Links!

"Fan Mail. A Bit of Advice":

Getting back to work, when your work is creative, isn't like reaching for the next part in an assembly line, comfortingly close to hand. Creativity demands both a calm state of mind and a bloody great amount of self-confidence. Shake those? The cost is hours. Maybe days. Maybe more.

"Hope Stems Eternal From the Cell of Man":

 The New York Times, in covering the Nobel Prize story, grants a nod to those quaint “people who fear, on ethical or religious grounds, that scientists are pressing too far into nature’s mysteries” -- an observation designed to conjure up images of a fearful, ignorant mob persecuting what they don't understand. What they mean is, “Some of you object to making human beings so you can kill them and use pieces of them.” 

"The Casual Vacancy: J. K. Rowling's Profoundly Biblical Worldview":

 I am not saying that J.K. Rowling has written a Christian allegory; The Casual Vacancy is far more complex than that. Neither am I saying that she was thinking of the Gospels when she devised her plot; it seems unlikely. On her website she says, "I love nineteenth century novels that centre on a town or village. This is my attempt to do a modern version." Perhaps religious themes sneaked in through her deep acquaintance with Victorian authors and biblical literature. Perhaps she included them intentionally. However they got into the novel, they are hard to miss once you go looking for them.

(Hat tip to Brandywine Books.)

"Two kinds of atrocity: an ethical thought experiment":

And when they bring up the Spanish Inquisition (you know they will), the most efficient answer is to point out that it took the Inquisition nearly a century and a half to kill 3-5,000 people while the atheistic Reign of Terror under the French Revolution murdered about 40,000 in less than a year.

Still, at least for me, that’s not entirely satisfactory. Saying, “We’re not as bad as you guys,” isn’t quite enough when you’re talking about killing people in the name of Christ, whether in the Inquisition, or during the Crusades, or under a pogrom. The deeper problem, in my view, is how to think about Christians who act like the worst kind of atheists (for of course most atheists are perfectly decent people), and how to judge their acts. 

 "In Which the New York Times Suggests I Am a Pretentious Git":

I see we’re confronting the simultaneously existential yet provincial terror of someone choosing to use the whole of the English language when it suits them.

Yes, indeed, I used “A nice piece of kit” to describe the iPad, because it was an apt phrase for how I felt about the machine, and I like to use apt phrasing from time to time. Because, you know, I am a professional writer. I have also been known to use “all y’all” even though I am not from Texas, “no worries,” even though I am not from Australia, and “le mot juste,” even though I am not from France. I once invented something called the “schadenfreude pie” although neither it nor I am German. I ALSO EAT TACOS.