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The Storied World: Impassibility, Incarnation & Virtual Reality
In recent months, I have been thinking and writing about the significance of stories, divine impassibility and the incarnation. Here is a post to draw some of those threads together in the light of our Christmas hope. Some of this is an adaptation of a paper I gave up at EV church earlier this month. Here’s an odd truth to…
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Spooky Stories and the Lord of Halloween
I like a spooky story. Maybe I shouldn’t. Maybe it’s unhealthy. Maybe I should be more reformed and less medieval—more Zwingli and less Luther, as Carl Trueman would put it. I know there are definite dangers in thinking too much about spooky things—of drifting into a superstitious mindset where intermediate powers control the ups and downs of life. I know…
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Narnia Must Die – Tough Questions for Christian Writers
A few weeks ago, I shared some of my thoughts about the possibilities of Christian fiction: whether it should exist; what it might achieve. I ended on a fairly upbeat note. Stories might refresh our jaded palettes to see what’s true; stories might take us by surprise and sneak past our prejudices and certainties. But there is one important problem…
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Considering Barbie (and Marriage and Singleness)
Being human can be very uncomfortable … People make up things like the patriarchy and Barbie to endure how uncomfortable it is. Jen and I saw Barbie over the weekend. We both liked it; were both surprised by it. I thought it was funny and smart and multi-layered to a degree that I still haven’t fathomed. The film’s reframing of…
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What’s the Point of Christian Fiction?
What’s the point of Christian fiction? Can it do any good? Should it even exist? These are some of the questions I have been mulling over as I have been working on several novels over the last ten (or thirty) years or so. I have found them difficult to answer, but here are some scattered ideas that I have tried…
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The Little Hunter Who Ran on Water
One of the projects I am currently working on has required me to generate several background myth-cycles. Here is a story from one of those mythologies. In the larger novel it appears as a tale from a children’s book called, “Tales From Lands Afar”. Perceptive readers might recognise allusions to several other stories from the real world within it. Here…
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Medieval Bikkies for Jen
Back in June 2021, I made some bikkies for Jen’s birthday. I wanted to copy Dr Ella Hawkins’ amazing and painstakingly hand-painted masterpieces but I didn’t have the skill / patience / time / eyesight. Fortunately, I do have a bit of technical cunning, so I found a whole lot of images of illuminated manuscripts online, cropped and imposed them…
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Reading and Writing – Literal Magic
I recently had the opportunity to talk about “Reading and Writing to the Glory of God” at the RTC in Melbourne. Here is an expanded version of some of what I said. Is there anything closer to magic than reading and writing? The idea that by making some marks on a page, you can send your very thoughts into another…
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I2C Multimedia Project
Please note, this won’t look much good on anything other than a landscape display—i.e. desktop or iPad etc.—sorry mobile users. Many years ago, I worked with AFES Victoria and Mustard Schools ministry to produce a Flash-vased CD-Rom for an evangelistic event at the Melbourne Forum. It was complicated project and had its share of technical challenges. Our video quality was…
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Review: Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
Minor spoilers for the novel follow. Published in 2021, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun predates the excitement and consternation generated by the advent of large-language-model AIs. Yet this astonishing novel has some important things to say to us about quasi-intelligent machines, and how our interactions with them might affect us. Klara, the protagonist and narrator is an android—or AF…