Tag Archives: books

The Lord, Hollywood, and Lewis

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I nervously await the film adaptation of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Will the message be “Disney-fied”? SDG at JimmyAkin.org is worried, too.

Now that Walden Media is at work on The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, Narnia fans are understandably wary. For one thing, as well-loved as these books are both inside and outside the church, they don’t have nearly the huge following of the Lord of the Rings books. For another, the Christian themes in Lewis’s books are so much more blatant than those of Tolkien’s books that the risk of Hollywood subversion and the stakes in the event of such subversion are higher.

15 Minutes of Fame

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Friend and sometime co-blogger Jerry Nora was mentioned in the June/July issue of First Things. 🙂 (Thanks, Quenta Narwenion)

"It's been a while since I've had occasion to remark on Peter Singer of Princeton University, the ageing bad boy of moral philosophy. But now Gerald Nora, a second-year medical student, sends me the dust jacket of the 1996 edition of Singer's Rethinking Life and Death. Mr. Nora is right in suspecting that the blurbs 'praising' the book might have been chosen by Professor Singer's enemies. For instance, there is this from the Washington Post: 'Far from pointing a way out of today's moral dilemmas, Singer's book is a road map for driving down the darkest of moral blind alleys. . . . Read it to remind yourself of the enormities of which putatively civilized beings are capable.' Precisely. If you want a roadmap for driving down blind alleys, this is it. Then there is this from the publisher: 'A profound and provocative work in the tradition of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.' Precisely again. Even more precisely, it is in the tradition of thinking that Huxley so powerfully warned us against." – Richard John Neuhaus

Ask and You Shall Receive?

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“For the smell of new rain, for pumpkins and Snoopy, for the aroma of homemade bread, for cotton candy, for funny looking animals like giraffes and koalas and human beings, let us give thanks to the Lord. – Prayers of the Faithful: cycles A, B, and C

*shudder* This book shows some of the awful consequences of unfettered reform. One doesn’t generally think of such a think as “bad” prayer, but this stuff is atrocious. (Thanks, Waiting in Joyful Hope)

The Papacy, Chapter 1

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A friend of mine is (slowly) working on a book about the papacy. Here’s a sneak peak at the first chapter. The copyrights to this abstract and rough draft belong to Jordan Joseph Wales.

Abstract:

When considering the nature of the charism of the Bishop of Rome within the Church, it is imperative to give proper attention to the role he historically played and the way this role was interpreted by the fathers of the Church. Fundamental to the matter is the question of his authority: does or does not the Bishop of Rome have a special jurisdictional authority over other Churches? This chapter details the first of a series of historical illustrations of the universal "care for the churches" exercised by the occupant of the See of Peter. This particular illustration, that of St Clement of Rome in A.D. 96, is especially important in any discussion of the papacy because it is so often put forth by proponents of almost any view of the Roman bishop’s role in the universal church. Herein, we attempt an ordered and clear exposition of the events with special attention given to the role of Pope St Clement’s letter as it was understood by the early church fathers. Their views must take precedence over those of any later theologians and apologists, for the fathers wrote from within the tradition received from the apostles.

St Clement I

Good Ol’ Gilbert

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Here’s some info on an Catholic author for whom I gain more respect every time I
read another of his books.

“Who
is this guy and why haven�t I heard of him?”

A pithy bio of G.K. Chesterton by Dale Ahlquist

President, American Chesterton Society

I’ve heard the question more than once. It is asked by people who have just started
to discover G.K. Chesterton. They have begun reading a Chesterton book, or perhaps
have seen an issue of Gilbert! Magazine, or maybe they’ve only encountered a series
of pithy quotations that marvelously articulate some forgotten bit of common sense.
They ask the question with a mixture of wonder, gratitude and . . . resentment.
They are amazed by what they have discovered. They are thankful to have discovered
it. And they are almost angry that it has taken so long for them to make the discovery.