The Light in the Darkness

Mark was determined to die. And in retrospect there was really nothing anyone could have done to stop him. His first attempt came when he was 18 and it left him with scars running the length of his arms. His sister found him sitting calmly in the bathtub, a razor blade lying in the pool of blood. Help arrived in time to save him. When he was released from hospital his parents took him to the finest psychiatrists in the …

An Interview with Lukas VanDyke

This marks the third interview I’ve completed with artists involved in various disciplines. I first interviewed Max McLean about performance art and then Makoto Fujimura on his abstract art. Today I turn to photography and interview Lukas VanDyke, a photographer I have met at several conferences. Lukas is an exceptional photographer and I enjoyed his responses to these questions. I hope you do too! Tell me a little bit about yourself—who you are and what you do. Who I am? …

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Discernment and Long Division

Do you remember learning to do long division back when you were in grade school? It was probably fourth or fifth grade when we learned to do it. It was a long and laborious process and one that, even in my day, seemed irrelevant. After all, we all had calculators and we knew that they could do it quickly and easily. With the tapping of a few buttons we could get our solution and it would be correct every time. …

An Interview with Devin Brown (Part 2)

Yesterday I posted the first portion of an interview with Devin Brown, author of Inside Prince Caspian and Inside Narnia. Today we continue with the second and final piece, and look at mistakes people make when reading the Narnia books and the film adaptations of Lewis’s works. TC: What are some of the most common mistakes people make when reading and interpreting the Narnia books? In my opinion, the two biggest mistakes people make about the Narnia books are 1) …

An Interview with Devin Brown

Last week I posted a review of Inside Prince Caspian, a new book by Devin Brown and a follow-up to his earlier work Inside Narnia. These books provide literary analysis of the Narnia books and have greatly enhanced my understanding of and enjoyment of C.S. Lewis’s imaginary world. I thought it would be interesting to follow the reviews with an interview and Brown was kind enough to spare some time. I asked him not only about his books, but about …

“…For That is Far Better.”

A few years ago Chris and Rebecca, close friends of ours, shared with us that her grandfather, Art, had been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. The doctors considered it terminal and inoperable, saying that it was one of the most aggressive forms of brain cancer. He would have only a couple of months to live and for much of that time, especially as the end approached, he would be in agonizing pain. Like the rest of their friends and …

Excessive Reading

Of all the questions that find their way into my inbox, I don’t know that any topic receives more attention than reading. I get a lot of questions from people asking if I’ve read or can recommend certain titles, but also a lot of questions just about reading–how to do it and how to do it more. A couple of days ago, a friend and long-time reader of this site (one of this site’s very first readers, in fact) asked …

The Gift of Spiritual Discernment (Part 2)

How can I know how the Holy Spirit has gifted me? This is the second part in what I anticipate will be a brief three-part series examining the spiritual gift of discernment. The first part is available here: The Gift of Spiritual Discernment. In this first article we looked at the question of “What is the gift of discernment?” and concluded that “Men and women with the gift of discernment are specially gifted in distinguishing between those words, deeds and …

The Gift of Spiritual Discernment

As you well know if you are a regular reader of this site, I’ve written a book called The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment and that book was the result of spending almost a year studying the topic of spiritual discernment. As I hunted down all the references I could to discernment and as I studied what the Bible has to say about the topic, I was struck by how many people show interest in discernment as a spiritual gift, but …

A La Carte (7/19)

Thursday July 19, 2007 Books: The NY Times has an early review of the new Harry Potter. “With each installment, the Potter series has grown increasingly dark, and this volume … is no exception.” “Ms. Rowling has fitted together the jigsaw puzzle pieces of this long undertaking with Dickensian ingenuity and ardor.” Politics: Obama says “sex education for kindergarteners, as long as it is ‘age-appropriate,’ is ‘the right thing to do.’” Humor: Pecadillo shares a strange story and shows that …