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To This Great Stage of Fools: Born August 28th

Aug28

Roger Antoine Duvoisin, author of Petunia and Veronica.

“When Veronica reached the streets of the city, she knew she was different. THERE WAS NOT ANOTHER HIPPOPOTAMUS IN SIGHT.
Only people, and more people, and still more people —people who stared at her, bumped into her, and shouted angrily at her when she stepped on their toes.
She was gloriously conspicuous.”

Phyllis Krasilovsky, author of The Cow Who Fell in the Canal and The Man Who Didn’t Wash His Dishes.

“Well, as the days went by he got hungrier and hungrier, and more and more tired, and so he never washed his dishes. After a while there were so MANY dirty dishes that they didn’t all fit in the sink. So he began to pile them on the table.”

Allen Say, Japanese-American author of The Bicycle Man and Grandfather’s Journey

“When I was a small boy I went to a school in the south island of Japan. The schoolhouse stood halfway up a tall green mountain. It was made of wood and the wood was gray with age. When a strong wind blew, the trees made the sound of waves and the building creaked like an old sailing ship. From the playground, we could see the town, the ships in the harbor, the shining sea.”

Tasha Tudor, illustrator of so many beautiful books for children and creator of a beautiful life in rural New England.

“Life isn’t long enough to do all you could accomplish. And what a privilege even to be alive. In spite of all the pollutions and horrors, how beautiful this world is. Supposing you only saw the stars once every year. Think what you would think. The wonder of it!”

Leo Tolstoy, author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina.

“Pierre’s madness consisted in not waiting, as he had formerly done, to discover personal attributes which he called ‘good qualities’ in people before loving them; his heart overflowed with love, and by loving without cause he never failed to discover undeniable reasons for loving.”

Picture Book Preschool Book of the Week: Week 36 American Folk Tales

Aug27

Peter Spier and Tasha Tudor must be about my favorite author illustrators. Today it’s a Peter Spier book that I’m featuring: The Fox Went Out on a Chilly Night. This book was one of his earlier efforts, published in 1961 well before he won the Caldecott Medal in 1978 for Noah’s Ark. Fox was a Caldecott Honor book, however, early recognition for this talented artist.

We love to sing this book together in our family. The fox is such a villain, and the farmer is such a klutz, and the fox family is so cute, and we just like it. If you don’t know the tune, there is music in the back of the book, or I suppose you could make up your own. The words are all printed on one page in the back of the book, too, so that you could make copies and pass them out for everyone to sing along. However you read it or sing it or look at the pictures together, I think you’ll enjoy the book. The illustrations evoke autumn and farm life and New England. The song itself is folksy and catchy, fun to repeat over and over. The pictures will bear scrutinizing over and over, too, with lots of details to catch as you go through the book a second or third time.

By the way, one of my discerning preschoolers once asked me why the fox “prayed to the moon to give him light.”

“We don’t pray to the moon, Mommy. We pray to God.”

“Right,” I answered. “But foxes don’t know much. Maybe they think the moon gives us light all by itself.”

So, I commend to you foxes who pray to the moon or for the moon to give them light, and I recommend this book and any others written or illlustrated by Peter Spier.

Picture Book Preschool is a preschool/kindergarten curriculum which consists of a list of picture books to read aloud for each week of the year and a character trait, a memory verse, and activities, all tied to the theme for the week. You can purchase a downloadable version (pdf file) of Picture Book Preschool by Sherry Early at Biblioguides.

You Are Who We Say You Are

Aug25

A Malaysian woman who was born into a Muslim family wishes to become a Catholic and marry a Catholic man. So what’s the problem? According to sharia law, she’s just not allowed to disavow Islam, even if she’s been baptized as a Catholic. So my question is: in their world would I be allowed to submit to Islam? If so, why, since I was “born Christian”? If not, how can Islam be true for all people?

“In rulings in her case, civil courts said Malays could not renounce Islam because the Constitution defined Malays to be Muslims.

They also ruled that a request to change her identity card from Muslim to Christian had to be decided by the Shariah courts. There she would be considered an apostate, and if she did not repent she surely would be sentenced to several years in an Islamic center for rehabilitation.”
From the NY TImes article on the case.

New York Times: Once Muslim, Now Christian and Caught in the Çourts.

Read more about this story at Michelle Malkin’s blog.

Friday’s Center of the Blogosphere

Aug25

Krakovianka is an American Christian living in Krakow, Poland. She’s also a homeschooler, and she’s been invited to peak to a small group of pioneering new Polish homeschooling parents. Go over and encourage her.

Sarah at Reading the Past on The 50-Page Rule. Before last year, I almost always finished any book I started, hoping that it would get better. I have, in the past couple of years, given myself permission to give up on a book that I’m not enjoying. However, I just finished a wonderful book, Kristen Lavransdatter: The Bridal Wreath (actually part 1 of a three part novel), and I couldn’t get interested or get used to the style until I was about a third of the way through this first part. I stuck with it because a good friend highly recommended the book. So, sometimes you should give up, and sometimes you need to keep trying, and who can tell the difference?

