Photo by Frans Lanting. :.:  Read the story here.  :.: HT: Gospel Of The Trees

“The vital power of an imaginative work demands a diversity within its unity; and the stronger the diversity, the more massive the unity. Incidentally, this is the weakness of most ‘edifying’ or ‘propaganda’ literature. There is no diversity. The Energy is active only in one part of the whole, and in consequence the wholeness is destroyed and the Power diminished.”

Dorothy Sayers

HT: Rebecca Reynolds

“When you besiege a city for a long time, making war against it in order to take it, you shall not destroy its trees by wielding an axe against them. You may eat from them, but you shall not cut them down. Are the trees in the field human, that they should be besieged by you? Only the trees that you know are not trees for food you may destroy and cut down, that you may build siegeworks against the city that makes war with you, until it falls.
(Deuteronomy 20:19-20 ESV)

This is mentioned over at a Gospel Of The Trees by Alan Jacobs, which I love.

Photo by Gina G. Smith

People say “moms are heroes,” but I think they usually mean this in a less emphatic, penetrating way. Moms are truly heroes when they shatter the darkness by pouring the light of the love of Jesus into the lives of their children. I absolutely love this song in every way. Truth, beauty, and goodness. And I love how it validates the beautiful life my wife lives and the terrible war she makes everyday on the darkness. I love how it names her for who she is. We all need to be named. Thanks, AP.

Another great thing about this song is that it means more, not less, than what is said above. It says so much about so much.

“Lean into something lasting…”

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“…the delight and pride of Aule is in the deed of making, and in the thing made, and neither in possession nor in his own mastery; wherefore he gives and hoards not, and is free from care, passing ever on to some new work.”

J.R.R. Tolkien

Ron Block, who posted this on FB, calls this, “Advice for creative types from The Silmarillion by J.R.R.T.”

“I have been privileged to know gifted artists who were not acknowledged as such simply because they lived like regular people and didn’t carry on like Lord Byron. (‘Of course, he can draw, but he is not really an artist.’) All of us have received, as an important part of our cultural inheritance, this pernicious myth of the artist. He has soul, and perhaps even rich brown eyes. He is widely misunderstood. He lives in a garret. He feels deeply. He fights the establishment orthodoxies. This last part of the myth has become increasingly difficult for him since fighting establishment orthodoxies has become the establishment orthodoxy.

“But regardless of the details, anyone who wants to be admitted into the land of the artist has to show some version of these papers to the border guards. And while we are on the point, few things are more painful to watch than to see evangelical Christians (who have heard the phrase ‘redeeming the arts’ one time too many) trying to bluff their way past the guards. If artists get to ‘produce art’ then just call yourself a producer, or painter, or writer, or whatever, and hope they buy it. They almost never do, but the neediness of some Christians demands the risk be taken anyway. Repeatedly.”

Douglas Wilson, from an essay titled Humbling the Arts

Behold, the Lamb of God.

Visit this handy-dandy website to listen to the entire record, see the tour dates, buy the record, or dvd, etc.

A must-own for Advent and Christmas! 5-7 thumbs up. My kids love it. My wife loves it. Myself loves it. Mylanta loves it?

Here’s a little outtake from Lanier Ivester’s wonderful post over at The Rabbit Room, Two Trees.

“The affair in the Garden was not about keeping rules or breaking them so much as choosing the Desire of our souls or choosing His counterfeit. At the heart of this poem lies that ancient choice, as terrible today as it was when God first granted it in the Garden: heaven or hell? Life or death? Not only for all eternity but for this very moment snared in time. ‘Gaze on this,’ the poet pleads, ‘not on that.’ Love and long for—in other words, submit to and believe—the ecstasy of the Life offered you. Take faith to turn from the ruin of your own heart and fix your eyes on something that is truer than all the sorrow of the world put together.

“It has been said that for every look at self we must take ten looks at Christ. I find that truth expressed with such magnificent beauty in this poem. For while the accepted interpretation—and for all I know, the original intent—of these lines may uphold an inward search for goodness apart from Christ, as a Christian I take great delight in the freedom I have to celebrate the gleaming flashes of truth that glitter and sparkle with such inexorable joy in the world around me. We’re miners, really, we servants of the true King, plunging through a darkened world in enemy territory to retrieve the scattered bits of Eden that were made to flame in the light of the sun. For though far-flung and often couched amid the hard crust of error and inaccuracy, they are there all the same. As C.S. Lewis recounted in Surprised by Joy, longings that disclose eternal realities may be mediated to us by ‘the water-colour world of Morris, the leafy recesses of Malory, the twilight of Yeats…’ That is just the wonder of poetry—or of anything beautiful, for that matter. They bear the opportunity of communicating spiritual truth, these remnants of a lost paradise with which our tired earth is endowed like veins of living gold, and give us courage to hope in a Redemptive Plan that is steadily, patiently, unrelentingly working to restore all things to their original purpose.”

I recommend the entire piece, which includes the poem, The Two Trees, by Yeats. Lanier and her husband, Philip, live in a farmhouse in Georgia. I was privileged to meet them at Hutchmoot 2010. She is a wonderful, careful and thoughtful writer.

