Beware the Emergent Church

Last night I had a bad dream that these people, who were called “the emergent church” in my dream but who were really a lot like the autumn people in Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes–still one of my favorite books of all time–were chasing my beautiful and sexy wife and me. We kept trying to get away from them by losing them in big stores or on busy streets, and at one point we had to get back my wife’s phone, which had some sort of important photo on it that I think our pursuers did not want us to have. We stashed the phone in a garbage bag and then had to go back and dig around for it.

Eventually we got away and lived on top of a snowy mountain in a cabin, and were worried they would find us. And then this man came along, acting like a friendly visitor, but we knew he was one of them and that since he had found us, the others would be coming. So I killed him with my bone-handled CRKT Natural and we started running again, back into the city, back through the same streets and stores, never stopping, always just barely keeping away.

I woke up cold and pretty scared.

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My Five Favorite Books

My top five favorite books of all time, in alphabetical order by author:

1. Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes: A dark carnival comes to a fictionalized Waukegan in a timeless October, bringing nightmares. It is a story about childhood and growing up, fathers and sons, friendship, and the good and evil in every one of us.

2. William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!: Unimaginably rich and mythic, a magnum opus about the South, chronicling Thomas Sutpen’s obsessive but doomed struggle to found–“tore violently a plantation”–an aristocratic dynasty in Mississippi before, during and after the Civil War, and about the destruction brought down on his bloodline and the land they inhabit as judgment that ripples through place and generations as a result. In the end, it is relentlessly a book about the dark places we should not go but that we ultimately cannot resist.

3. C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: Lewis’s re-telling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche is the most true book about God that I have ever read. It is the story of an ugly queen whose beautiful sister is taken from her by a god, and who unintentionally enacts her revenge on everyone around her by taking just as ruthlessly, until at last she is finally forced to come to terms with the true nature of herself and the Divine.

4. Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove: An epic, episodic novel about a pair of grizzled ex-Texas Rangers and the men and boys they lead on a cattle drive from Texas to Montana, for no reason at all, more or less, other than to be the first to be there. It is a powerful and poignant story about manhood, friendship, obligation, women, cattle and death. Uva uvam vivendo varia fit.

5. Jack Schaefer, Shane: A short but intense novel from a young boy’s perspective about a dark gunfighter who drifts into a Wyoming range war between farmers and an unscrupulous cattle baron. Shane is a cracking, fast-paced novel about courage, love, commitment, manhood and true strength.

6. T. H. White, The Once And Future King: A lush and quirky but immensely powerful retelling of the entire Arthurian legend. In a sense, there is nothing that this book is not about. If I had to give a boy only one book to live their life after, it would not be the Bible. It would be this book.

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