaries, but didn’t make the grade for one reason or another, and were dumped into the “unimportant” work of loco parentis. Stafford’s analysis was that they were embittered, and took their frustrations out on the kids. Continue reading How monsters are made
Once again, I offer something more in the line of a reading report than a book review, because (alas) the novel I’ve just finished reading isn’t available in English.
My friend Baard Titlestad of Saga Publishers sent along a copy of Edvard Eikill’s Lokes Lek, personally autographed for me by the author. I was fascinated and moved by what I read in its pages.
Lokes Lek (Loki’s Game) isn’t precisely a Viking book, but is set about a century after the death of Erling Skjalgsson, hero of my books. Indeed, Erling’s descendents at Sola are part of the story.
When Norwegians look back at their history, they see a Golden Age beginning with the Viking raids, and ending with the death of King Sigurd Jorsalfar (the Crusader). King Sigurd did mighty deeds in the Mediterranean as a young man, then settled down to a peaceful joint rule with his brother Øystein the Good, one of the country’s most beloved rulers. After Øystein’s death, Sigurd ruled alone, sometimes heedlessly, but there was peace in the land and the people loved him. Continue reading Reading report: Lokes Lek, by Edvard Eikill
Like great men before me (Lars, for one), I am taking leave of the blog for a few days. In the words of Longfellow:
The Landlord ended thus his tale,
Then rising took down from its nail
The sword that hung there, dim with dust
And cleaving to its sheath with rust,
And said, “This sword was in the fight.”
The Poet seized it, and exclaimed,
“It is the sword of a good knight,
Though homespun was his coat-of-mail;
What matter if it be not named
Joyeuse, Colada, Durindale,
Excalibar, or Aroundight,
Or other name the books record?
Your ancestor, who bore this sword
As Colonel of the Volunteers,
Mounted upon his old gray mare,
Seen here and there and everywhere,
To me a grander shape appears
Than old Sir William, or what not,
Clinking about in foreign lands
With iron gauntlets on his hands,
And on his head an iron pot!”
All laughed; the Landlord’s face grew red
As his escutcheon on the wall;
He could not comprehend at all
The drift of what the Poet said;
For those who had been longest dead
Were always greatest in his eyes;
And be was speechless with surprise
To see Sir William’s pluméd head
Brought to a level with the rest,
And made the subject of a jest.
Yesterday our friend Ori sent me a link to an article (which unfortunately appears to have disappeared from cyberspace) on the custom of dueling, a tradition which (as you know) is of some interest to me.
The author’s thesis (making some use of game theory) was that the duel of honor was more than a ritualized method for obtaining personal revenge. It served a legitimate economic function in cultures where modern banking was unavailable, or where private borrowing remained a recourse for gentlemen in desperate circumstances.
In other words, imagine you’re a gentleman who sometimes needs a short-term loan, and your only source of credit is to borrow from another gentleman.
Now, imagine that someone publicly calls you a liar. Continue reading Dueling for dollars
The City, a publication of Houston Baptist University, has its Spring edition out using zmags.com as a delivery platform. Read it here, and note the poem, “Fairy Tale Logic” by A.E. Stallings.