Skip to content
Collected Miscellany
Avid Readers, Occasional Bloggers
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • About
  • Contributors

Tag: allegory

Reviews

Purple Jesus by Ron Cooper

Posted on November 30, 2010 by Kevin Holtsberry / 0 Comment

Regular readers will recall that I am a bit of a sucker for quirky novels that deal with faith or religion in some way. So when I heard about Purple Jesus I was...

Reviews

Between Two Kingdoms by Joe Boyd

Posted on April 4, 2010 by Kevin Holtsberry / 0 Comment

Allegory – or even symbolism for that matter – is a tricky thing. Too obvious and people ask why fiction? Not clear enough and you risk confusion an...

In The Mail

Between Two Kingdoms author Joe Boyd

Posted on March 31, 2010 by Kevin Holtsberry / 0 Comment

Well, since we are doing videos I thought I would post Between Two Kingdoms author Joe Boyd talking about his career path and how he came to write this book of ...

Reviews

The Little General and the Giant Snowflake by Matthea Harvey

Posted on October 16, 2009 by Kevin Holtsberry / 0 Comment

I have been reading a lot of young adult fiction of late and have also found myself interested in children’s stories; new and old, classic and experimenta...

Last Four

  • A Creepy, Atmospheric Young Adult Story From Kevin Wignall
  • Jim Geraghty Returns with Another Dangerous Clique Novel
  • Senator Josh Hawley VS Simon & Schuster
  • Trump, Hawley, Cruz & Dostoevsky: They are our own Stepan Trofimoviches

Notes & Asides

  • Trump, he loves this. He loves the bile, the wrath, the mockery. It’s a well-done steak to him, with extra ketchup. But Hawley and Cruz? I bet they are befuddled and mystified. How could it possibly have come to this? They are, then, our own Stepan Trofimoviches. It was all a game to them, until it wasn’t. They are, like him, utterly frivolous. If they had any dignity, any moral backbone, they would resign their offices. But the very frivolity that led them, and us, to this pass is the vice that will prevent them from acting honorably. I hope I am wrong, but I expect they will go to their graves thinking How could we have known?

    Frivolity - Alan Jacobs

    - Trump, Hawley, Cruz & Dostoevsky: They are our own Stepan Trofimoviches
  • While the laws that we live under matter a great deal, Christians need to recover the primacy of the personal over the political more than anything else. If we can’t love our neighbors in a personal, politically agnostic, face-to-face way, they’ll turn to synthetic and unreal ideological communities to fill the gap left by the loneliness of their daily lives.

    The road back to sanity, solidarity, and social trust on both sides of the political spectrum will involve turning away from this ideological cul-de-sac and back toward personal communities once more. If Christian churches won’t do this, they risk being exploited as political playthings of the powers that be. -- Christianity as Ideology: The Cautionary Tale of the Jericho March

    - Christianity & the Jericho March
  • You’ll notice we are not having a national debate about paying off poor people’s mortgages. We could do that just as easily if the self-declared champions of the poor had any interest in anything other than their own status and their own appetites.

    They don’t.

    The College-Debt Debate Is a Culture-War Battle

    - Kevin Williamson on the college debt debate
  • Wharton’s novel was little appreciated in its time, and it hasn’t benefited from the same revival of interest that eventually rescued F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, another Jazz Age novel. Maybe it’s because our culture is created and largely controlled by latter-day Pauline (and Paul) Manfords. Gatsby’s novel is held to reject the American dream itself as a falsity, obscene wealth as corrupting, and the WASP ruling class as a permanent source of oppression, despite its evident decline. Compared with Wharton’s novel, which cuts deeper and is more personal, Gatsby looks like a cheap attempt at scapegoating. For Twilight Sleep is a satire of the modern age, but it targets some of our permanent temptations. If we’re about to embark on a new Roaring Twenties, Wharton’s book will remind us that we’ve been there before.

    Michael Brendan Dougherty

    - Wharton vs Fitzgerald and the Jazz Age Novel
  • Mental Anchors for Information Overload - my review of Breaking Bread with the Dead by Alan Jacobs

    - Me in the University Bookman on Breaking Bread with the Dead

Current Reads

Tags

Amazon Kindle authors Bible blogging blogs Books Children's literature Christianity Christmas conservatism espionage Espionage Fiction faith fantasy Fantasy Fiction featured Fiction Folklore God Goodreads Historical fiction History illustration Jesus Literature memoir military history mystery non-fiction nonfiction Olen Steinhauer podcasts Politics Publishing Reading Religion and Spirituality Speculative fiction thriller thrillers translation Twitter video World War II Young Adult Fantasy young adult fiction

Archives

Categories

Connect

Mail Facebook RSS Tumblr Twitter
© 2021 Collected Miscellany
Powered by WordPress | Theme: Graphy by Themegraphy