Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earthEdited by Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2000) “The Lost Road, The Dark Tower, and The Notion Club Papers: Tolkien and Lewis’s Time Travel Triad”by John D. Rateliff According to John Rateliff, the genesis of The Dark Tower is recorded in a letter that J. R. R. Tolkien Read More ›
by Larry Gilman Larry Gilman has a doctorate in electrical engineering and a recent Master of Fine Arts degree. He says “I love Lewis, of course — he has always been a reliable spring of clean water, and when I was a teen he taught me almost single handedly what the words ‘intellectual honesty’ count for. I now re-read 4 Read More ›
C. S. Lewis: Essay Collection & Other Short Pieces HarperCollins, edited by Leslie Walmsley,894 pp, 135 selections, 25, about $39.25 U.S. The cover of this book shows the famous photo of C. S. Lewis with his cigarette erased. In her introduction Walmsley writes “For all this background information, as for so much else to do with the works of C. Read More ›
Anna and the King of Siam gave people the proper Victorian governesses and cruel Oriental potentates they wanted. This 1944 novel by Margaret Landon was promptly made into a film starring Rex Harrison and Irene Dunne. In 1951 the story opened on Broadway as a successful Rogers and Hammerstein musical comedy, and then it became a film starring Yul Brynner Read More ›
America Online has been lobbying for months for laws mandating that cable companies offering broadband service provide “open access” to AOL and other Internet service providers. But last week AOL borrowed one of the late Gilda Radner’s old “Saturday Night Live” punch lines: “Never mind.” AOL succeeded in persuading local governments from Portland, Ore., to Broward County, Fla., to mandate Read More ›
The Definition of Death, Contemporary Controversies, edited by Stuart J. Youngner, Robert, M. Arnold, and Renie Schapiro. Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 346 pp., $ 54 In just thirty years, bioethics has grown from a group of ruminating philosophers and theologians into one of the country’s most fiercely secularized and influential intellectual forces. Bioethicists sit on presidential advisory commissions, teach in Read More ›
What’s Darwin got to do with it? When it comes to evolution, quite a bit! But many people don’t understand Darwin, creationism and intelligent design. Here’s a book that makes sense of it all! A group of scholars, teachers, writers and illustrators have teamed up to create an easy-to-read introduction and critique to this important issue. You’ll enjoy the lively Read More ›
I was recently on an NPR program with skeptic Michael Shermer and paleontologist Donald Prothero to discuss intelligent design. As the discussion unfolded, it became clear that they were using the phrase “intelligent design” in a way quite different from how the emerging intelligent design community is using it. The confusion centered on what the adjective “intelligent” is doing in Read More ›