Tonia at Intent has a challenge: 30 Days of Nothing. The idea is refrain as a family from buying any non-essential things for an entire month. I honestly don’t think I could talk my family into restricting our buying to only essentials for a month. And I’m not sure how to define “essentials”? The things that Tonia mentions– lattes, movies, books, clothes, fancy hair gel– are already fairly scarce in our family, not that we don’t have our luxuries. (We get most of the books from the library and from the used bookstore.) We buy fast food or pizza occasionally. We spend a great deal of money on classes: dance, karate, outside academic classes for the high schoolers, college classes. I don’t see how we could quit these for a month, but it might be that we ought to consider cutting down on the outside classes in the long term. Nonetheless, I’m intrigued by the idea of a month long fast from materialism. What do you think?

Not Death, But Life on MY Terms

Aug25

I did it MY way. Kathryn Judson at Suitable for Mixed Company pointed me to this FIRST THINGS blog post by Wilfred McClay arguing that what we have is not a culture of death or a party of death but rather a significant group of people who do not understand what life is nor from whom it is derived nor what their purpose and response in life is to be.

“To say that we do not kill them (the helpless, the unborn, the elderly) because they have a right to life is not to explain why we have a responsibility to care for them, and love them, and why we fail ourselves when we fail to acknowledge that responsibility and seek to offload it onto others. An ailing elderly parent has the right not to be killed, but he does not have the “right” to be loved.

Yet it is one of the central tasks of our humanity that we care lovingly for him and not merely be instructed by the law that we must resist killing him. Rights-talk does not necessarily give rise to responsibility-talk.”

“Right to life,” then, is fine as far as it goes, but we also need to show why we as humans have a responsibility to care for and love those around us—whether they are meeting our needs in return or not. I think it is wonderful when I hear the parents and family members of disabled persons tell about how much love and joy they have received from their special needs child, but what if it were not so? What if the disabled person or the elderly relative is difficult, demanding, and draining? Do we not still have a duty, unpopular word that, to care for and love that person with a disability that runs deeper than physical handicaps, a disability of the heart or of the mind? That’s an easy statement to make, or write on a blog, but oh, so hard to live.

I believe, not only in the right to life, but also in the reponsibility to love those to whom God has called us. Actually, I’m not sure this concept can be explained or understood or lived fully apart from a Christian philosophy of self-sacrifice. However, I see people living responsible love every day. I have a relative who cares for her crabby mother-in-law because my relative is responsible. I have several friends who have adopted children, not because they can’t have children (not a bad reason for adoption), but because they feel called to care for those who are without parents. I know people who stay married because they made vows, and sometimes the love and joy come back. Sometimes not.

Where does the sense of responsibility and duty to serve come from, and where does the strength to actually do it come from, if not from the Holy Spirit? Even with God’s help, I find it difficult to love some people. Without supernatural intervention, it would be impossible.

A Kid’s Eye View

Aug25

Hi! This is the Optimistic Idealistic Drama Queen, aka Brown Bear Daughter (age 11). Since it’s Take Your Kids To Blog Day, I’m here! Okay, so I just finished a book called Open Your Eyes: Extraordinary Experiences in Faraway Places. This is my review for it.

First of all, I have to explain. This book is made up of stories by authors about themselves. Nonfiction. I am usually not too interested in nonfiction, but as this was a school book, I didn’t have much of a choice. I actually thought it would be interesting, however, when I first looked at the jacket blurb.
Anyways . . . the authors who wrote the book are M.T. Anderson, Piper Dellums, Jean Fritz, Kathleen Krull, Lois Lowry, Harry Mazer, Susie Morgenstern, Elizabeth Partridge, Katherine Paterson, and Graham Salisbury.
I don’t want to give too much away, but I have to say that my favorite story was the one written by Jean Fritz. It was about her, as a preteen, in China where she spent most of the first thirteen years of her life as a missionary kid. I was especially interested in it because she was almost my age throughout most of the story.
It had a bit of language in it, but I kind of had to ignore those parts. Part of why I really liked it was because it was a book with lots of different stories, and it was not just one book. It was impossible to get bored with it because everyday I would start a new story, and then, if I had been bored before, I would get interested again.
Actually, I had only heard of a couple of these people before I read the book. The only authors I recognized were Jean Fritz, and Katherine Paterson.
Okay, I have to go! You should take advantage of reading a kid’s point of view of a book. Bye.

Book -Spotting #17

Aug24

I just discovered this list: National Geographic’s 100 Greatest Adventure Books.
I’ve read only two out of one hundred: Wind, Sand & Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1940) and Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl (1950). However, I see several books on the list that I’d like to read.

Here you can read the story of another woman who is besotted with P.G. Wodehouse.

“One of my aims in Life — other than getting a job, swimming with dolphins off the coast of Australia (after I learn how to swim, of course), spending a summer in Provence, going out for dinner with Pierce Brosnan/Johnny Depp/Orlando Bloom/George Clooney (I’d better stop here) — is to introduce Wodehouse to as many people as I can. I want to spread the Wodehousian magic to the ignorant and uninitiated.”

I can think of much worse goals.

