I’m planning on going dark on social media over the next day or so. Partly, it’s for my own sanity; once in a while, I just need a cleanse. Need to stop being bombarded by the constant noise of online interaction. I love it – don’t get me wrong. My extrovert comes out in full force on social media; likes […]
By Design: Book Review (ish)
Almost a year ago I began working with Dr. Martha MacCullough, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Cairn University to shape her manuscript on educational philosophy into a book. I learned a lot about the editing process, educational philosophy, page layout, and the awesome name pairings of educational scholars (seriously, “Chubb and Moe”? “Long and Frye”? “Bigge and Shermis”? I came to […]
The Gospel According to Eliot
This winter, I’m taking part in a virtual reading group hosted by Greener Trees. We’re going through the book The Art of T.S. Eliot, by Helen Gardner. I adore Eliot’s Four Quartets, so Gardner’s examination of Eliot’s work through the lens of that great work has been right up my alley. I was asked to write a guest post for […]
Peter Nimble and His Fantastic Eyes: Book Review
“Adventure ho!” reads the author’s inscription on the first page. Jonathan Auxier is a friend of a friend who lent me her signed copy of Peter Nimble and His Fantastic Eyes for a read. Auxier wasn’t wrong. From the first page, Peter Nimble rollicks forward through adventure with barely a missed beat along the way. Peter Nimble is an orphan, […]
The Real Battle
As I listened to The Hobbit on CD today on my drive, I was struck by Tolkien’s comments about Bilbo just before the hobbit sees Smaug for the first time. “Wisps of vapour floated up and past him and he began to sweat. A sound, too, began to throb in his ears, a sort of bubbling like the noise of a […]
Fare Forward, Voyagers
On the Sunday morning of Hutchmoot, my sister and I went to church with the friends we were staying with at Christ Presbyterian Church of Nashville. The minister, Scott Sauls, spoke from Philippians 2 on “The Humility of God.” In one of those “God-things” everything he said seemed to fit hand in glove with the content of the conference. He […]
Eleven Years
I first met him in the Oxford Valley Barnes and Noble on a rainy afternoon about eleven years ago. I’d heard he would be a bad influence on me, but I wanted to draw my own conclusions before entering the debate. And time was running short: a discussion about his worth was planned for the next day. It was a […]
You see, there’s this book…
There are some books that I always have in the back of my mind when I’m in used book stores or wandering the wide web. They’re often the ones from childhood which are just so worn (after all, even if they were just given to my sisters and not passed down from our mom, they’d been through nearly 10 years […]
House of Books
“A house without books is like a room without windows.” ~Heinrich Mann People marvel at my bookshelves when they come to my apartment…I come home and realize that I come by it honestly.
Spaghetti in the Pensieve
In one of the Harry Potter books, when Harry and Dumbledore are examining memories in the Pensieve, there’s one memory that Dumbledore has trouble getting out of its little bottle into the Pensieve. It clings to the glass, and stretches into strings as he forces it out…I think all memories are like that, in a way. They all cling, typically […]