Posted by Kelly Belmonte in The Creative Process | 0 Comments
DO Cross the Streams
Dr. Egon Spengler: There’s something very important I forgot to tell you. Dr. Peter Venkman: What? Dr. Egon Spengler: Don’t cross the streams. Dr. Peter Venkman: Why? Dr. Egon Spengler: It would be bad. Dr. Peter Venkman: I’m fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, “bad”? Dr. Egon Spengler: Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping...
Read MorePosted by Holly Ordway in C.S. Lewis, Culture, Ethics | 0 Comments
Love, Sex, and the Supernatural: the Practical Theology of Charles Williams and C.S. Lewis (Part 5)
The two sets of contradictions about sex and love that we have been discussing in this series, with the help of C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams, come together in contemporary attitudes about sex and children. (You can read parts one, two, three, and four here.) The emotion of love, and the transcendant value given to sexual activity, are increasingly totally separated from the...
Read MorePosted by Garret Johnson in Literary Apologetics | 0 Comments
The Art of Surprise
Lots of beginning writers pen stories with surprise endings. Surprise! your quirky narrator was actually a bowling pin . . . Surprise! they were on Mars the whole time! . . . Surprise! This is such a ubiquitous phenomenon that books on the craft perennially warn against using such trickery. Jerome Stern gives precisely this counsel in his book Making Shapely Fiction. “Don’t do...
Read MorePosted by Holly Ordway in C.S. Lewis, Culture, Ethics | 1 Comment
Love, Sex, and the Supernatural: the Practical Theology of Charles Williams and C.S. Lewis (Part 4)
In this series, I’ve been exploring the contradictions in our culture regarding love and sex, drawing on the work of C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams to gain insight into the practical implications of Christian theology. (You can read the first, second, and third parts of the series here.) As I’ve been talking about love, I’ve been talking about marriage, sex, and children....
Read MorePosted by Holly Ordway in C.S. Lewis, Culture | 0 Comments
Love, Sex, and the Supernatural: the Practical Theology of Charles Williams and C.S. Lewis (Part 3)
What do love, sex, and the supernatural have to do with each other? Quite a lot, according to C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams. This post is the third in this series – you can read part one here and part two here. In the previous post, I noted that the attempt to divide the natural and supernatural creates contradictions that impair our ability to live out what we believe. Two of...
Read MorePosted by Holly Ordway in All Nine Muses, Poetry | 2 Comments
Letting Go of Irony: Reflections on the Ode (and on teaching poetry)
Over at my friend Kelly Belmonte’s excellent blog All Nine Muses, she challenged us to think about the ode. (You can read all the contributes on the ode here). I found myself wondering why the ode seems to be such an easy target for satire in the modern day. Certainly it’s hard to imagine writing an ode like Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” or Wordsworth’s “Ode:...
Read MorePosted by Holly Ordway in C.S. Lewis, Culture | 1 Comment
Love, Sex, and the Supernatural: the Practical Theology of Charles Williams and C.S. Lewis (Part 2)
Charles Williams and C.S. Lewis can help us both to think theologically and to apply that thinking in practical terms to our lives. In part one of this series, I discussed the false separation between natural and supernatural in our culture, and noted that Lewis and Williams both refuse to accept this division. Now we will look at the ways in which these two men help us explore the...
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