A Prayer on the Conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter

Tonight and all this week, Saturn and Jupiter will have a “great conjunction.” Since reading Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia this year, which gave me a layman’s course in the Medieval spheres, this conjunction has assumed monumental symbolic significance in my mind. Saturn is Infortuna Major, the sphere of suffering, old age, and death. Jupiter is […]

State of the WIP Address

I’ve obliquely shared about my current WIP, through posts about protagonist change-ups, essays on world building in general, meditations where I work through some of the book’s major themes, and self-imposed deadlines (none of which I have met, but all of which have moved me closer to the end goal). Now that the end of […]

Myth: The Secret Ingredient to Modernity

One morning on my patio, I turned to one of our potted plants and beheld an audacious fuzzy caterpillar energetically exploring the leaves. He stepped so lively that he won my heart, and I thought, “Why not take him inside and let him pupate and become a moth, and we’ll have some opportunity for Nature […]

When You Feel Small

In his very excellent and moving book C. S. Lewis: Man of Letters, Thomas Howard writes of Lord of the Rings: “We find at work in that world such notions as majesty and mystery and purity and nobility and taboo and heroism and so forth—all of which we tend to attach to ‘antiquity’” (46). Nobility. […]

Are “Good Guys” Boring?

Stephen Koch writes the following about Lucie Manette, the ideal woman in Tale of Two Cities: “She is a flawless paragon of sweetness and love, and the way we know it is true sweetness, true love, is that both are defined by the absolute absence of any conflicting impulse whatsoever. In two plain words, she […]

Captain Marvel, Disney Princesses, and Idolatry of the Past

I ran into the following quote in the probably-well-intentioned-but-extremely-problematic book What the Bible Says about Child Training: It is interesting that even with all of the women’s liberation and “politically correct” attack against traditional male and female roles, and although the majority of the boys in this survey expected their wives to work, they still […]

Top 10 Books of 2018

When I posted my Top 10 Children’s Books before last Christmas, one of my friends asked if I had a Top 10 Books of 2018 list in the works. Of COURSE I did! Well, not at that very moment—but I thought it would be fun to develop one after the new year. Then I got […]

My Solution to Resolutions

New Year’s Resolutions have come under fire lately. My whole adult life, I’ve heard the (perhaps deserved) cynicism. While I’m generally skeptical of what culture says we should do, I do like New Year’s Resolutions. The new year is a guaranteed fresh start, an official milestone to look forward to as the beginning of something good. […]

Tolkien’s Three Satans and Why They Matter

Happy Tolkien Week to one and all! One of the aspects of Tolkien’s work that fascinates me is its depiction of Evil. Not only can this mild-mannered, somewhat niggling professor write some truly terrifying scenes, but I also appreciate the thematic truths that inform his portrayal of Evil. I love a good subtle villain as […]

C. S. Lewis Digest: Literature

The school year is beginning, and my thoughts have returned to C. S. Lewis’s ideas about English education. He thought a lot about education (as evidenced by his profession and by the fact that I am not even going to quote from The Abolition of Man, his major work on the subject, in this post). […]