Christmas in September

I am headed out the door to take care of some business for the parish. Before I depart, I had to share with you some of the lovelies that showed up in the mail.

From time to time, I will update my library, both DVD and literary. It's part of an overall strategy of good general theological and cultural formation. At worse, unhelpful books can hit the local library. What was in this drop from the Initiative, aka Amazon?

In package one, we find one of my favorite movies based on one of my favorite books, Francis Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury remains one of my favorite authors, as demonstrated here, there, and elsewhere, though, I must confess I have not read him recently. Recently, Truffaut's work was mentioned in one of the Chesterton magazines I take, and I decided to dig it up. I really can't wait to fire this up, but I need to finish watching Fawlty Towers first. (God Bless, Netflix!) The movie deals with a totalitarian world in which books, all books, are banned. It is a frightening vision of what a world could become if the free exchange of ideas was boiled down to only the banal and omitted the beautiful as well. Even ideas we find objectionable should find a place in discourse, even though we should be free to disagree, even strongly, even passionately with them.

In package two, we find Fahrenheit 451 (this time in book form); Batman: Gotham Knight (an anime inspired version I saw a snip of in Austin), Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill by Gretchen Rubin; Something Wicked This Way Comes by R. Bradbury (see a pattern?), and lastly The Gun Seller by Hugh Laurie. Yes, he's more than House.

As you can see, I have some work ahead of me, not to mention the four presentations I have to make in the next four months, and my book rewrites, and parish business, and shrine business, ... , eh, why did I restart this blog?