“We have lost our sense of the holiness of beauty . . . when exterior beauty is in harmony with a character’s interior beauty, then the sign value of the tale of the character is greatly enhanced” (Michael D. O’Brian, A Landscape With Dragons, p. 35).
Just and General
“Generalizations are legitimate if they honestly describe an overall pattern. Generalizations are consequently not refuted through particular and individual counter examples. Honest Pharisees lived at the time of Christ, and they were not an embarrassment to Christ’s scathing denunciations of their religious sect as a whole. Indeed one indication of a Pharisee’s honesty would be …
Keeping Dragons Dragony
“The imagination fed on truth knows that the serpent is a symbol of hatred and deceit, of evil knowledge and power without conscience . . . I want [my children] to read plenty of stories in which there are dragons that act like dragons and meet a dragon’s end” (Michael D. O’Brian, A Landscape With …
Catechized by Fairy Tales
“Good magic and bad magic in truthful stories correspond to true religion and false religion in our real world . . . True religion is about surrender, while false religion is about control” (Michael D. O’Brian, A Landscape With Dragons, p. 29).
Shriveling the Inner Man
“We must consider each situation in its own right to get some sense of who or what is responsible for the boredom and what can be done to relieve it. We have seen many influences in our culture and in the individual choices that people make in response to their circumstances that might lead to …
Corruption and Stewardship
“Rarely will followers of Christ set overt corruption as their goal; rather, they want to be conservative, consolidate gains, learn fiscal realism, and be ‘good stewards.’ Of course, nothing is wrong with good stewardship — other than the fact that is a phrase which frequently stands in for bad stewardship” (For Kirk and Covenant, p. …
Do We Think That They Think That We Are Influenced by What They Show Us?
“If their techniques for influencing us were not successful, I doubt they would spend millions of dollars for a thirty-second commercial during the Super Bowl or the Academy Awards” (Richard Winter, Still Bored in a Culture of Entertainment, p. 85).
The Marshmallow Test
“In an experiment at Stanford University known as the ‘marshmallow’ test,’ four-year-olds were brought into a room one by one. On the table in the room was a marshmallow. Each child was told, ‘You can have this marshmallow now if you want. But if you don’t eat it until after I get back from running …
A Culture-Wide Case of the Fidgets
“Those of us who do not hunger for such extreme stimulation can still find plenty of entertainment in the endless shopping malls, restaurants, fitness clubs, tennis clubs, golf courses, gambling casinos, porn shops, strip clubs, movie theaters and late night television. This is the world of the big M’s: the Mall, McDonald’s and MTV” (Richard …
Calling Covenant Fathers
“Today, the whole trend is against authority, against maleness, against Christianity, against covenant, against law. You have to find the strength that’s much greater than your own if you will be a covenant father, but it remains the need of the hour” (Steve Schlissel, Christian Culture in a Multicultural Age, p. 156).