Tag: Lewis

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Emerging from the New Dark Age: From Truth to Goodness to Beauty

I used to think we were headed for a new Dark Age. Now, I believe we may already be there.

There is an upside, however, because in the darkness, we can better recognize the light and walk toward it.

But only if we are willing to look up from the blue screen glowing in front of us and encourage others to join us without basking in the electronic glow.

I preach to myself as well because I’m finding it more difficult to sink into a longer text and stay there until the end.

But the longer text of a classic is always worth the work.

We should be embarrassed to admit that it took so many years to realize that too many–one is too many–college students have never read an entire book. At least not since the Little Golden Book days of their toddlerhood.

And who says good books are only for the college-bound?

The Atlantic, not a conservative resource from classical Christian education, has realized this loss in our education system. Even students at our elite universities, far too many of them, have never read a book.

For the last quarter century at least, educational testing has marked students’ ability to navigate a passage, so education systems locked into teaching young ones how to do just that.

No more Bronte, Hugo, Dostoevsky, and Lee in their entirety.

No more requiring a student to follow an epic journey from beginning to end.

We have added fuel to the fire that limits our collective ability to think well. To think with clarity and critical analysis.

We have lost the personal discipline it takes to plod through Hugo’s fifty pages of Napolean’s failure at Waterloo to get to the crisis Jean Valjean must face to save Marius in Les Miserables. We’ve lost the discipline to even get to those fifty pages.

It takes discipline to get to the beauty of a great book. Therein lies the truth any great author has sweat blood to tell us: that we are more than body and mind. We are souls capable of courage, capable of seeing beauty, capable of telling truth through goodness and beauty.

Great writers create beauty to show goodness and truth. In losing our discipline to read long texts, we have lost so much more because from truth, goodness, and beauty come meaning and purpose in our lives.

Few people today see meaning and purpose in their lives. Fewer than half.

The answer may be found in the nearest library or bookstore. Wise sages tell us how to pursue the answer.

“Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance.” Stratford Caldecott

“If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.”  C.S. Lewis

If you don’t have one on the shelf and didn’t get one for Christmas, buy a good book for yourself, a classic that contains truth about humanity, truth about who we are, beings capable of being courageous on behalf of goodness.

Buy good books as gifts. Embrace goodness in truth’s defense and promote the beautiful in the culture around us.

I used to pay my two youngest sons to read good books. (I hadn’t thought of the idea with the older three.) That was some of the best spent cash I ever spent.

Shakespeare, Tolkien, Lewis.

People grow stronger character from such books.

And we grow better from having seen tough tasks through to the end–the quest of the characters and our own in the completion of a thing of beauty.

Photo Credit: Pexels. Logo below credit Lily Hildebrand.

Our new website milicomathersreads.com is accepting reviews for middle reader books–especially those written by middle school students. Message me at readgoodbooks@milicomathersreads.com or in the comments below.

Permissions: You are permitted and encouraged to reproduce and distribute this material in any format provided that you do not alter the wording in any way, do not charge a fee beyond the cost of reproduction, and you credit the author.

Disclosure of Material Connection:  I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the entities I have mentioned. Restoring the Shattered is published through Morgan James Publishing with whom I do share a material connection. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

Our new website milicomathersreads.com is accepting reviews for middle reader, YA, and literary books–especially those written by middle school and high school students. Message me at readgoodbooks@milicomathersreads.com or in the comments below.

Milicomathers reserves the right to edit or reject any submissions.

Permissions: You are permitted and encouraged to reproduce and distribute this material in any format provided that you do not alter the wording in any way, do not charge a fee beyond the cost of reproduction, and you credit the author.

Disclosure of Material Connection:  I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the entities I have mentioned. Restoring the Shattered is published through Morgan James Publishing with whom I do share a material connection. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

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The Choices that Shape Us

I remember sitting in a college classroom, a criminology class, and hearing the instructor discuss “victimless” crimes, the encounters society frowned upon (more then, less now) but that “didn’t hurt anyone.”

The instructor suffered from the disillusionment that “consenting adults” could engage each other, agree to exploit each other, walk away, and remain unchanged, unharmed, perhaps even happier or better off for having had the experience.

Somehow when one eternal soul encounters another, both change. Loving choices produce good–satisfaction in our purpose fulfilled.

Exploiting choices, unrepented and left to themselves, never produce happiness or anything else we can call “better”.

We human beings shape and reshape ourselves and each other–all through the power of our choices.

We cannot, of course, ignore the work God does in shaping us. Our circumstances–not all resulting from our choices–shape us. But always, always, we choose how we react to every situation.

There is a calling, a mandate, on our lives. That calling demands a response. A false response refuses to acknowledge the harm sin causes. A true response resists evil, evil that has power to do great harm.

In his discussion of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and C.S. Lewis’s various works, Joseph Loconte presents this universal calling:

“One may answer the Call–or refuse it, turn away, and walk into Darkness. But indifference to the Call to struggle against evil is not an option; one must take sides. Thus, set before our imagination in the works of Tolkien and Lewis is one of the great paradoxes of our mortal lives: the mysterious intersection of providence and free will” (152).

Every day, we choose to answer the call or neglect it. We choose the good way or our own way.

As our choices shape us, so do they shape our society.

And the shifts in society manifest themselves in changed language. Unborn humans have not just become fetuses. Clinic workers must never say the word baby. They call the child tissue, a blob.

Prostitutes are sex workers now. That’s a very clinical sounding term for something that sounds like an innocuous business. That innocuous business has grown into sex trafficking, even of children, even in America.

Porn is not victimless. It turns its viewers into addicts.

And it abuses and entraps those who produce it. In the meantime, the audience for porn becomes younger and seeks “ever harsher and more violent, degrading images.”

Abortion obviously harms the child, and less obviously, but still profoundly, harms the mother. Even less obvious, but perhaps as profound, is the damage to fathers, surviving siblings, and other family and friends.

And let’s not neglect the harm done to those within the abortion industry. Many within pro-life ranks today left clinic work to stand for life. They have answered the call. But healing is a long road.

Many wounded remain behind and cause more harm.

Loconte: “It is through their own decisions . . . that they invite a spiritual crisis into their lives. The result is not the freedom they imagined, but the deepest slavery of heart and mind” (163).

God bids us to answer His call–to be instruments of healing–to make choices that will shape us, others, and our society for good.

He calls us to speak the truth in love. Our refusal to do so can only bring more hurt.

It’s our choice.

Photo Credit: Pixabay

Nancy E. Head’s Restoring the Shattered is out in paperback! Get your copy here!

Permissions: You are permitted and encouraged to reproduce and distribute this material in any format provided that you do not alter the wording in any way, do not charge a fee beyond the cost of reproduction, and you credit the author.

Disclosure of Material Connection:  I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the entities I have mentioned. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

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Wonder in Sick Days

“We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders,” G.K. Chesterton.
 Last week, I had the blessing of being sick. Good timing. After Christmas. When there’s time for not doing much.
Wednesday: A granddaughter is sick along with me. Two bad cases of winter yuck: coughing and head stuff. We each claim a couch and a blanket. I put in a DVD of Twilight Zone episodes. Black and white images flicker in the glow of a wood fire and a lit tree.
We find a twilight of wonder with Rod Serling voicing over our dreams. Continue reading “Wonder in Sick Days”