Recently Ben Shapiro added another hot take to his history of bad media analyses when he went after It’s a Wonderful Life. He asserted that Mr. Potter had the right of it: lending should be run as Potter ran it,
The prefaces to this consideration of The Princess and Curdie are two. First, I must highly commend the book to you, together with its prequel. MacDonald is a skilled teller of tales and includes many gems of insight in his
Theology and writing have a sometimes fraught interaction. Art has an apparent opposition to theology, if we consider how awful preachiness can get, how making a story into a tract makes it a very bad story. At the same time,
Last week, we looked at the dichotomy between a sin’s historic fact and its moral guilt as they relate to redemption arcs. I asserted that redemption arcs are just not quite possible, in their fullness, outside of the Christian understanding,
The redemption arc is a difficult but powerful tool in the writer’s arsenal; it’s an even more difficult thing to undergo in real life, as Saul of Tarsus could no doubt tell you. See, sin exists. Because men sin and
Today we’re going to deal with two problems of direction, a false goal and a false guide to art. This is Part Three of a series (1, 2) dealing with the issues of modern writing, as I’ve observed them, a
Last week we discussed two issues common in modern writing: failure to take it seriously and disregard for realism. Today we’re continuing the topic with another issue endemic to the failures of popular media, particularly films and TV shows. We
The archetypical ‘pure evil’ race (no, not that kind of race) in fantasy is the orc, as inspired by (ripped off from) Tolkien, often by way of D&D. If you’re interested in writing fantasy, you almost certainly have some thoughts
Over Christmas break, devoid of either college or work, I did what I had long forsworn, in part from self-perservation, to do: I wrote a piece of fanfiction. Now, it’s not the only fanfiction I’ve written (this poem is based
Note: This paper was written for college- hence the Works Cited includes course resources not publicly available. Originally titled: “At The Center, God.” The atheistic conception of the world by necessity bases its understanding of a hypothetical spiritual (or mental)