May is Get Caught Reading Month. Doesn’t he (yes, it’s a boy) look as if he’s excited about his reading choices?

Et Tu? on God and the tow truck driver: “Eventually I realized that what it means to accept I am part of God’s story is to ask in every moment not ‘What is God trying to tell me with this situation?’ but rather, ‘How can I better know, love and serve God through this situation?’ It is to stop reading tea leaves to see what God thinks of all my great, important plans and to realize that my plans are neither great nor important in the grand scheme of things.”

Alan Noble at Christ and Pop Culture has a brilliant discussion of Aslan as presented in the movie version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe versus C.S. Lewis’s Aslan: “For Lewis, this experience was central to any Biblical understanding of God, and so when he created Aslan as a Christ-figure, it was fitting that he should have the other characters of his books respond with awe-ful fear to Aslan. He was the God of Narnia, and just like the God of this world, any real encounter with him is bound to be marked by reverent fear and wonder. In the film adaptation of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the numinous quality of Aslan’s character all but disappears, and with it Lewis’ conception of God.”
I think Mr. Noble is absolutely right, but the contrast may have been unavoidable, given the limitations of the film medium. How can anyone portray a truly God-like lion using costumes, actors, and video technology? In this instance, words and the imagination are much better tools.

If you like words, you’ll enjoy this essay by Joseph Bottom from The Weekly Standard: “Thwart. Yes, thwart is a good word. Thwarted. Athwart. A kind of satisfaction lives in such words–a unity, a completion. Teach them to a child, and you’ll see what I mean: skirt, scalp, drab, buckle, sneaker, twist, jumble. Squeamish, for that matter. They taste good in the mouth, and they seem to resound with their own verbal truthfulness.”

A husband, father, deacon and grad student confesses: he loves chick flicks: “Sure they’re often shallow and clichéd, but these stories always center on people who go out of their way to make each other feel special and loved, and I for one can never be reminded of that too often.”