Radix

by Jan Lermitte
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I did not immediately love the work of Dorothy L. Sayers.  I tend to read detective novels as escapist fiction, and Sayers’ stories are often too sophisticated for that. Too many epigraphs by Shakespeare, Spencer, and other long-dead male writers; complex characters who represent various classes of modern Britain after WWI and quote Latin, French, or speak with a broad Cockney accent…

by Tony Lawton
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I am an actor. Since 1998, I have been performing solo versions of C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce and The Screwtape Letters. I usually get hired by evangelical institutions to perform these works…

by Claudia May
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In her recording of the song, “Flattery Will Get You Everywhere,” country singer Lynn Anderson mines various facets of flattery. She acknowledges that if someone utters unkind words, her mind “would soon close from ear to ear.” But if a suitor or acquaintance flatters her, she devours their words and “lick[s] the platy clean . . . so starved” is she for “pretty words [that] are ever insincere.” She is cognizant of the calculating traits of flattery, but she does not seem to care because she thrives on the attention flattery offers. Emboldened by the charisma of flattery, she tells her flatterer to “brag [her] up” because “flattery will get you everywhere.” The back note of these lyrics suggests that the one being flattered is a co-conspirator, a willing accomplice to flattery’s devious and perhaps not-so-devious ways. …

by Laura N. Van Dyke
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When I encountered my first Charles Williams novel in an undergraduate class fifteen years ago, I wasn’t sure what I had just read but knew I wanted more. So I went to the campus library and checked out his other six novels. A week later I had read them all, and while I didn’t know then that I would go on to spend almost a decade working on a PhD involving Williams’s writing, I knew that something about his view of the world had changed mine.…

by Jim Friedrich
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I first met David and Susan at the California Shape Note Convention in January 2000. They introduced themselves at the lunch break. After hearing my opening prayer that morning, they suspected we were kindred spirits. We quickly discovered a multitude of common bonds, including creative liturgy, filmmaking, music, theater and dance, theology, and radical Christianity.…