The Power of the Imagination

Literacy Foundation: The Gift of Reading - Cinderella
Uploaded by hourigan. - Watch feature films and entire TV shows.


What a great testament to the power of the imagination! Enjoy! :-)

Lazy fail :-)

I think we've all done this at one time or another. Hilarious!

The Teacher

Lord, who am I to teach the way
To little children day by day,
So prone myself to go astray?

I teach them KNOWLEDGE, but I know
How faint they flicker and how low
The candles of my knowledge glow.

I teach them POWER to will and do,
But only now to learn anew
My own great weakness through and through.

I teach them LOVE for all mankind
And all God's creatures, but I find
My love comes lagging far behind.

Lord, if their guide I still must be,
Oh, let the little children see
The teacher leaning hard on Thee.

-Leslie Pinckney Hill

Tomorrow is Another Day...

This summer, I finally got around to reading Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. Contrary to popular belief, this novel is about so much more than romance. It's about war. God. Culture. History. Despite the fact that it's a staggering 950 pages long, I have found it refreshingly simple to read. If you're looking for a good book to read, this is it!

In the preface, Pat Conroy paints a beautiful picture of why Gone with the Wind holds such sentimental value for Southerners, and especially for him (because of his mother). I wanted to include some of my favorite quotes from the preface, hopefully in an attempt to spark some interest in the novel :-)

"This is the Iliad with a Southern accent, burning with the humiliation of Reconstruction. It is the song of the fallen, unregenerate Troy, the one sung in lower key by the women who had to pick up the pieces of a fractured society when their sons and husbands returned with their cause in their throats, when the final battle cry was sounded."

"Even my young and tenuous manhood was informed by lessons of instruction from her interpretation of the novel and she would fight about it with my father. 'No matter what girls say,' my mother would tell me, and this was a recurrent theme broached upon often, 'they'd much rather marry a man like Ashley Wilkes than Rhett Butler.'"

"My mother's family suffered grievously during the Depression, but Scarlett taught that one could be hungry and despairing, but not broken and not without resources, spiritual in nature, that precluded one from surrendering without a fight. When Scarlett swears to God after rooting around for that radish in the undone garden of Tara that she will never go hungry again, she was giving voice to every American who had suffered want and fear during the Hoover years."

"I know of no other thousand-page book that reads so swiftly and grants such pleasure. The characters are wonderful, and the story moves with swiftness and bright, inexorable power. The novel allows you to lose yourself in the glorious pleasures of reading itself, when all five senses ignite in the sheer happiness of narrative."

Now go read! :-)

My dear Wormwood...

As an English teacher, it's difficult to pick a "favorite" book. Or I guess a more accurate statement would be: "As a nerd, it's difficult to pick a "favorite" book."

BUT if we're referring to a book that I could read once a year and still uncover precious truths, then C.S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters is a good example.

Here's an excerpt from Screwtape's letter to Wormwood about the Real Pleasure of reading:

"And now for your blunders. On your own showing you first of all allowed the patient to read a book he really enjoyed, because he enjoyed it and not in order to make clever remarks about it to his new friends. In the second place you allowed him to walk down to the old mill and have tea there--a walk through country he really likes, and taken alone. In other words you allowed him two real positive Pleasures. How can you have failed to see that a real pleasure was the last thing you ought to have let him meet? Didn't you foresee that it would just kill by contrast all the trumpery which you have been so laboriously teaching him to value? And that the sort of pleasure which the book and the walk gave him was the most dangerous of all? That it would peel off from his sensibility the kind of crust you have been forming on it, and make him feel that he was coming home, recovering himself?"

Oversee, O my God, my life...

Morning Prayer by Thomas Aquinas:

Oversee, O my God, my life,
that I might do what you ask of me;
allow me to see and permit me to do
whatever is fitting and profitable to my soul.
Lead me not, O Lord my God,
into excessive wealth or want,
lest I put my trust in riches, or despair in misery.
Let me take no joy or sorrow,
in what would lead me to you or from you.
Let me delight only in pleasing you
and fear only displeasing you.
O Lord, let all passing things seem worthless to me
and let everything eternal become my treasure.
May I despise any joy apart from you
and seek nothing that is without you.
Make carrying burdens for you my relaxation, O Lord,
and rest without you itself a burden.
Cross, my certain salvation, Cross, whom I ever adore,
Cross of the Lord be with me, Cross, my refuse, forevermore. Amen.

Fail!

I'm not positive, but there's a chance that might be an Obama '08 sticker...