A Picture Book That Calls Us to Books and Living

My wife is a librarian and daily interacts with children and books. If I were not a Professor, I cannot think of a more appealing calling. We talk daily about the little ones in her school, books, and the relationship between bookish children and their overall demeanor. A picture book that we recently became aware of is The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore.

For all bibliovores, regardless of age, this book is for you. It is beautiful in form and content, it is good in form and content, and it is true in form and content. Rarely does one find a children's picture book that so throughly celebrates a bookish life, but also deals with some grand humane themes. In addition to this unique book, there is an app (sorry Luddites) that is interactive with the book. For the critics of such apps, one can make the case that this app encourages greater interaction with the book and other books. For short film lovers, this wonderful book also inspired the Academy Award winning short film.

Faith, Hope, and Love in a Culture of Death: Lois Lowry's The Giver as Film

Let's begin with the film's single greatest obstacle: the culture Philip Rieff described as "the death culture" is not likely to assemble en masse to pay for viewing a morality tale. A central message in this film is that we have become "shadows." Indeed, those immersed in our death culture do not likely have ears to hear and eyes to see the hollow selves we currently are. In a time such as ours, where very little if anything signifies, it is not probable this movie will be understood. At one key moment The Giver declares, "we are living a life of shadows, of echoes." This sentence captures the essence of the death culture. Add to that the following minor problem of our nearly national obsession with spectacle, as evidenced in news shows and recent popular YA movies such as The Hunger Games and Divergent . It is clear our current death culture is taken with the dystopian novel and dystopian movie version of said novel as long as it provides ...

How Twitter Killed Tolstoy or Why You Will Likely Not Finish this Blog

My favorite fictional Professor, aptly described the end of learning. Faber, tells how his class went from Sven Birkerts The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction Alan Jacobs Slow Reading in a Hurried Age David Mikics Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital Age Naimi S. Baron My own experience parallels that of Professor Faber. With declining Liberal Arts majors and distracted Great Books students.... Our lives have become as thin as the thinnest flat screen TV. There is a hollowness to our public discourses and our private conversations. It is not surprising how the tone, texture, and content of our verbal exchanges mimic posts on our dominate social media or the headline stories Of course, the title of this blog could have been any of the following: How Instagram Killed How Vine Killed How Facebook Killed How Google+ Killed How LinkedIn Killed

If Dostoevsky Had Written Science Fiction

Sounding like a modern, the Greek writer Callimachus once penned an epigram where he quipped, “a large book is a great misfortune.” Does not the legitimacy of such an assertion depend on the author and the reader? Novelist Michael O’Brien gives all lovers of fine novels another marvelously large book. As one who enjoys good science fiction, it is always a treat when a first rate novelist ventures into a genre different than what is the norm for that novelist. Often when talking about literature, someone will ask, “what is it about?” This question is sometimes confused with the more important question of, “what are the possible meanings of this work?” While the storyline of Voyage to Alpha Centauri is about a trip of the spaceship Kosmos to Alpha Centauri and given to us primarily in the form of the diary of Neil de Hoyos, one might be able to say that the novel is really about what it means to be a human being, the human...

Musings of a Christian Humanist

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