Literary Analysis

white colonial church in winter

“Tempter, methinks thou art too late:” Grace and Community in The Scarlet Letter

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s legendary novel, The Scarlet Letter, gets a bad rap. It’s set in the Puritan town of Boston, Massachusetts in the 1640s, a time during which the church dictated literally everything about society: not only public policy and government, but also private morality. Hawthorne introduces his main character, Hester Prynne, as she begins what will be a lifelong punishment for the sin of adultery — public condemnation via a scarlet letter ‘A’ worn on her breast…

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close-up of kangaroo face

Fair Trials and Kangaroo Courts: An Interpretive Philosophy

I spent March on the road traveling to homeschool conventions. These are interesting events: educators, professionals, and entrepreneurs of every stripe fill exhibit halls with their wares and spend literal hours on concrete floors explaining their materials. Wide-eyed parents are just trying to figure it all out so that their precious charges can get what they need to survive in the world. Of course, “need” is a broad term…

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stack of colorful picture books

Picture Books…for High Schoolers?

If you are already thinking about the reading list you will assign to your students next fall, congratulations – you are way ahead of Missy and me! But let me offer one piece of advice as you assemble your curriculum: Assign children’s picture storybooks to all of your students in the first few weeks of the school year…

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moody Scottish cliff's edge

“Another Golgotha”

Holding my breath, suffocated by the burning odor of bleach, I took up my sponge against the scarred and yellow linoleum of my first apartment’s kitchen floor. The war raged long. Arms weary, knees bruised, I scrubbed like my life depended on it. And when I rinsed the host of suds at the end of a long afternoon…the floor did not look any cleaner. I obsessed over that kitchen floor for the whole first year of my marriage. I took it as a black mark against my identity as a homemaker…

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close up of boxers with red boxing gloves

Conflict–The Heart of Every Story

“Write me a story,” I said to the girls in my junior high composition class. “It is due next Wednesday.” That was the extent of the assignment I gave them. No limits, no rules, no guidance – nothing. Admittedly, I was new. As a first year teacher, I had no way of knowing what I was in for, or how grave an error I had just made. If I had been more experienced, I would have been alarmed by the eager light coming on in the students’ eyes. These were aspiring writers, after all. They had always wanted to change the world with the great American novel, and I had just promised to edit it for them…

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man holds Bible in front of his face

Christian Books and Christian Reading: Part Two

Ernest Hemingway’s prize winning 1953 novella The Old Man and the Sea opens on Santiago, an ancient fisherman, who is mired in an epic streak of bad luck. He has not caught a fish in many days – so many, in fact, that he is near starvation and has been shunned as cursed by the other fisherman in the small village where he lives and works. The novel tells the story of his last voyage, in which he travels farther out into the Sea than anyone has ever dared, and catches the greatest fish in history. As a master fisherman, Santiago draws on his expert knowledge and long experience to hook the giant fish, who then drags the tiny boat out into the heart of the Sea…

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look up through trees

Joy and Death in Tolkien

It’s tempting to think that reading fantasy is about escaping from one’s own world. I’d bet that everyone has wished at least once that they could join their favorite characters in their world—things always turn out better, or at least they seem far more exciting through the eyes of our favorite authors. But I think to dismiss fantasy literature as escapism is to ignore the central attraction of a good fantasy novel: its capacity to recast universal truths in winning ways…

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wooden shack by a lake on a cloudy day

An Apology for “The Hovel”

I think my husband is tired of letting me name things. Our life is becoming a living encyclopedia for the work of William Shakespeare. We have a car named “Hal,” a plant named “Brutus,” and I’m trying to figure out how to convince Ian to let me use “Miranda” as the middle name of a future daughter. (I have a particularly soft spot in my heart for The Tempest.) Needless to say, when it was time to dream up titles for all of our new endeavors at CenterForLit, nothing was safe. I suggested an alternative Shakespearean title for every new product we’re releasing. Most of them got shot down, but as a consolation prize everyone was kind enough to let me name the blog…

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Preparing Students to Think about Modern Literature

I sing of dirty dishes and the man…Today, June 16, marks the 24 hours that Leopold Bloom wanders around Dublin in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Joycean geeks commonly refer to it as “Bloomsday.” If you have heard of Ulysses before, the context was most likely negative. Perhaps you categorize it with other “modernist nonsense” or “perverse drivel.”…

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