Visiting Donald Hall's Eagle Pond This Christmas

For lovers of great poetry, the name Donald Hall is well known. For those familiar with the poetry of Donald Hall, we recognize the fondness Hall has for the particular place of Eagle pond. In Christmas at Eagle Pond, Hall offers all readers a treasure, in the form of a short story about an imagined childhood Christmas experience at Eagle Pond. In the midst of numerous delightful moments, there is an important reflection of a Christmas pageant and the place a Christmas party held in the life of the community. There are simple and elegant back and white illustrations throughout. The value and glory of transmission of folk culture through story telling is pushed to the front of the narrative more than once.

The story is set in the time of model A's and T's with some still using buggies and sleighs. Among the many worthy moments in the story, there is a beautiful moment and image of prayer. Additionally, the charm of a revised version of "Casey at Bat" is fitting in light of the teller of the tale. While I've never experienced it, I participated vicariously in the process of making popcorn (long before the instantness of the microwave) in a kettle, adding syrup with the intention of making popcorn balls for decoration and eating.

My favorite description and one that speaks of one joy of embodiment is when the narrator says, "I walked through their icy bedroom to mine, even icier, and stuffed my hot-water bottle under the sheets to warm my feet. Crawling beneath the covers I shivered a moment, but the quilts were thick, my feet almost too hot, and soon I fell asleep in my familiar goose feather bed at the house I loved most in the world." The prose of Hall is as smooth and flowing as his poetry with some lines singing like his poetry. This is a story to be enjoyed this Christmas season and will most certainly call to mind childhood Christmas memories..

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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