This is the first of a series of books to be published over the next
twelve years, containing the complete run of Peanuts cartoons from
October of 1952 until Schulz’s retirement, a span of nearly fifty years.
I bought it for two reasons.

The first is purely nostalgic. During most of my life, the only
Peanuts cartoons I read in the newspaper were the Sunday strips.
The daily strips weren’t on the usual comics page; instead, they were
just inside the front page, which I seldom looked at. Thus, my knowledge
of Charlie Brown et al came from a handful of Peanuts
collections, most of which I inherited from my siblings, and all of which
were from the first ten years of the strip’s existence. I read them over
and over. And many of the ones I remember best are from the time period
covered by this current collection.

The other reason is that I’m a comic strip junkie, and I especially like
watching comic strips evolve. There’s always a period of time during
which the cartoonist is figuring out how his characters are drawn, and
what personalities they have, and I find it fascinating to watch. In
this case, I also found it fascinating to re-read the same cartoons I’d
loved as a kid, and see things that had gone completely over my head.

Here are a number of things I noticed as I was reading it.

As the strip begins, there are only four major characters: Shermy, Patty
(who is not the Peppermint Patty of the later years), Charlie
Brown, and Snoopy. Shermy and Patty are the big kids–they both go to
school (though it might only be kindergarten). Charlie Brown is the
little kid in the neighborhood; he doesn’t go to school yet. And the kind
of problems Charlie Brown has with Patty and Shermy (though mostly with
Patty) are the kind of problems any little kid has with the Big Kids.
Interestingly, there’s a clear scent of on-again/off-again romance
between Patty and Shermy. Snoopy, meanwhile, is just a dog. He has
moods, and opinions, but they are non-verbal. His big thing is that he can
always tell when Charlie Brown has anything to eat, especially ice cream
or candy.

Over the course of the first year, Charlie Brown gets a little older, and
a new cast member is added: Violet, a pretty girl of Charlie Brown’s own
age, with two straight pigtails in back (though she’s usually drawn in
profile, so you can only see one). One gathers that she was added to
give Charlie Brown a love interest of his own. Violet, interestingly,
is the first girl to hold a football for Charlie Brown; and though she
takes it away at the last minute, it doesn’t appear to be due to malice.
Charlie Brown also shows up playing Beethoven (badly) on a violin during
this period.

The next kid to arrive is Schroeder, the new baby in the neighborhood, and
for the first month or so a baby is all he is–and then the piano shows
up, and he takes off with Beethoven. By the end of the book he’s walking
and talking and playing baseball with Charlie Brown–who at this point is
always shown as the catcher, never the pitcher–though he’s definitely
still younger than Charlie Brown.

Shortly after Schroeder makes the transformation from toddler to little
boy and Charlie Brown’s frequent companion, Lucy shows up. As with
Schroeder, she starts out more or less as a toddler, and though she has
an independent streak she’s initially relatively guileless. Toward the
end of the book, she does indeed hold the football for Charlie Brown in a
Sunday strip in which he twice fails to kick the ball, and in neither
case does she pull the ball away. The first time she’s afraid that he’ll
kick her, and so she lets go of the ball so that it flops over just as
he’s about to kick it. The second time Charlie Brown warns her to hold
it absolutely still, and she holds it so tightly that he can’t kick it
out of her grip. In neither case is she being mean; she’s trying her
best, in fact.

After Lucy appears, Violet’s hairstyle begins to change, possibly because
she and Lucy look too much alike. Over the course of several months it
goes back and forth between her signature pigtails hanging straight down
in back and a single proto-bun on the back of her head.

It’s about this time, or maybe a few months earlier, that Snoopy shows
signs of becoming a Dog of Parts. Charlie Brown comments that everyone
in town is getting a TV, and gives as evidence Snoopy’s doghouse, which
has a TV aerial on top. (If I’m not mistaken, this marks the first time
Snoopy’s doghouse appears in the strip.) A month or so later, angry at
being left all alone by the kids at the end of the day of a long day of
play, Snoopy stalks off to his dog house. If they don’t want to play
anymore, that fine. He doesn’t need them. He can spend the evening
watching TV.

And then, just at the end of the book, Linus makes his first appearances
as Lucy’s baby brother.

