I really wish this movie were not rated R; I would go see it on opening day. As it is I can recommend the book by P.D. James, and then you won’t have to see the movie in order to get the message. What a wonderful poster! I want one.
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*My review of Children of Men, the book.
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*Children of Men Official Website
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*Buy Children of Men at Amazon
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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.
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.
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?”
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.
Mark Steyn is in Australia, and he’s writing about doomsday. Here’s a sample:
Much of western civilization does not have any future. That’s to say, we’re not just speaking philosophically, but literally. In a very short time, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and other countries we regard as part of the western tradition will cease to exist in any meaningful sense. They don’t have a future because they’ve given up breeding. Spain’s population is halving with every generation: Two grown-ups have a total of one baby. So there are half as many children as parents. And a quarter as many grandchildren as grandparents. And an eighth as many great-grandchildren as great-grandparents. And, after that there’s no point extrapolating, because you’re over the falls and it’s too late to start paddling back.
I know there are lots of people who still don’t believe that the declining birth rate is a problem, but most of us won’t be around to see the worst results of our lack of responsibility and generosity as a generation.
Read Steyn’s essay; maybe he’ll convince you.
THE BEST CRIMES (according to the Penguin List)
Maigret and the Ghost
Georges Simenon
The Woman in White
Wilkie Collins
The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler
A Study in Scarlet
Arthur Conan Doyle
The Thirty-Nine Steps
John Buchan
No, No, NO! These are decent, predictable choices. But the best crimes . . .
Best Crimes according to Semicolon:
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie.
An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser.
Cover Her Face by P.D. James.
Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey.
Gambit by Rex Stout.
That was difficult. I had to leave out Erle Stanley Gardner, A. Conan Doyle, and Ellis Peters. But the five I chose are best.
I found the links to these articles on Family Economy a long time ago at Two Talent Living., aka A Gracious Home. The articles are long but worthwhile, I think.
Love Is Not Enough: Toward the Recovery of A Family Economics by Allan Carlton
The Power of the Home Economy by Kathleen Bahr
In one international study, African children who did “predominantly family-care tasks [such as] fetching wood or water, looking after siblings, running errands for parents” showed a high degree of helpfulness while “children in the Northeast United States, whose primary task in the household was to clean their own room, were the least helpful of all the children in the six cultures that were studied.”
How does ordinary, family-centered work like feeding, clothing, and nurturing a family—work that often seems endless and mundane—actually bless our lives? The answer is so obvious in common experience that it has become obscure: Family work links people. On a daily basis, the tasks we do to stay alive provide us with endless opportunities to recognize and fill the needs of others. Family work is a call to enact love, and it is a call that is universal. Throughout history, in every culture, whether in poverty or prosperity, there has been the ever-present need to shelter, clothe, feed, and care for each other.
In our family, each child has a morning job, a lunchtime job, and an evening job. These are “family care tasks” such as loading the dishwasher, or emptying the trash, or sweeping the floors. These jobs are to be done before the meal is served, providing an incentive for timely completion. And the jobs are necessary. Everyone knows if Someone hasn’t cleaned the bathroom properly because it gets very nasty very fast with ten people livng in the house. Children keep their same jobs for six months or a year because then I can remember who’s supposed to do what, and they can practice a particulaar job and learn to do it right. Sometimes, if some one is ill or out of pocket, another gets to do the sibling’s job, a gift of service to the family and to the sibling.
We still have some complaining and sometimes jobs aren’t done to the highest standards, but we have a plan and we keep on plugging. It mostly works for me.
Work your way over to Shannon’s Rocks in My Dryer for more Works for Me Wednesday tips and ideas.
1) ONE HOMESCHOOLING BOOK YOU HAVE ENJOYED
What Is a Family? by Edith Schaeffer. I know this book wasn’t written as a homeschooling book, but it summarizes my ideal philosophy of family-centered living and God-honoring education.
2) ONE RESOURCE YOU WOULDN’T BE WITHOUT
My computer. I use it to make lists and lesson plans and schedules, and to find titles of books and other resources, and, of course, to blog about it all.
3) ONE RESOURCE YOU WISH YOU HAD NEVER BOUGHT
Television. We use it to entertain and to watch educational videos, but the TV and I have a love-hate relationship. We hardly watch any network TV (just LOST), but still I think my urchins spend way too much time watching movies and PBS junk food.
4) ONE RESOURCE YOU ENJOYED LAST YEAR
I enjoyed all our read aloud books, especially The Pushcart War by Jean Merrill.
5) ONE RESOURCE YOU WILL BE USING NEXT YEAR
Good old Saxon math. Not exciting, but reliable.
6) ONE RESOURCE YOU WOULD LIKE TO BUY
A maid. Well, not buy, but rent.
7) ONE RESOURCE YOU WISH EXISTED
A self-cleaning house that also trained the urchins to do housework.
8) ONE HOMESCHOOLING CATALOGUE YOU ENJOY READING
Sonlight catalog. I use their book lists all the time.
9) ONE HOMESCHOOLING WEBSITE YOU USE REGULARLY
Potter’s School, an online Christian school that offers classes for secondary school students. This year we’re only taking one class at Potter’s School, a writing class for Brown Bear Daughter, but we’ve been very pleased with the classes we’ve taken there.
10) TAG FIVE OTHER HOMESCHOOLERS
Yikes! I think everyone has done this meme, but if you haven’t please copy and post and leave me a comment so I can see what you’re enjoying, regretting, wanting, and using in your homeschool.
Sing a Song of People by Lois Lenski. Illustrated by Giles Laroche.
Lois Lenski was first an art student, then an illustrator, then a poet and and illlustrator, and then an author of prose stories for elementary age students. Her city poem “Sing a Song of People,” illustrated in this picture book by Giles Laroche, is a simple, much-anthologized list of the kinds of people a child might meet on a city sidewalk. Of course, the city is New York or Chicago or some other northeastern city. The people are riding on subways and walking on sidewalks in front of huge department stores or apartment buildings.
My daughter asked me just last week why hardly anyone walks anywhere in Houston. I told her it was too hot in Houston, but that’s only half the story. We Texans are too fond of our automobiles to ride subways. Even if the places we go are not that far away, we never think of walking or riding a bicycle. Psychologically, we believe in distance and open spaces, and of course, air conditioning on the way.
Anyway, in Lois Lenski’s city, people walk and ride buses and subways, and wear hats, and carry umbrellas, and pass by each other without stopping to talk. This last is not a Southern custom either; when we get out of our cars, we tend to talk to people in lines, in the aisles of the grocery store, in waiting rooms. So, Sing a Song of People is a poem about a different culture, but not an unattractive one. All the busy people hurrying along the streets make an interesting poem and a montage-like picture of city life.
Go here to read a short autobiographical piece by Ms. Lenski telling about how she came to write poetry and how her poetry and her prose share the same theme: a child interacting with his environment.
Sing a Song of People is one of the over 365 books listed in my preschool/kindergarten curriculum, Picture Book Preschool. In this read aloud curriculum list I recommend some of the best picture books available for children, and the book suggestions are grouped into themes such as last week’s theme “Farms” or this week’s “Cities.”
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.