Black Friday has become synonymous with the spirit of Thanksgiving and growing corn by planting fish in the ground. It’s as American as a payday.
The Rabbit Room is holding a Black Friday all month for the sheer joy of it. Of particular interest to our readers may be these first editions of author Walter Wangerin.
Not to be outdone by a warren of artists, Banner of Truth is offering good discounts on many Puritan paperbacks and other fine volumes.
A great, godly author died yesterday.
Walter Wangerin, Jr. dealt with lung cancer for the last several years and has finally succumbed to it. He wrote many award-winning books, including the popular The Book of the Dun Cow. He was the speaker for the Lutheran Vespers radio program for about ten years (1994-2005). More recently, he was Senior Research Professor at Valparaiso University.
Image Journal shares Wangerin’s short story “Moravia” from Issue 82.
Pete Peterson says Wangerin cast a long shadow. “The proof of that shadow’s reach, perhaps, is that a few weeks ago when I sat down to write a short story for a forthcoming book called The Lost Tales of Sir Galahad, the tale that came out was, unexpectedly, about Walt.”
I’ve been referring to Wangerin in the past tense, but realistically, Christianly, he continues to live, even more full than he has on earth. We would say he was a good man because we approved of his life. He is a good man, even today, because of Christ. But today, I doubt he or anyone around him would refer to him or each other as good.
Who is good but God, after all?
The Rabbit Room has announced that the great Walter Wangerin, Jr. passed into glory yesterday, after a long battle with cancer. Article here; I haven’t been able to find much other information.
In my humble opinion, Wangerin’s The Book of the Dun Cow is one of the truly great works, not only of Christian fantasy, but of any fiction of any kind. I never loved any of Wangerin’s other works as well as I loved TBOTDC, but that book is so wonderful all by itself that it ought to secure its author’s standing as a great master until Our Lord returns.
He was a Lutheran, by the way.
Paul Pastor reviews Walter Wangerin’s memoir, Everlasting in the Past.
The contemporary Christian memoir has behind it a richly populated tradition of self-reflection: Augustine’s Confessions, Julian of Norwich’s Showings, Therese of Lisieux’s Story of a Soul, C. S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy, Madeleine L’Engle’s A Circle of Quiet, and countless other narratives that use personal experience and devotion to point to a larger Christian path.
. ..
[Wangerin’s] prose is miniaturized, fitted like clock parts, each sentence turning the next. Just when you think you are witnessing an over-written sentence, he expertly surprises you. The book is paradoxically both spare and extravagant, and it will not be to everyone’s taste. It’s high craft, but he avoids pretense, and it works, as Dun Cow did. It’s distilled, dense. Delicate. I love it.
(via Prufrock)
This coming Spring, Rabbit Room Press will release a new memoir from the great author Walter Wangerin, Jr. It will be called Everlasting Is the Past.
“In this new memoir, he invites the reader into the past to experience his loss of faith as a young seminarian, his struggle to find a place for his chosen vocation amid a storm of doubts, and his eventual renewal in the arms of an inner-city church called Grace.”
Pre-orders are being taken.
Despite all of the praise I heard for The Book of the Dun Cow, I still smirked through the first few chapters. It has a great setup for a terrible challenge to the earth, even the galaxy, but the characters are farm animals. How terrifying can a story get with a proud rooster for a leading man? But then if I understood myself properly in relation to the God of heaven and earth and the fatally wounded enemy who still plots our defeat, I may think of mankind in the same way–mere animals standing between the Almighty and the Lord of the Flies.
Let me briefly give you the plot. Chauntecleer, the rooster, is lord over a patch of farmland, field, and forest. He is king and cleric to the animals who live there, crowing canonical blessings throughout the day to give their lives order and spiritual purpose. Far away, another farm and another rooster have slacked off holding the order of the day, giving a profound and powerful evil an opportunity to fight for its freedom. The animals are called Wyrm’s Keepers, though I doubt they would recognize the label. By keeping their proper order, they unknowingly keep the evil Wyrm imprisoned, so when one farm has grown tired of the cares of the world, Wyrm exploits his opportunity. Gradually, you might say, all of something breaks loose.
I love most in this story the animals leaning on their daily order, their time-honored tradition. It gave their dirt-scratching, grub-hunting, cleaning, and sleeping greater meaning and consequently greater peace. From Lauds to Compline, Chauntecleer crows through the day, usually because that’s how its done, but when their world become overcast with troubling clouds, he crows to bless those creatures he cares for. In a somewhat comical way, it’s glorious.
And there’s a good bit of comedy throughout the book too. John Wesley Weasel and Mundo Cani Dog are hilarious in their own way as is the rooster’s obnoxious pride.
I have to wonder how much of this fantasy is reality. How much or what kind of grace does the Lord give us through liturgy and the mental transformation he calls us to by meditating on his precepts throughout the day? What is robbed from us when we think of our lives and world in secular terms, when we see the planet instead of creation, when we look into space instead of the heavens? Would we keep the evil imprisoned a little more if we gave ourselves and our families lauds and vespers?