As 1952 comes to a close, none of the characters yet look quite as we
will know them for the better part of the strip’s life. Charlie Brown’s
head is still noticeably oval when seen full-face. Snoopy hasn’t
yet begun to walk on his hindlegs or sleep on top of his dog house–it’s
not even completely clear yet that he’s Charlie Brown’s dog. Violet is
clearly evolving toward her final form, but hasn’t gotten there yet.
Schroeder is already a big Beethoven fan, but Lucy has not yet fallen in
love with him. Lucy, who is still noticeably younger than Charlie Brown,
has not yet opened her psychiatrist’s booth. Linus has not yet acquired
his security blanket, nor can he talk. Charlie Brown plays baseball,
but has not yet begun to pitch.

There’s good stuff in this first volume, but clearly, the best is yet to
come.

I’ve had a fair number of religion-related posts up recently, and if it’s
becoming tedious for you I apologize in advance for posting another one.
The Foothills is supposed to mostly be a book blog, and herein lies my
problem: many of the books I’ve been reading recently involve religion in
ways I can’t ignore. So please, bear with me; it’s not my intent to turn
The Foothills into an All-Religion-All-The-Time kind of blog.

Phil at Brandywine Books has written several posts (most recently
here)
on the subject of “What is Christian Fiction?” My answer is that there
are several things which can go by that name. The first is simply,
“Fiction written to be marketed specifically to Christians”. There’s a
lot of this stuff being written, I guess, and I have no idea what it is
or if it’s any good.

The second category is fiction which expresses the Christian worldview.
Let me explain that, because what I mean probably isn’t obvious.

Every work of fiction is, in one sense, a work of fantasy. That is,
every work of fiction takes place in a world of its own, a world where
things are different than they are in our world. In mainstream fiction,
the world may correspond quite closely with our own, but it still
contains people who don’t exist in our world, doing things that never
actually happened, saying things that were never actually said. It
must–for if it did not, the work might be history, or journalism, but it
certainly wouldn’t be fiction. This created world has geography and physics
(though in a fantasy novel they might be very strange physics); it also
has a metaphysical dimension.

Most science fiction, for example, assumes the naturalistic view of
things. The universe may be a very strange place, but the rules are
scientifically discoverable, and everything that happens is the result of
physical processes acting on matter and energy. In the naturalistic
view, the supernatural does not exist. There are no ghosts; there are no
dieties; or if there are, they are subject to the same physical laws as
the rest of us, though they might involve physical processes as yet
unknown to science.

Much fantasy fiction, perhaps counter-intuitively, also assumes the
naturalistic view of things. Since the publication of
J.R.R.
Tolkien‘s essay “On Fairy Stories”, most fantasists
have seen themselves as creating fantasy worlds that follow
well-understood and immutable laws. These laws are undoubtedly different
than those of the real world, but that’s the point of most fantasy–it
doesn’t take place in the real world. Such worlds often contain ghosts,
and dieties, and stranger creatures as well, because that’s how the author
wrotes the rules. For all that she’s a werewolf,
Terry
Pratchett‘s Corporal Angua is no more supernatural in
her world than a motorcycle cop is in ours.

To the Christian, of course, the naturalistic view is true so far as it
goes, but it is severely limited. God is not subject to natural law; God
is, in fact, the creator of the natural laws, and of the very matter and
energy whose processes they describe. Christian fiction, in this second
sense, is simply fiction whose philosophical underpinnings are those of
Christianity. That is, it is fiction that takes place in worlds in which
Christianity is true.

Note that this definition doesn’t assume any particular kind of plot, nor
does it require that Christianity be mentioned, either explicitly or
symbolically, in the work in question. Tolkien’s The Lord of the
Rings is a work of Christian fiction simply because Tolkien
explicitly set it in the prehistory of the real world–and for Tolkien,
the real world was a Christian world, a world created by the God of
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Eru-Illuvatar of Tolkien’s mythology is not
just a diety, nor a symbol of the Almighty God; but the true, the living
God that he worshipped each Sunday. The same may be said for
C.S Lewis‘s
Aslan. Aslan does not symbolize Jesus Christ;
Aslan is Jesus Christ, as he chose to appear in the world of
Narnia.

Middle-Earth and Narnia are, of course, worlds not only of Christian
fiction but also of Christian fantasy, and both illustrate the
fundamental problem that faces the would-be author of Christian fantasy:
how can one introduce fantasy elements, things which contradict natural
law and the world as it is, after constraining oneself to remain true to
Truth Himself? He resolved it by setting his story in an ancient,
ante-deluvian world, at a time before the Almighty had begun to reveal
himself to his Christian, and by limiting the supernatural aspects of his
story.

