Literature

Cards on the table: Stephen N. Williams is a fellow Welshman whom I have known for over thirty-five years. I am still pondering a question he asked me on a visit he made to my home in 1977 when I was a student at Reformed Theological Seminary, Jackson, Mississippi, and both of us fellow-exiles from...

A friend of mine, some five years ago now, introduced me to Vigen Guroian when he suggested I read Inheriting Paradise (Eerdmans, 1999), a short but immensely satisfying meditation on the relationship of theology to gardening. Earlier this year, I was pleased to find that Guroian had continued his...

Though some will try and deny it, everyone loves a good story. Being fashioned in the likeness of the God who scripted the story of life, we by consequence find both identity and delight in stories. We have, after all, been written into the grand tale, playing a vital part in its unfolding, moving...

When viewing a film, while it is important to pay attention to its narrative, it is also very important not to simply or exclusively concentrate on the narrative. The artistic elements of filmmaking convey aesthetic and worldview choices as much as the dialogue. How a filmmaker says something is as...

Harry Potter is the literary phenomenon for children so far in the twenty first century. On the use of the imagination in literature, C.S. Lewis has commented, "You and I who still enjoy fairy tales have less reason to wish actual childhood back. We have kept its pleasures and added some grown-up...

"Fairy tales, romance and adventure appeal to us, not just because they are different from our ordinary experience but because they present in easily assimilable form an essential element of that experience, the shrouding mystery of life and the tremulous human desire for an unseen glory." --S.L...

Toothless Vampires and the Holy Grail It is often suggested that John Milton's Paradise Lost is a better read than his Paradise Regained. It is easier to describe evil than goodness, easier to record the terrors of Hell than the beauty of Heaven; --so the suggestion goes. It is certainly true of...

Carrying biblical overtones and set in the rural Iowa town of Gilead, Marilynne Robinson's second novel is the winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction--and with good reason. In a spare prose that rings with psychological realism and moral depth, Marilynne Robinson depicts what William...