Literature is read and loved because it has that beautiful way of shining light on the mysterious ways of our being. It helps us to become reflective and thoughtful people as we glimpse the varied trials of humanity. These trials elicit from us compassion, sorrow, gratitude, admiration, and perhaps most importantly a sense of kinship. I [...]
If I want to become childlike this Advent, I think there is no better way than to spend time with someone who is already childlike. There are few characters in Ageless Children’s Literature who are more so than Winnie-the-Pooh. This bear of little brain is just the guide I want as I settle into an armchair [...]
We who read Ageless Children’s Literature seldom see a spider without thinking of the dark gang of arachnids from Mirkwood or the gentle, gray Charlotte. We look on the spider and think, friend or foe? We wrestle with whether we love, hate, or simply fear the creature, and perhaps, (because we are very well read), we [...]
I was with him forming all things: and was delighted every day, playing before him at all times; Playing in the world: and my delights were to be with the children of men. Now therefore, ye children, hear me: Blessed are they that keep my ways. Proverbs 8:30-32 All the world is my palette; all [...]
No doubt, those of us addicted to film versions of Pride and Prejudice remember the scene in one or another of the productions where Mr. Bennett, in the aftermath of dealing with all of his daughters wayward and otherwise, is sitting in his study enjoying a glass of sherry and chuckling over the humor rising off [...]
Joan Windham’s Six O’Clock Saints series is witty, pithy and droll. In three volumes she lightly recounts the lives of several saints in a style reminiscent of Kipling’s Just So Stories. The tales have a homey, conversational tone, are filled with humorous anachronisms, and abound with common sense. Indeed, one has the impression that while Joan [...]
"if a man would make his world large, he must be always making himself small.” ― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy Ageless Children’s Literature is that happy place that doesn’t shy away from the world’s big bag of vocabulary; it uses just the right word, big or small. It is that literature that opens a door for a [...]
“…there is really nothing to be done. You see, I know him from of old.” And so Rat, in Kenneth Grahams’s The Wind In the Willows, resigns himself to Toad’s new mania, and we happy readers nod in agreement, for we too know him from of old. That is, if we have been one of the [...]