Have you ever noticed that despite being the pre-eminent work of fantasy
of the 20th century, The Lord of the Rings contains very little
that’s actually fantastic? The geography is different than in our world,
but the physics are the same. There’s elven-magic, but Galadriel
cautions that it’s not what we’d usually think of as magic. There’s
nothing particularly supernatural about elves, or dwarves, or orcs, or
ents; though extinct, they are creatures just as men are. Indeed, the
only really magical beings we see are the wizards Gandalf and Saruman,
Sauron the dark lord, and the Nine Nazgul. The Silmarillion makes
it clear that Gandalf, Saruman and Sauron are all nothing more nor less
than angels; the Nazgul can then be thought of as extreme cases of
demonic possession. In any event, all power in Middle Earth derives
ultimately from Eru, the One, the Creator.

In short, the mythology of Middle Earth extends Christianity and goes
beyond it, but doesn’t contradict it. The same can be said for Lewis’s
work. It’s a difficult line to walk, and few have been successful at it.
There’s Tolkien and Lewis, of course, and Lewis’ master George MacDonald;
I’m hardpressed to think of any others.

Indeed, even less successful attempts are hard to find. Christopher
Stasheff wrote a series beginning with The Oathbound Wizard, which
takes place in a world (if I recall correctly) in which basic Christian
morality is enforced by natural law–the wizard truly is oathbound,
because having once sworn an oath it’s impossible for him not to keep it.
And yet, that seems to me to work against the Christian belief in
original sin and the need for redemption. Kathryn Kurtz sets her Deryni
series in a world with a church much like that of medieval England, but
though the forms of the Catholic church are retained there’s little of
Christianity here–except for numerous examples of original sin at work.
C. Dale Britain has written a book called A Bad Spell in Yurt (one
of a series, if I recall correctly) in which the dominant religion is
Christianity, positively portrayed; a nice touch, though an odd one–it
bothers me, here and in the Deryni books, to find a church that
celebrates the crucified and risen Christ by name in a world with no
apparent connection to the world in which he was crucified. Poetic
license, I suppose.

Now, why have I gone through all this? To define Christian fantasy, and
to make the point that writing it is extremely difficult–all in
preparation for some interesting books I got in the mail recently. But
that’s a post for another day.

I first read this last July and enjoyed it very much. I
just heard that a sequel is due in June, and so I pulled it out and read
it to Jane, who also enjoyed it very much. I won’t say much about it
(you can read the earlier review) but there are a few points worth
mentioning.

First, it’s a Discworld book; but it’s also a juvenile. I’ve generally only seen
it in the young adult’s section of the bookstore; so even if you’re a Discworld
fan you might have missed it. Hie to a bookstore (or, more likely, to
Amazon.com) and order it! (Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg have cameos.)

Second, it contains one of his best lines in a long time–one
of the ones that doesn’t hit you until you’re already a couple of
sentences past it: “The universe is a lot more complicated than it looks
from the outside.” Think about that for a while.

Now, this you gotta see. Courtesy of Lileks.

This is the fourth of Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain, and if you’d
asked me some months ago, before I started reading them to David, I’d
have told you it was my favorite. It might still be…but I was
surprised to discover that it’s not the book I thought it was.

Or, rather, it is…but the events that I remember and that made the book
special for me and that I thought filled the whole book are actually all
jammed into the last thirty or forty pages.

Anyway, this is the book where Taran, through self-sacrifice and
hard work, finally becomes a man. This is the book where he discovers
his limits–which are wider than he thinks in some places and which pinch
unexpectedly in others–and makes his peace with himself. He becomes a
man who can see what needs doing, and will do it, as best he can; who
does not make excuses; who is brave, honest, and skilled, all three. Not
a bad package, I think.

Michael Friedman has a post on special effects that mentions one of my favorite movies, The Five Thousand Fingers of Dr. T. If you’re looking for Seuss on the big screen it beats the offerings of the last couple of years all to pieces.

I’d intended to post a review or two tonight; possibly, I still will. But it’s been an interesting evening, from an Internet point of view.

