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Category Archives: Commonplace Book
“I’ve Got a Feeling”
In the spring of 1921, some eight years before his conversion to Christianity, C. S. Lewis said this about death: I have seen death fairly often and never yet been able to find it anything but extraordinary and rather incredible. … Continue reading
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“We Want to Play the Music”
As the year comes to an end, I find myself with a short stack of articles and essays that I never quite got around to writing about here. One of them was yesterday’s question of religious language through Jonathan Merritt’s … Continue reading
Chesterton and “the World’s Inn”
The season of Christmas continues for many even as others see it as three-days gone. Here’s another Chesterton poem for the season from The Spirit of Christmas. It’s an interesting thought, really, that places the Christ Child at a particular … Continue reading
Reflecting on John
Today many Christians around the world spent time reflecting on the life of John the Evangelist, the apostle who penned a gospel and three letters found in the New Testament. John is a fascinating figure on multiple levels, particularly with … Continue reading
Posted in Books, Commonplace Book, Faith, Friendship, Life in the Fifth Act
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Season’s Readings: 2018 Edition
One thing I’m trying to do a little more of as I get older is to establish some set “reading patterns” for different parts of the year. Holidays are often geared that way, of course. Then you work in classics … Continue reading
Lewis on Literature
Fall break has broken. It came to an end last night with church, some orange chicken with steamed rice, laundry, and the final pages of C. S. Lewis’s The Discarded Image. The book, Lewis’s attempt at writing a “primer” for … Continue reading
The Joy of Teaching
What started out as a quote about the particular love of teaching turned into a call for something more from pastors. From VanHoozer and Strachan’s The Pastor as Public Theologian: Stanley Woodworth, my high school French teacher, once described the … Continue reading
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A Sort Of Wizards Duel
This week some of my students will start to read C. S. Lewis’s “The Weight of Glory.” Every year I read it with my students, I seem to find something new or just askew enough to strike me deeply. The … Continue reading
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Up Through the First Joke
From The Magician’s Nephew by C. S. Lewis: The Lion, whose eyes never blinked, stared at the animals as hard as if he was going to burn them up with his mere stare. And gradually a change came over them. The smaller … Continue reading
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The Professional Necessity of Others
From Matthew B. Crawford’s The World Beyond Your Head: For experiences to become part of the secure, sedimented foundation of a skill, they must be criticized. Otherwise people (and the resources of language) are indispensable. Without them, your experiences are … Continue reading
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Space Enough, and Time 