A Few of My Favorite Things

C. S. Lewis

:: Check out these fantastic videos of his essays illustrated/animated! [I can’t pick a favorite.]

:: C. S. Lewis: The Undragoning of Eustace @ Jennifer Neyhart [So beautiful. Check out her other C. S. Lewis posts, as well.]

:: Thanksgiving and Desire, Ordinary Time and Advent, and C. S. Lewis Week @ The Rabbit Room

It takes work to see the extraordinary things in “ordinary” time: to see a sunbeam shining through a cracked door into a dusty shed as a parable for the modern world; to see praise as “inner health made audible”; to see a world in a wardrobe.

:: The Legacy of C. S. Lewis @ The Imaginative Conservative

For in both his fiction and nonfiction Lewis, like Eliot, affirmed such norms as the rightness of order, not anarchy; the desirability of cultural change coming about slowly and organically; and the high value of custom, convention, and continuity. He also stressed the importance of individual responsibility for one’s decisions and actions; the necessity of recognizing man as a flawed creature, and of mistrusting the naked human ego and all utopian talk of men being like gods; and the overarching imperative of recognizing a transcendent order in the Person of God, the Author of Joy as revealed in the doctrines of orthodox Christianity.

Fairytales

:: What If Fairytales Weren’t Fairytales After All? @ Tates Creek Presbyterian Church [go read this one!]

What if our novels and films were both untrue and true? Untrue because they are figments of human imagination; true because they are portals into another reality, a greater reality of which our physical reality is a part not the whole.

What if we tell stories because we are made in the image of a God who Himself is telling a story that we are all a part of? We certainly cannot see this God anymore than Harry Potter can see J.K. Rowling, but there are signposts everywhere that we exist within a story written by an Author.

:: Redeeming Santa @ Tates Creek Presbyterian Church

Allowing our children to encounter and even believe (children don’t cognitively believe like we believe. They have an ability to get lost in fantasy without detaching from reality. Maybe that’s what Jesus means when He said, “Unless you become like a child you cannot enter the Kingdom…”) in fantasy is one of the greatest ways to prepare them to believe in the true and better story to which all other stories point. To deprive them of fantasy is to reinforce the lie of our secular age that there is no fantasy.

:: I Saw Mommybloggers Dissing Santa Claus by Marc Hays @ Kuyperian Commentary

If myth “blurs the lines between fact and fantasy” to such a dangerous extent, why do we read stories to our children at all? And if we’ve decided to read them stories, then we would crush their imaginations by perpetually reminding them that this is not real. In fact, we read them stories because fiction is more real than not. Fiction is vicarious living, whether or not the protagonist has magical powers. Stories by humans will always teach us about what it means to be a human, and there are no stories that are not written by humans.

 

Cellos (and Music)

 

:: Why Music Theory? by Caleb Skogen @ Classical Conversations

Music theory…teaches how to communicate well through studies of order, harmony, relationships, ratios, dissonance, consonance, tension, and time. Within these studies, one is pushed passed the mere notes and ideas of a score to discover more of music’s grandiose purpose. Many of us do not generally think about music or the arts as means for understanding God, but studies in music theory can help one understand that form is important to our Creator and that it should be used in ways that reflect His character. This is an appropriate pursuit of the beauty that Plato wrote about.

CiRCE

::  How to Read a Brook: Some Notes on Creation-Literacy @ CiRCE. On Wordsworth, Augustine, and stopping reading to read well.

Books are mankind’s words about God and the world, but the world is God’s word about himself. As the Psalmist writes, the heavens “pour forth speech” and “reveal knowledge” which runs “to the end of the world.” The cosmos then is not full of unanswerable questions (as it would sometimes be convenient to imagine), but unquestionable answers—the visible, audible, tangible, smellable, tastable, altogether incontrovertible testimony of the Three-in-One.

:: The Wonder of Unexpected Supply @ CiRCE

Perhaps teaching itself is a poetic endeavor; or perhaps poetry, in it’s ability to work directly on the affections, is the purest form of education.

:: Off Stage by Tim McIntosh @ CiRCE Magazine [Read the rest of the CiRCE magazine here, or request the GORGEOUS print copy (pictured above).]

Yet the starkness of the stage highlights the incredible power of Hamlet’s yearnings. Richard Burton as Hamlet cries, “What should such fellows as I do, crawling between heaven and earth!” His longing leaps off the bare stage, an incandescent reminder that God has planted eternity in the hearts of men.

Sisters

:: Your Adult Siblings May Be The Secret To A Long, Happy Life @ NPR

"The literature on sibling relationships shows that during middle age and old age, indicators of well-being — mood, health, morale, stress, depression, loneliness, life satisfaction — are tied to how you feel about your brothers and sisters."

Education

 

"When people are bored, it is primarily with themselves." —Eric Hoffer (HT: Gutenberg College)

::  The 3 Characteristics of an Educated Man @ The Art of Manliness [This is an older article, but I thought it was fantastic.]

The real test for the modern educated man is the ability to entertain himself when technology isn’t available or is not socially acceptable to whip out. Can you entertain yourself at a boring meeting, while camping, while conversing at a dinner party? The educated man can, and he does it, ironically enough, by retaining an important ability of his childhood—curiosity. The educated man is insatiably curious about the world around him and other people. In any situation, he sees something to learn, study, and observe. If he’s stuck somewhere with neither phone nor company,  he uses the time to untangle a philosophical problem he’s been wrestling with; the mind of the educated man is a repository of ideas that he can pull out and examine to pass the time in any situation.

Books and Movies

::  First Trailer for “The Little Prince” Movie Released @ The Reading Room

 

:: The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 by Jeffrey Overstreet @ Letterboxd

:: “We will need writers who can remember freedom”: Ursula K Le Guin at the National Book Awards @ Parker Higgins

"I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries — the realists of a larger reality.”

:: 50 Best Books for Boys and Young Men @ The Art of Manliness

:: The Green Ember is here!