She also has a website and a bookstore where she probably has what you’re looking for for the bibliophile in your family this Christmas. Note: It’s not for Kindle.

Alan Jacobs sits down with Doug and N.D. Wilson to talk C.S. Lewis. They range all over, from films to the Space Trilogy with asides that will delight fans of the creator of Narnia.

This was a real pleasure to watch. I can’t recommend it highly enough. If you’re a Lewis fan, a movie buff, a story lover, a Christian, a human, you’ll appreciate this.

I loved Alan Jacob’s book The Narnian, and if you watch this you’ll see why. The man, in fact all three of these fellows, absolutely get Narnia. They also deeply get Lewis himself and his magical worldview.

Many expressed concerns over The Great Divorce film adaptation in the works (by N.D Wilson). If you’re one of those people, I’d watch this and your mind might change. At least you’ll appreciate that the story is in good hands. Who knows if that will issue in a great movie.

This, my friends, is gold. It’s gold-plated gold. Enjoy.

Jonathan’s new book, The Charlatan’s Boy, releases today. Some of you are familiar with JR’s trilogy (Wilderking). If you have middle-graders who haven’t yet read them, may I recommend them to you? And now there’s more, The Charlatan’s Boy releases today! I sat down with JR in different states and he answered 5 questions for us. –Sam

1. Fact: The Wilderking Books are gold for children (and adults) on many fronts. Truth? Check. Goodness, Beauty? Check, check. Were you inspired to write the trilogy by any concern over a lack of worthwhile fiction for kids, or was your motivation simply to make billions of dollars?

I wouldn’t say any ‘concern’ about existing children’s fiction motivated me. I was quite ignorant of what was out there when I started writing the Wilderking books. I’m only a little less ignorant now. I will say I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how much worthwhile fiction is out there–though there is plenty that isn’t worthwhile. Here’s the thing, S.D.:  I want people to like what I like. I think that’s a good enough reason to write stories. I have a particular vision of the universe, and I believe things would be better for all of us if more people shared that vision. I’m joking, but only half-joking. It takes a lot of work to write a book; in order to stay motivated to do that work, one needs an overblown sense that it’s important for people to hear what one has to say. The billions of dollars, that’s just a bonus.

2. What sets The Charlatan’s Boy apart from The Wilderking Trilogy?

Sadness. There’s a sadness in the Charlatan’s Boy that has no parallel in the Wilderking books. I’ve been dipping into Buechner’s book, Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale. An amazing book, by the way. As Buechner argues, the grand comic vision of redemptive history is rooted in the reality of deep sadness and hurt  and danger from which we have to be redeemed. I think (I hope) the comic vision of The Charlatan’s Boy is more fully realized than that of The Wilderking–in part because the sadness, loneliness, and hurt are more fully realized.

3. What are two important things for aspiring writers to remember as they work on their craft?

First of all, let me thank you for the way you phrased this question. You didn’t say, “What are the two most important things…” You said “What are two important things…” Do you realize how much that takes the pressure off? I know lots of important things aspiring writers should remember. I don’t know which two are the most important. So here are two from the list:

a) Pursue your audience. Woo them. It’s not their job to stay interested in what you write. It’s your job to keep them interested. As a corollary, don’t try to impress your reader. That’s for sophomores. Try to love your reader.

b) Speak English. When there’s a word derived from the Latin or Greek and another word from the Anglo-Saxon and they mean the same thing, the tie goes to the Anglo-Saxon word. There are reasons to go with the Latinate word; just be sure you’ve got one, and it’s good a reason. Let your default be the Anglo-Saxon word. It’s true (I think) that something like 75-80% of the words in an English dictionary derive from Latin or Greek. But here’s an exercise for an aspiring writer. Pick a favorite passage from the King James Bible. Count the words in the passage, noting how many derive from Latin or Greek. Divide the Latinate/Greek words by the total number of words to get a percentage. It won’t be 75-80%. It won’t even be close. It may be as high as 25%. It will probably be considerably lower. That’s something for aspiring writers to put in their pipes and smoke.

4. What is your life for?

I don’t see how I could improve on the Westminster Confession: “The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” I do like John Piper’s suggestion that we glorify God by enjoying him forever. The ability to enjoy the good things that remain, by God’s grace, in this shipwreck of a world is a vitally important thing, I believe.

5. Tell us what makes your books, which are speculative in nature, so American. Why not just do another England-inspired fantasy?

I love British literature as much as anybody. I’ve got a PhD in British lit, for crying out loud. But when it came down to producing rather than consuming literature, it seemed important to me that I speak in my native tongue. There is a vitality, a vigor in American storytelling traditions. I’m an American [cue Lee Greenwood], an inheritor of that verbal and narrative legacy. It makes sense that I should make use of it.

Thanks, JR. As an American, who’s proud to be, I especially liked the part about Lee Greenwood.

Jonathan is also the author of a great little book on Saint Patrick called Saint Patrick. He lives in Nashville, TN, with his wife Lou Alice and their six children. Lou Alice is a peach.