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Why read: C.S. Lewis weighs in
To my way of thinking, one reason to read is to “complete the past” – a step beyond merely learning about the past. This passage from C.S. Lewis’ Miracles speculates on both the dangers and possibilities of…
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Thoughts on Prince Caspian
My husband has been away this week. Here’s what this has meant for me: I miss him. The girls miss him. I get to read in the evening without the television being on.…
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Good Friday: a poem, a painting, and a passage
One of Wendell Berry’s Sabbaths poems from 1980: What hard travail God does in death! He strives in sleep, in our despair, And all flesh shudders underneath The nightmare of His sepulchre. The…
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Letters to Malcolm
C.S. Lewis’ Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (1964) is a short book (only 124 pages). When I closed it last night and turned off my light to go to sleep, I felt disappointed.…
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The Problem of Pain
We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven — a senile benevolence who, as they say, “liked to see young people enjoying themselves” and whose…
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Lucy and the Book
I’ve been struck lately by the uniqueness of the experience of reading the Bible as compared to reading other books. Normally I hate the term “strategy,” but in the same way Lucy goes…
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A Confederacy of Dufflepuds
Question: Is it too late to dress up as a dufflepud for Halloween? Sometimes it seems that all around me are dufflepuds–those one-footed, herd-mentality little creatures in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.…
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Wood Between the Worlds
Why has the Wood between the Worlds in The Magician’s Nephew always appealed to me? It’s a place I return to often in my own mind. I like it so much I tried…
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Narnia and Other Matters
My Netflix this week is the BBC version of Dickens’s Bleak House. The juxtaposition of that with my reading these days–Falling Man (my first DeLillo novel), and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,…