Adventures in Syberspace

Thought of the Day, October 11

"C.S. Lewis wrote fantasy stories because he thought, correctly, that that’s what the world is really like. The lie of realism is that somehow we've let people name ‘important fiction’ in which there is no soul, no spirit, no supernatural — “realistic.” In realistic fiction, there can be no magic, no supernatural, no God, no soul to the character. … We’re on a rock, mostly molten lava, flying through outer space at about mach-86 right now, like a yo-yo being swung around a ball of fire in the sky. That’s our setting. What kind of story are we telling? We’re in the sci-fi fantasy section of the bookstore."     -N.D. Wilson

Thought of the Day, February 2nd 2012

When Christianity says that God loves man, it means that God loves man: not that He has some "disinterested"... concern for our welfare, but that, in awful and surprising truth, we are the objects of his love. You asked for a loving God: you have one. The great spirit you so lightly invoked, the "lord of terrible aspect", is present: not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, nor the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of his guests, but the consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist's love for his work and despotic as a man's love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father's love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes.    ~C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

Thought of the Day, September 23

"We are made in the image of God, and have no say in the matter. We do not choose most things about our existence: to be alive, to inherit traits from our families, to be raised the way that we are. If freedom is defined as wholly autonomous choice made in a vacuum devoid of external influence, then freedom is impossible. If we are seeking self-invention, then there is no hope for us. However, if we can finally come to accept the inherent and irreversible limitations of being humans made in the image of God, living in a world that belongs to God, the path of freedom opens before us. We can either see our very existence as an affront because we did not choose it, or we can accept what we are and move forward."      ~Heather Hughes