The first thing that happens is, when I download my e-mail, I discover that my weblog here has been hit with about thirty or forty pieces of comment spam. They are all obviously from the same person–but each one is from a different IP address. So not only did I have to ban forty IP addresses, and delete the forty bogus comments, I’ve no assurance that the same party won’t continue with their tricks. And short of turning off comments altogether, there isn’t much I can do about it.

Actually, there’s some add-in software I can install that will make my blog less of a target, but I’m waiting for MovableType 3.0, which is currently in Beta. I was going to install the add-in a few weeks ago, and then decided to wait for V3.0, which has spam-blocking stuff built in. At the moment I’m reconsidering.

Then, while in the middle of deleting bogus spam comments, I observed that I’d gotten a new non-spam comment on this recent post. It’s from a fellow who simply can’t understand how a seemingly intelligent person like me can possibly believe in Christianity. Charitably, he finally attributes my inability to question my religious beliefs to my geographical setting and points me at a number of pro-atheism websites.

The man’s entitled to his opinion, certainly, and he’s even entitled to say so in my comments section–that’s what it’s for. And I don’t believe he was intentionally rude; I think he was honestly mystified. But I have to say, the distinction between honey and vinegar seems to have eluded him.

And then, just to put an absurd cap over the whole thing, I got an e-mail from a college freshman asking me point-blank to help with a homework assignment. It was remarkably tempting to send back the wrong answer, but I restrained myself and simply replied, “No can do.”

My father did that once, actually. He was taking a multiple choice test, and noticed that the guy sitting next to him was copying. So he wrote down the wrong answer to every question, making no attempt to hide his work at all–and then at the last moment went back and fixed all of them and turned his paper over.

The May issue of Ex Libris Reviews is now available for your reading pleasure.

As usual, if you’ve been following the blog over the last month you’ll have seen all of my reviews and all of Deb’s, but Craig Clarke’s got some interesting stuff for you.

Lynn Sislo comments on an article about a young preacher who has been charged with heresy by his denomination. It seems that the preacher has been teaching that non-Christians might still be able to go to heaven; the denomination’s position is that that’s false doctrine and that he ought not be teaching it.

I don’t mean to speak to which of the parties is correct (though I’ll note that Holy Scripture and nearly 2000 years of Christian tradition are on the denomination’s side). Nor do I intend to speak to Lynn’s contention that if the preacher is really called by God that he has no reason to care what the denomination says (though I could say a few words about human frailty, as well as the fact that if God called the preacher, he equally called the preacher’s superiors). Nor will I go into the various means the Church has used over the last 2000 years to determine the truth of various doctrines.

No, what I want to talk about is an interesting contention of Lynn’s. She says this about the article:

I like this part:

…said the Joint College in a statement March 29. Despite “repeated, compassionate and loving overtures,” it added, Bishop Pearson refused to quit preaching that doctrine.

“Compassionate and loving overtures” to force a preacher to stop preaching according to his beliefs, which are more compassionate than the official version.

It’s that phrase, “more compassionate than the official version.” What Lynn is saying, clearly, is that it’s more compassionate to say that non-Christians can go to heaven than it is to say that they can’t. And I’m trying to understand the logic here, because it purely doesn’t make sense. Where does compassion come into this?

It’s not as though the preacher’s contention that non-Christians can be admitted to heaven actually admits them to heaven, or that the denomination’s contention that they can’t be actually bars them from heaven.

Either there’s a heaven, or there isn’t. If there isn’t, it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans what either the preacher or his denomination says. If there is a heaven, as Christian doctrine teaches, then either non-Christians can be admitted or they can’t. This young preacher is either right or wrong. But whether he is right or wrong has no bearing on whether God admits non-Christians to heaven or not. So in what sense can he be held to be compassionate? Compassion that doesn’t lead to acts of mercy is just a cheap feeling.

Now, on the other hand, let’s suppose for a moment that there is a real heaven, and a real hell, eternal joy on one side, eternal torment on the other. And let’s suppose for a moment that Christians go to heaven and non-Christians don’t. I don’t care for the moment whether you believe this or not–just, for the sake of argument, suppose that it’s true. Let’s think about the implications.

The preacher is saying, “It doesn’t matter if you’re a Christian or not, you can still go to heaven and have eternal bliss.”

His denomination is saying, “That’s not true. If you’re not a Christian, you’re subject to eternal damnation.”

