First Things RSS Feed - Sally Thomas

Children's Books and the Christian Story

Sat, 01 Aug 2020 06:00:00 -0400

It is one thing to talk about the Resurrection. It is quite another to see the Easter fire struck in the night, the candle lit, the light of Christ filling the tomblike darkness of the waiting church. As a Catholic, I live and relive that liturgy every year; every year it astonishes me as no amount of evidence-based argument—The Case for the Resurrection—could ever do. Yes, yes, I want to say to the apologist, I get it. But when the lights come on and the bells ring and the music starts, I know it. If, as John Lukacs has written, knowledge is “personal and participant,” then our knowledge of Christianity must, at its most real, be both of those things. If you ask a child, “Where is God?,” he may respond, “God is everywhere.” This is a fact, easily memorized. But until the child has some personal and participant sense of who God is, what it feels like for God to be everywhere, his answer falls short of knowledge.

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Tomie dePaola’s Icons

Tue, 14 Apr 2020 06:00:00 -0400

Real artists don’t copy.” Tomie dePaola, the children’s author and illustrator who died last week at age eighty-five, once recalled this counsel given him as a child of four or five. “I had these twin cousins who . . . were in art school. They had told me . . . ‘Real artists don’t copy.’” When dePaola began school, his cousins’ advice sparked a small rebellion. In the first art class of the year, the children were directed to draw Pilgrim figures—man, woman, turkey—which the teacher had done in chalks for them to imitate. DePaola refused.

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Epiphany

Wed, 01 Jan 2020 00:00:00 -0500

He tells himself a tale his grandmother told:
Babuschka sleeps by the fire. Outside new snow
Laps the window. Camels look in from the cold.
Wise-crowned kings—they know her name—say, Go
With us, Babushka. Constellations stare down,
Choirs of startled silence. Bolting the door,
She stirs her fire. Like that, the moment’s gone,
Calling over its shoulder. Too late. Evermore,
The hermit’s grandmother said, Babushka travels
Up and down the whole world, knocking. Where?
Above his sharp tin roof, the wind unravels
Its silver skein. On his lintel he chalks the new year.
If a priest should knock, he’d have his creek water blessed.
He sprinkles it anyway, welcomes himself as his guest.

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First Sunday

Sun, 01 Dec 2019 06:00:00 -0500

In Advent, the hermit lights a candle-end,
Drips wax onto a saucer, stands it there.
The early nightfall forms itself around
This little shivering flame. He says his prayer:
Stir up Thy power, Lord. Outside, the wind
Has risen. Rain flicks its fingers at the window.
He’s alone. God’s called him to this homeland
Of loneliness, leafmold. The lengthening shadow
Creeps always from the trees. The winter air
Smells of it. At prayer he is God’s widow,
His heart bereaved and restless. Prepare, prepare—
The word exhorts him. The wet evening’s slow
Footfalls drag. He nods in candlelight,
Then darkness. So the watchman guards the night.

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Not Duffers, Won't Drown

Wed, 01 May 2013 00:00:00 -0400

These stories are all about unsupervised children,” my oldest daughter observed years ago, when we were reading Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons books aloud, one after another, books in which—to offer a rough collective plot summary—some children mess about in boats. “How,” my daughter asked in marveling tones, “did these children get to be so unsupervised?” Autonomy is, after all, the child’s secret dream. To go out alone and live, even if all you do is swim, fish, cook regular meals, and go to bed when it gets dark, is a vision beyond the reach of the average child today.

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Newman’s Unusual Feast Day

Sun, 19 Sep 2010 21:29:07 -0400

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The Close of the Day

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 16:59:45 -0400

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Terror Plot Against the Pope?

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 10:38:19 -0400

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Who Are These People?

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 08:00:47 -0400

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The Social Commentary of Ice Cream Ads

Wed, 15 Sep 2010 15:14:47 -0400

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