Here’s a review of a new translation of The Three Musketeers. I’m planning to read The Three Musketeers to my urchins later this year, actually next spring, so I might check this translation out.

“My teetering piles are composed of books I read about on other blogs, or people mentioned in comments here. My TBR lists grow longer everyday because of blogs. And my reading horizons have grown ever wider. Book bloggers are some of the coolest people I know. —Stephenie at So Many Books.
I agree. THE LIST grows ever longer, and I’m getting most of my book recommendations from other bloggers these days.

Speaking of recommendations, I want one of these books, The American Story by Jennifer Armstrong, reviewed by Chris Barton.

Cindy re-reads an old favorite book and asks: “Do you re-read books?”

Glittering Images by Susan Howatch

Aug24

Wow! Susan Howatch has been recommended to me several times as a “Christian author” or an author of fiction dealing with Christian themes, but I didn’t expect the emotional and spiritual impact of this book. After just having read just one of her books, I would say that Howatch reminds me most of P.D. James. I’ll definitely be reading the sequel to Glittering Images, Glamorous Powers.

I would also add Howatch to my list of authors of Anglican-themed literature. The spiritual advisor who plays a large role in Glittering Images is as Freudian as he is Christian, but all the main characters are orthodox, if somewhat liberal, Anglican Christians, people who describe themselves as “not apostate.” The plot and the themes hinge upon their being devoted followers of Christ and members of His church. And those themes of forgiveness, celibacy, marriage, self-deception and hypocrisy are explored in depth and somewhat exhaustively. So, I give the book a qualified recommendation.

Qualified by what? Welll, one of the main themes of the novel is one about which I professed last week to find difficulties reading and finding really good literature, namely sex. Glittering Images is about the images we project to the world to protect ourselves and the desperate deceptions we practice even upon ourselves (The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? Jeremiah 17:9). However, in a concrete sense Glittering Images is also very much about sex, sexual ethics, celibacy, marriage, sex within marriage, adultery, and all sorts of other sexual aberrations. For the most part, Howatch deals with the subject in a mature and thoughtful manner, but some of the bizarre actions of some of the characters in her book and some of the descriptions of those actions may be more than the average Christian reader wants to read.

The book is set in England in the 1930’s. Archbishop of Canterbury Lang, a real person, asks the narrator of the story, a fictional canon named Charles Ashworth, to investigate a bishop who is causing political trouble for the Church in the House of Lords. Ashworth, unfortunately, has troubles of his own, problems which interact with those of the troublesome bishop to create one unholy mess. Howatch uses a rather bizarre (her word, not mine, but I concur) situation to explore such diverse topics as sexual ethics, fathers and sons, counseling ethics and methods, marital relations, and the limits of sanity and demon possession.

Here are a couple of passages that I thought especially insightful, just to whet your interest:

“I’ve prayed and prayed for help but —”
“Then your prayers are being answered, aren’t they?”
I stared at thim. “Answered?” I looked around the room. I was barely able to speak. “I’ve broken down so utterly that I’m unable to continue as a clergyman, and you say this is God answering my prayers?”
“Of course. Do you think God’s been unaware of your difficulties and the suffering you must inevitably have endured? And do you think He’s incapable of reaching out at last to bring you face to face with your troubles so that you can surmount them and go on to serve Him far better than you ever served Him in the past?”
I understood but was unable to tell him so, and as I covered my face with my hands, I heard him say: “God hasn’t sent this ordeal to destroy you, Charles. He’s come to your rescue at last, and here in this village, here in this house, here in this room where you’ve hit rock-bottom, here’s where your new life finally begins.”

“All clergymen ought to be married, said the authorative Mrs. Cobden-Smith, offering a handful of water-biscuits to the St. Bernard. “They say the Roman Catholics have frightful trouble with their celibate priests.”
“They say the Church of England has frightful trouble with its married clergy,” said a strong, harsh, well-remembered voice from the doorway, and as we all turned to face him, the Bishop of Starbridge made a grand entrance into his drawing-room.

“Do they still perform exorcisms in the Church of England?”
“Nowadays it’s generally regarded as a somewhat unsavoury superstition.”
“How odd! Is it wise for the Church to abandon exorcism to laymen?”
“What laymen?”
“They’re called psycho-analysts,” she said dryly. “Maybe you’ve heard of them. They have this cute little god called Freud and a very well-paid priesthood and the faithful go weekly to worship on couches—“

I like the second conversation particularly because I’ve always thought that the nonsense that people talk abut how Roman Catholic priests are bound to fall into sexual sin because celibacy just isn’t natural is particularly pernicious nonsense. Of course, celibacy and sexual purity aren’t natural; neither is marriage and sexual purity within marriage. Sin is natural, and there but by the grace of God . . .

I think this novel is worth reading in spite of its sexually explicit passages and in spite of its tendency to get lost in Freudian psychoanalysis because the author has a great deal of insight into the agonies of spiritual darkness, the process of healing and forgiveness, the vicissitudes of marriage, and the practice of spiritual disciplines such as prayer and meditation. And she tells a good story. I’m going to be thinking about applying those insights to my life for a quite a while.