Miscellany: What It Means to Be a Man, Genre Fiction, and 100 Children’s Books
Miscellany: What It Means to Be a Man, Genre Fiction, and 100 Children’s Books
Plus, three things for Advent and a free month for our paid subscribers.
Welcome to Three Things.
It’s been a busy time for us, so we weren’t able to get your normal issue of 3T out earlier this month. Our apologies!
As a gift for the season, we’ll be pausing paid subscriptions for the month of December.
If you’re a paid subscriber, that means you won’t be charged your normal fee in December. Get coffee with a friend with that money instead.
If you’re not a paid subscriber, that means you could subscribe now, get a free month, as well as get a free book from us.
Think about it.
The first Sunday of Advent is December 2 this year.
We frequently get to our December issue, then realise we’re probably too late to recommend things in time for the start of the season. So, here are three things for Advent, a full two weeks before it begins.
1. Advent playlist with ArtandTheology.org
A proper Advent playlist, which means there are no Christmas tunes. These are all songs of waiting, expectation, longing and hope. There is a lot on this playlist—almost 20 hours of music—so you might want to use it as a base for culling a personal playlist, as Phillip has done.
2. Heaven and Nature Sing: 25 Advent Reflections to Bring Joy to the World by Hannah Anderson
Twenty-five short reflections for the season, each one focused on something from the natural world that is bound up in the biblical story — mountains and valleys, birds and trees, serpents and sheep — to show how the whole earth sings the praise of Jesus, the coming king. Remarkably rich.
3. Sacred Seasons: A Family Guide to Center Your Year Around Jesus by Danielle Hitchen
This is a book many of us have been waiting for: an approachable guide celebrating the church’s liturgical year at home. You’ll get theology, history, devotional guides, craft ideas, recipes and beautiful art by the talented Stephen Crotts. Even though Advent usually arrives in November, it is the beginning of the church’s year. Sacred Seasons begins with Advent, then leads you through the whole journey.
Despite being scorned at a French bakery at 6:15 am for poor French grammar whilst ordering croissants, Phillip and his family enjoyed their European holiday immensely. Highlights? A clear sunset ferry crossing across the English Channel; De Hoge Veluwe National Park, where free bikes took them to the world’s second-largest van Gogh collection at the Kröller-Müller Museum in the middle of the park; beautiful medieval Dutch villages and a final day in Ghent, Belgium where the sun even deigned to come out.
Reading: While finishing up a lecture on what it means to be a man, Phillip discovered the work of Prudence Allen, a Catholic nun who has written three massive volumes on ‘the concept of woman’ in history, theology and philosophy. He will likely never read Allen’s ginormous 1,768-page project, but this handy 21-page summary will do. Allen offers two math equations to describe two opposing views of how men and women complement each other: 1⁄2 + 1⁄2 = 1 and 1 + 1 ➔ 3. In the former, men and women are incomplete persons without the other. In the latter, they are whole persons whose relationship produces a profound synergy, bringing more into the world than they could on their own. Very helpful. Phillip has also been preaching through Acts and finding Craig Keener’s commentary quite illuminating.
Watching: On a whim, Phillip went to see Killers of the Flower Moon on Monday night. He hasn’t been a strict Scorsese devotee over the years, but this one seemed like a landmark. You could argue that 3h 26m is too long, but seeing the drip, drip, drip deformation of DiCaprio’s Ernest Burkhart as he is gradually enfolded into a plot to kill even his own beloved wife in order to steal her ancestral land is riveting and convicting.
Nevertheless, a few listens to this Danish string quartet was necessary to recover:
As the first tentative strains of Christmas music begin to appear in the Patton household, Andy has been enjoying idyllic autumn days. Being back in range of the landscape he grew up in has reminded him of one of the beautiful things the Midwest has going for it: four distinct seasons. October released the last heat of summer and the leaves changed and began to fall in time to be bundling up and shuffling through them while the family trick-or-treated, or rather joke-or-treated as they do in St. Louis.
Speaking of something the Midwest has going for it, here is another: The City Museum. If you are within 500 miles of St. Louis, make a pilgrimage to the City Museum, as Andy did for his son’s birthday this month. It is like Salvador Dali and Willy Wonka teamed up to make a playground inside an old factory. It exceeds expectations.
Reading: Andy is pretty much always tearing through some tiny corner of the world of speculative fiction. Here is a true fact: ten out of ten of the top-selling authors in history wrote genre fiction. (Ok… a bit of a stretch there with Shakespeare, but I’m allowing it.)
What is it about visiting other worlds - be they by Orient Express, wardrobe, or wormhole - that we find so compelling? Why is it that when Waterstones asked England what their favorite books were, they chose The Lord of the Rings by a wide margin? The literary elite of Britain were flummoxed and demanded the poll be retaken. They retook the poll and it returned the same result.
There is perhaps no better source to turn to for an answer to these questions than Tolkien himself. If you love genre fiction but haven’t read Tolkien’s “On Faerie Stories,” amend that gap in your reading as soon as possible.
Oddly enough, the good people of England failed to mention Andy’s favorite genre, LitRPGs. If that acronym means nothing to you, skip this paragraph. But for Andy’s litRPG brothers and sisters out there, Zogarth’s Primal Hunter has been fun lately. It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but, you know… many are called but few are chosen.
For those who prefer to take their imaginative journeys via spaceship, Columbus Day by Craig Alanson is good (especially when the sassy AI shaped like a beer can shows up in the narrative). It is the kind of series you can measure by the cubic foot (i. e. lots of books). If you liked The Expanse series or John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, you’ll like Alanson’s Expeditionary Force series. It also smacks of Ender’s Game at times, though the true successors to that immortal classic are Pierce Brown’s Red Rising books.
Making: Andy is putting together a list of great children’s books for the Rabbit Room. Here is a sneak peek. It is almost at 100 books but if you have any favorites, he has left off, email andy@rabbitroom.com. This is the list Andy wishes he had when he became a father six years ago. (Note that the book Phillip gave to Andy on that fateful day did not make the list. Honestly, Phillip… Not Now Bernard?) [EDIT: Phillip has since emailed the address above with a recommendation.]
Teaching: This month Andy was able to give a lecture at L’Abri on the question of what to do when someone you love is deconstructing their faith. The audio of the lecture isn’t up yet, but you can see a version of the lecture in this lecture and this lecture on the Covenant Seminary site.
Watching: Only Murders In the Building. Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez team up to solve murders in their old Manhattan apartment building. Witty banter, colorful characters, and murders abound. What could go wrong?
New from Pattern Bible: (Andy’s Bible + theology Substack): Why Did Eden Have Four Rivers?