Fiction

Prince Caspian

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Who among us has not read Prince Caspian, the second of the Narnia books (unless you are devoted to the new numbering system on some editions)? Well, HarperCollins is talking to other people when they encourage young and old alike to read the book before seeing the movie. The publisher’s webpage has information about the book, book-related games, and a contest for a trip to the movie premiere in New York (opening in less than two months). Facebook users can catch a bit of buzz over here.

The publisher has added something new to The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian Movie Tie-in Edition, “an 8-page, fold-out insert based on C. S. Lewis’s own timeline conceived for Narnia.” This is a hard-bound edition of all seven books and a “special full-color timeline, recreated from C. S. Lewis’s original and paired with Pauline Baynes’ classic full-color illustrations for the first time. [It offers] the key to the passage of time in Narnia and Earth by laying the two worlds side by side. Never before has C. S. Lewis’s timeline been included in a complete edition of all seven books of Narnia.”

If that isn’t cool enough, Brandywine Books will have being hosting a Narnia book giveaway someday soon, so tell your friends. I’ll let you know when I can.

Non-fiction

Racial Ideas and American Conservatism

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The Washington Times has these two reviews:

“Upstream,” in essence, is a Baedeker guide to the men and ideas behind conservatism. The underlying theme for the movement was a strong belief in individual freedom and personal responsibility. The task was tough. As Mr. Regnery astutely notes in his opening pages, in the early 1950s “few people would admit to being conservatives at all, and those who did were thought to have lost their minds.”

Uncategorized

Only Up From Here

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I have to pass on this metaphor alert from the Wall Street Journal’s Best of the Web:

“We hit the ground running. We’re at the bottom of the food chain but . . . we have really made a dent up here.”–Sen. Jim Webb (D., Va.) on his time in the Senate so far, quoted in the Washington Post, March 21

Uncategorized

A little (extra) good news for Easter

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The pope baptizes a prominent Italian Muslim.

Italy’s most prominent Muslim, an iconoclastic writer who condemned Islamic extremism and defended Israel, converted to Catholicism Saturday in a baptism by the pope at a Vatican Easter service.

No doubt this will lead to violence somewhere, as does anything that offends “the religion of peace.” But that’s no reason not to celebrate a soul coming home.

Authors

Jon Hessler, 1933-2008

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Jon Hessler, an author and Minnesotan, died this week. Terry Teachout says Hessler was one of his favorite American authors:

Try thinking of him as a Midwestern John P. Marquand and you’ll get a better idea of what he’s about. ‘Of all the people I know,’ Marquand observed, “only Americans, because of some sort of inferiority complex, keep attempting the impossible and trying to get away from their environment.” Jon Hassler has never made that mistake.

Religion

“Bad Saturday”

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I think I’ve written about this before, but it’s something I’ve come to believe.

I don’t know if there’s an official, ecclesiastical name for the day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. But I call it Bad Saturday.

It doesn’t have a name (or not a well-known one, anyway) because it’s a kind of a nothing. The bad thing happened yesterday. The good thing hasn’t happened yet. It’s the day of disappointment, of shock, of depression. The day when the scattered disciples hole up and try to figure out the safest way out of the province. The day when everything has fallen apart, and you don’t know what’s coming next.

The day when all you’ve got to go on is a promise. And that promise that doesn’t look very promising, in the wake of what happened yesterday.

In other words, it’s the day in which we live most of our lives. True, Easter has happened, but Easter isn’t finished yet. We seem to be in the third act of God’s great drama, and we can’t see the climax from here. So we wait, and we say our lines, and we follow our stage directions, but the Happy Ending is still waiting in the wings, behind a curtain.

We’re trying to get through Bad Saturday as well as we can.

Easter is our hope. It’s a thing that has already happened, and has not yet happened, for us as individuals.

It’s a question of perseverance. Today might be called the Day of Perseverance. Hang on. The Feast comes tomorrow.

Goofing

A Joke from a Four Year Old

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Happy Easter, everyone. My four year old just told what we used to call a rip-snorter.

Why did the chicken cross the road to get the ball?

He didn’t want to be a snowflake.

Mmm, does it get any better than that?

Writing

The complex origins of language

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I enjoyed Roy Jacobsen’s comments on a speech by Christine Kenneally at the Writers USA Conference in Portland.

One of the interesting things about language is that it’s not a single ability, but rather a suite of abilities. We’re all born with this innate suite, but the ability to speak seems to develop only if we are spoken to; it does not arise spontaneously on its own. Thus, if we learn to speak only because we are spoken to, how did language arise?

Fascinating subject, with profound philosophical and theological implications, I think. The power of speaking, and the significance of the word, are part of the very architecture of biblical thinking.

Religion

On This Night

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The Lord grieved in the garden, as depicted by Robert Walter Weir

Then Jesus went with his disciples to a place called Gethsemane, and he said to them, “Sit here while I go over there and pray.” He took Peter and the two sons of Zebedee along with him, and he began to be sorrowful and troubled. 38Then he said to them, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.” Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.”

Book Reviews, Creative Culture