Safety has become a very important concept in Christian entertainment. Pick up any Christian parenting magazine that talks about healthy entertainment for your kids, any online guide to what entertainment Christians should or shouldn't indulge in, and you'll find it can almost all be summed up as, "anything outside this very specific zone is unhealthy …
A couple of weeks ago, I shared an essay on thriller novelist Dennis Wheatley (whose influenced Ian Fleming and others) and his interesting part in promoting the books of Charles Williams. A new post, giving my concluding thoughts and some suggestions about why Williams and Wheatley's careers took such different turns, has now been published. …
Continue reading Thoughts on Charles Williams & Dennis Wheatley Part 2
One of the joys of writing book reviews is that sometimes you discover a book you really didn't expect to enjoy. I picked up a copy of West Side Story: A Novelization just after Christmas in a mall bookstore for two reasons: first, it's a reprint of a novelization written for the original film, and …
Since today is the end of the Lent/Easter season, I decided to look back at some of the books I've been reading since Ash Wednesday. I read fairly quickly and will read almost anything once, so it was a mixed bag of items. However, there were a few books that dealt with religious themes or …
Today, April 9, marks 77 years to the day that theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) was executed for his involvement in the most famous of several plots to assassinate Hitler. As a friend observed yesterday in Inkling Folk Fellowship's Memorium for Bonhoeffer, he died exactly three weeks before Hitler committed suicide in his bunker. Within two …
Continue reading Remembering Dietrich Bonhoeffer 77 Years Later
While my fiction writing so far has mostly been in the sci-fi/fantasy genre with ventures into ghost stories, I keep telling myself I should write a thriller. I enjoy the well-tuned psychological games, the tension and the chase between hunter and hunted. As I mentioned in my MovieThoughts series on Patricia Highsmith's Ripley novels, I …
Wrapping up my MovieThoughts series on the Tom Ripley novels and the five films based on them, and my review of Deep Water, I had some final ideas that didn't fit into the posts. Like my "Things I Left Out" post about T.H. White, this post collects the afterthoughts for anyone who may be interested. …
Continue reading The Cinematic Mr Ripley: Final Thoughts and Factoids
As many of you may know, today is International Tolkien Reading Day. Many fans and scholars are getting together today to read sections of his work. I had the pleasure to attend the Inkling Folk Fellowship's reading event, where people read from The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and Lord of the Rings. A few people read …
Continue reading Something for International Tolkien Reading Day: The Hobbit, Contractor’s Edition
I've talked quite a lot about C.S. Lewis on my blog over the years, and his circle of friends known as the Inklings. One of his more mysterious friends was Charles Williams, who was (among other things) a playwright, a Dante scholar who got Dorothy L. Sayers hooked on The Divine Comedy, and a writer …
Continue reading Some thoughts on Charles Williams and Dennis Wheatley
I mentioned at the start of my blog series The Cinematic Mr. Ripley that it seemed like a good idea to look at the various films based on Patricia Highsmith's Ripley books, since a movie based on one of her other thrillers was coming out soon. By coincidence, Deep Water (directed by Adrian Lyne, starring …
This is the fifth post in The Cinematic Mr. Ripley, a series for the MovieThoughts category of my blog that considers moral themes in Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley novels and the film adaptations of those books. This post looks at Ripley's Game, the 2002 film directed and co-written by Liliana Cavani, adapted from the novel …
Continue reading Movie Review: Ripley’s Game (The Cinematic Mr. Ripley #5)
G. Connor Salter 