The Simmering Mind

Hooray!!  The Simmer Starters are back!  I’ve been saving links ever since I stopped blogging…it will be hard to pick the best. 😀

Blue Pomegranates (Abby Jones) – “[The famous pastor’s] response was to lump all fantastical type stories into a form of discontentment for the world God has created. Not only did he put Twilight hand-in-hand with such epics as Lord of the Rings, Narnia, Harry Potter, andThe Odyssey, but he said they were all a form of saying God just didn’t make the world cool enough so I’m going to make my own. Obviously, I took a strong offense to that.”

Catholic or Pagan Imagination (David Russell Mosley) – This is a fantastic rebuttal to an Atlantic article that asserted that the British tell better children’s stories because Great Britain’s literature has its roots in paganism instead of puritanism.

Three Questions to Ask Before Listening to Any Sermon (Tony Reinke) – This is a great way to cut right to the worldview of anything.

In the Grand Scheme of Things (Hana Schank) – This is long, about a mother’s coming to terms with her daughter’s blindness, but I love this quote in particular. “I’d known, of course, that there were people who weren’t perfect, but they had lived at the fringes of my vision, barely existent in a landscape populated by the able-bodied and able-minded. And now, suddenly, the entire focus of my world had been inverted. I no longer saw ‘normal’ people as the focal point, with blurry disabled people at the edges. The whole world, I now understood, was made up of disabilities. Some people just wore their disability a little more obviously than others.”

Nine Questions to Help You Steward All of Your Life for God’s Glory (Brad Hambrick) – I found this exercise very helpful; although my direction in life is pretty “fixed,” it gave me a little bit of a better understanding of where God might be leading me.

The Clever Trick My Dad Used To Turn Me Into a Rabid Reader at 8 Years Old (Christopher Reiss) – Love this story!

The Force is With Her (Alicia Cohn) – If you haven’t seen The Force Awakens, beware spoilers, of course. “Throughout the series, Star Wars has shown us a chosen character grappling with how to use his unmerited gifts. It established the pop culture expectation that a young man has the right to choose his own path. Now perhaps it’s time for an iconic coming of age tale about a young woman. It is particularly encouraging — particularly for the mothers taking daughters — that for once, a female coming of age story in popular culture might not involve a messy sexual awakening, but her own search for power, agency, and calling.”

The True and Better YA Hero (Shannon Stewart) – Love this!!!  “All these things we find so magnetic in our fictional heroes are already ours in Christ.” On a similar note, check out this article by my friend RJ Conte which talks about a common fiction trope and how it shows a longing for God at the root.