Now remember, we’re assuming, for the moment, that his denomination is correct. In that light, which of the two is the more compassionate? Is it more compassionate to tell people what they want to hear, and make them feel good, at the possible cost of eternal suffering? Or is it more compassionate to tell them things they dislike, and make them angry at you, in the hopes that some among them will win through to eternal bliss?

I know which of those two positions has the greater personal cost.

I don’t know what’s in Lynn’s mind. But when I hear this sort of thing, that somehow it’s more compassionate to tell people that their actions do not have eternal consequences, I always feel that I’m being maligned–that the speaker assumes that I like consigning people to hell–that it’s a bowl of cherries to me. That I think that the God that I believe in loves me and those like me, but hates the people whose actions I disapprove of.

Nothing could be further from the truth. I don’t pretend to any moral superiority; God offers salvation and the hope of heaven to every man and woman. The Christian who calls people to God is like a man in a power boat, rescuing flood victims from the roofs of their houses. When he says, “If you’re not a Christian, you can’t go to heaven,” all he’s really saying is, “The waters are rising. If you don’t get in the boat, you’re going to drown.”

Meanwhile, our popular young preacher is telling folks to stay on the roof, the flood waters aren’t going to go that high. Maybe he’s right. Me, I’d rather be in the boat.

And frankly, I’d rather you were in it with me, because I really don’t want to watch you drown.

My kids think I am the nerdiest mother ever since I began teaching, or I
should say, reteaching myself basic algebra this spring. My 16 year-old son
mutters things about mumblemumble mom doing mumble algebra for mumble fun
and, like, mumble get a life, jeez mumblemumble. My daughter is a little
less subtle. She just declares to any and all that she has the weirdest mom
in the whole world. Do I care? Not in the least.

There is a story behind this. I didn’t just wake up to some odd biological,
midlife, menopause-related crisis with a burning desire to solve equations
for x or to delve into the mysteries of the quadratic theorem.

First of all, my daughter is LD and needs mucho help with homework. She
actually gets mathematical concepts quite well; it’s figuring out what the
problems are saying and what is the stupid question that is hard for her.
Copying from one spot to another, as in copying down a problem and then
recopying it as you do the work, is another difficulty. So quite often I am
explaining and checking math. That’s ok when we’re talking long division or
fractions. Percentages are a snap. So is factoring and figuring out common
denominators. But you start combining letters with numbers in any equation
and I start getting just a wee bit befuddled. Faking it doesn’t work either.
Tried that—-she got every problem wrong. I got a snotty email from the
teacher. And next year she’s in high school with real algebra, not just the
watered down, wussy 8th grade version. Yikes!

Second, I am unemployed right now. I have a fair amount of free, quiet time.
There are only so many times you can clean the house. The dog is not a good
conversationalist. Boredom sets in.

Saxon is fairly well known in the homeschool circles. He uses a simple
format of 4 lessons and then a test. Each lesson teaches one small increment
or concept with 5 or 6 worked examples. Then you are given a couple practice
problems specifically on the concept taught. Finally, there are 30 problems
that review all the material learned up to and including that lesson. There
is a 20 problem test given at the end of the 4 lessons that is actually
testing things learned in the prior lesson set. So on the test after lesson
80, you are questioned on the concepts taught up to lesson 76. By reading
the explanations and then following along as the examples are worked, you
pretty much have all the teaching you need because everything is taught in
very small steps. There are no tricksy problems. All is straight forward and
above board. It takes me roughly an hour to do a lesson.

The critique I’ve heard of the program is that there isn’t enough
repetition. Some kids need the 5 extra worksheets with 50 problems each to
get the concepts and in a schoolroom situation, the teacher needs those
resources in order to teach. It also is just straight math. No “real life”
applications aside from the word problems. No hands-on learning activities
demonstrating why a certain concept is important to a particular profession.
Actually, I like that about the book. My daughter’s book from school is so
full of culturally diverse examples and cool scientific applications, it’s
hard to find the math problems in it. Curriculum committees might not find
it so wonderful, tho.

So I ordered the next book in the series, Algebra 2, and I may take this new
little passion all the way to calculus. I am finding the lack of ambiguity
in math comforting somehow. There is an answer; all you have to do is
correctly follow the steps. As an adolescent I found that frustrating beyond
belief. As a middle-aged adult, it’s kind of nice that at least in some
things in life, there are concrete answers to certain questions even if they
are questions like “what is the slope-intercept method for finding the
equation of a line on a rectangular coordinate grid?”