Tag Archives: Paul Auster

Blogs, Socials, Religion, The Press

What is Truth? What is Comfort? Blogroll Links

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A college professor told me he gets the most response from his students by exposing them to the first question of the Heidelberg Catechism. It challenges contemporary assumptions and calls out our faith.

“What is your only comfort in life and death?

“That I am not my own, but belong with body and soul, both in life and in death, to my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ. He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood, and has set me free from all the power of the devil. He also preserves me in such a way that without the will of my heavenly Father not a hair can fall from my head; indeed, all things must work together for my salvation. Therefore, by his Holy Spirit he also assures me of eternal life and makes me heartily willing and ready from now on to live for him.”

Here’s some other reading from this weekend.

Reaction: Kevin Holtsberry reviews the novella Trust by Italian author Domenico Starnone. “I enjoyed the story as a mediation on the way we create stories and perceptions of ourselves and our lives, about who we are and why we do what we do, etc.”

Paul Auster: Locked in a room, unsure of many people and things, the writer in this Auster novel wrestles with the difficulties of knowing and telling the truth. (via Books, Inq.)

Jew­ish Book Coun­cil has released its list of win­ners of the 2021 Nation­al Jew­ish Book Awards. The winner for fiction is Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ulti­mate­ly Even Neg­li­gi­ble Episode in the His­to­ry of a Very Famous Family. (via Literary Saloon)

Writing: What could happen if you committed to writing at least a little every day?

One Nation Under the Pope: Some politically and theologically conservative leaders today dislike the secular government we have in America and would like to unite the country under one holy, Roman high priest.

Glynn Young: A grassroots level summary of a major problem with journalists and how the Internet changed the news.

Photo: Main Street, Columbus Junction, Iowa. 2003. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Religion, Writing

Writing by Hand, Beastly Boy band, Blogroll, and Fear

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Paul Auster has written a biography on Stephen Crane and several other works without a word processor. He drafts by hand and types a paragraph with a typewriter (via Literary Saloon).

I have shelves of encyclopedias, foreign dictionaries, and all the reference books I use. And I must have five or six English dictionaries of various sizes and editions. I even have slang dictionaries. When I’m really stuck I look at a thesaurus, but it never helps me. I know all those words, but I always think, “Well, there’s one word I’m not remembering that would be better than the one I’m stuck on.”

City of Fear, by Alafair Burke, “a tight, pacy police procedural, in which three Indiana college girls hit New York for their spring break.” One of them doesn’t come back.

The Album of Dr. Moreau, by Daryl Gregory, “deliberately and imaginatively breaks every one of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Rules of Detective Fiction.'” It’s a crazy premise, a genetically engineered boy band who find their producer dead in his hotel room, that apparently works.

Martin Luther: How Luther helped my depression. “I somehow found myself holding a copy of a Luther biography written by Roland Bainton.”

Why should we fear the Lord when perfect love casts out fear?

Halloween meditation: Jesus defines hell as the place when everyone is “salted by fire.”

No matter what you call your church or church movement, I think you’ll go astray if you claim your side is the one breathing life into dead orthodoxy. The message of the Reformation is still needed.

Photo by Andrew Seaman on Unsplash