Close your eyes and imagine a long-running battle between a hero and a villain coming to an end. It doesn’t matter which hero or which villain; they’re all interchangeable here. It doesn’t matter how long the two have been pitted against each other — ten episodes, maybe twenty, maybe 110 minutes of a two-hour movie….
What IT: Chapter Two Teaches Us About Defeating the Devil SPOILER WARNING: This article contains spoilers from IT: Chapter Two. Read at your own risk. IT: Chapter Two finds seven childhood friends reuniting after 27 years to face off against an enemy that has returned to terrorize their hometown. The film, while offering up plenty…
This article was published in Church Leaders on July 10, 2019. Last month, actress and singer Selena Gomez confessed that she is “scared” by what she sees as the exposure of young girls and boys on Instagram and other social media platforms. Speaking at the Cannes Film Festival, she said, “for my generation, specifically, social…
I told you before that I really like apocalypses. But I’m not a monster. I like creation stories too. Especially when they are as well-told as The Magician’s Nephew. A well-told tale From a technical storytelling perspective, The Magician’s Nephew is, in my opinion, the best written of the Narniad. (Narniad: a term I learned…
Of all the Chronicles, Prince Caspian turned out to be the one I’d most forgotten. Possibly because I love the 2011 movie so much (which brushed over a good portion of the book), large parts of it read like new to me. The movie leaves out the book’s most strident theme, which is what I…
“As far as the modern fantasy novel goes, [The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe] is ground zero. You’re seeing the atom being split for the first time.”
–Lev Grossman
Continue readingThe Great Narnia Re-Read of 2019: “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe”
I hope you’re the sort of person who reads the right kinds of books. If so, you’ve probably read The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the third-published and chronologically fifth installment of The Chronicles of Narnia. With King Caspian X setting out to find what became of the seven lords who were loyal to his…
Just a few years ago, I would not have described myself as a “music person.” I didn’t have a favorite artist or favorite genre of music. Most “popular” songs I regarded as shallow. I sang hymns in church, but loved them more for their words than anything else. (I mean, have you read “The Love of God”?) Occasionally, I listened to Christian radio and had a passing familiarity for what is termed “contemporary” in that genre.
But my ambivalence toward music in general changed when I discovered what can only be called “fantasy music.”
Continue readingIs ‘Fantasy Music’ a Thing? 5 Songs That Inspire the Way Fantasy Stories Do
It is one thing to say that you love something. It is another to say why you love that thing. The Horse and His Boy is my favorite of the Narnia chronicles, and I was all too happy to return recently to “Narnia and Calormen and the lands in between.” (THAHB is actually the second book that I re-read, before The Last Battle, but I forgot for a minute and wrote the TLB post second.) In this post, I hope to share something of why I love this story so much and what makes this story so meaningful.
Continue readingThe Great Narnia Re-read of 2019: “The Horse and His Boy”
I love apocalypses. I love world-ending, sky-shattering, history-breaking stories. And I applaud C.S. Lewis for delivering the creation of his Narnian universe, and its end, not as tales told second-hand or as something to be puzzled out based on clues, but in actual volumes of story — something I haven’t encountered very often in other fantasy works. So let’s talk about the Narnian apocalypse, shall we?
Continue readingThe Great Narnia Re-read of 2019: “The Last Battle”