Nonfiction « Across the Page

A Grief Observed

I’m not sure why I picked this book up just now. The ideal time to experience it would probably be in the midst of loss.

Or maybe I would find it annoying then. Maybe that’s the time when no one else’s words will do.

Written as a journal in the days after the death of his wife [...]

Reading The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia has been a rollercoaster experience. In that sense, the title is apt, named as it is after the weighty tome Lucy leafs through in search of a spell that will free the dufflepuds from invisibility in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. The book attracts and [...]

Aslan as a “device”

I’m reading The Magician’s Book, in which Laura Miller examines why she has continued to love the Chronicles of Narnia even after her initial feeling of betrayal that they contained so many Christian themes. I’m really enjoying it, even though I come from a different direction spiritually, one in sympathy with Lewis’s Christian faith. Like [...]

Curved space, Lent, and Faith

“Looking at Stars,” by Jane Kenyon

The God of curved space, the dry
God, is not going to help us, but the son
whose blood spattered
the hem of his mother’s robe.

This poem prefaces Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter. Though I’m not planning to delve much into the book [...]

Double-edged sword*

In his sermon on the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness, George MacDonald makes the point that Jesus and Satan use scripture in different ways. In the second temptation, when Satan urges Jesus to throw himself from the pinnacle by quoting, “It is written, ‘He will give his angels charge over Thee,’” Jesus replies, “You [...]

The Week in Words: Regions Unknown

Monday brings The Week in Words at Breath of Life. Though I fear I’ve already over-quoted from George MacDonald’s Unspoken Sermons this week, I can’t resist offering these wise words from “Man’s Difficulty Concerning Prayer”:

Perhaps, indeed, the better the gift we pray for, the more time is necessary to its arrival. To give us [...]

Saints and Spiders: Dueling Sermons

Recently, my husband read Neil Anderson’s Victory Over the Darkness. It’s about our identity in Christ, and it’s been an extremely influential book for him.

I read it a few years ago, and somewhere — I think at our former church — I picked up a bookmark that lists the various lies we believe about who [...]

MacDonald on prayer: Windmills, hungry children, and communion

I find George MacDonald’s “Word of Jesus on Prayer,” from Unspoken Sermons, very encouraging. The text he’s starting from is the parable of the persistent widow. Here are a few morsels:

If, instead of speculation, we gave ourselves to obedience, what a difference would soon be seen in the world! Oh, the multitude of so-called religious [...]

...and then, a few more words from the week

I tried to choose just one quote for the Week in Words carnival, but here are a few more, all on different topics, that have struck me lately.

*****

These two are from what my daughters call “The Talking Heads and Shoulders” on the Newshour. They’re actually from last week, in a discussion about President [...]

Brother, I'm Dying

Brother, I’m Dying chronicles the lives of two Haitian men. Bookmarks Magazine summarizes the tale this way:

Edwidge Danticat’s father and uncle chose very different paths: the former struggled to make a new life for himself in America, while the latter remained in the homeland he paradoxically loved. In following their lives and their impact on [...]