I'm amazed how they worked the Redcorn/Gribbles story. A story of a long-range adultery is rare: even rarer is having the woman fall back in love with the man she was cuckolding. And the show kept all of them in character.

The novel also poses questions about women in that society.

It wasn't good for the folks in Jamestown, either.

Wembly, is that you?

With overfishing and jellyfish overpopulation, I think we should have more jellyfish.

There used to be more controversy about discoveries and inventions. "But what if Russians got the Bomb?"  Now everybody's like, "New cell phone, O.K."

I like "Five Million Years To Earth," up till it gets to the marching grasshoppers.  That's ludicrous.

Not a brain tumor, but a strange brain-wasting disease.  One of his children later died of something similar.

Out on DVD for the Christmas gift sales?

Hurray!  Fluttershy is back!

"Adventure Time" has a subtle subtext: a lot of the story lines involve damaged characters.  Finn was an abandoned child; Marceline suffered father-neglect and/or abuse; and even the Ice King is an isolated creature with no social sense.  This subtext underlies the series' comic absurdity and the friendship of Finn…

I read the book; haven't been lucky enough to see the movie.  The cops go after traffic violations where the driver seems "suspicious" — stoned or anxious — and find drug dealers.  Or they look at the one detail that seems off about a car (an old, rusty license plate with shining new screws) and find a stolen car with…

I don't know if I'd call Dickens a Christian.  He was some sort of theist, though he didn't believe in miracles.  He held some pretty nasty beliefs.  You can see that in relation to how he treated his wife.  He wrote an odd little prayer for his children.  (Quoting from memory, so the wording is almost certainly…

I agree!  I'm an English Literature major.  But _at the same times_ as the Christian classics there was a lot of awful stuff written.  I keep on trying to formulate a general theory, such as X percentage of bad writing will ensure Y percentage of good writing.  But I can't cobble anything together, which is why I'm…

Boredom is a universal food.  A Dear Friend, who later became a Christian, was occasionally taken to a Synagogue in his childhood and recalls being very bored.  He later was taken to a Unitarian (atheist) church and was likewise bored.  He had his first religious experience in a Christian church at what he called a…

But "primitive superstition" has promoted good as much as the highest social expression.  Consider the shaman in the local tribe who, because he had a dream message from his ancestors, said that women could hold property.  I'd say that this is more praiseworthy than the Victorian "angel of the house," with all its…

"Most Christians?"  Overgeneralization?

On the other hand, the periods in which great Christian writing flourished also produced a lot of dreck.  I think grad students can still find seminars on Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor, but I don't think many literature schools are teaching Wiggleworth's _The Day of Doom_.

U2 and Arvo Part.

We talk about it because Christ did, and because we need to do it.  Is that different from what St. Francis did and William Langland wrote about?