Over the past several years, I’ve written a variety of short stories for my Visions of Grandeur short story collection.
I’ve occasionally added new stories to the collection.
But next month, this collection will come to a close.
On March 16th, I’ll be releasing two final stories:
Several moments in The Chosen season 3 have generated a lot of online buzz ever since the biblical fiction drama began releasing new episodes in late 2022.
In season 3, episode 2, Jesus (played by Jonathan Roumie) explains why he’s chosen not to heal the disciple James (called “Little James,” played by Jordan Walker Ross). In the story, Jesus explains how the disciple’s physical disability gives him unique ways to testify about God’s goodness in the midst of suffering.
Many viewers found themselves tearing up by the speech’s end. It’s a touching scene. Yet it’s also 100 percent made-up. Jesus never said or did anything like this in the four gospels. That’s given pause to some Chosen viewers.
This year was a squeaker for me in my ability to reach my Goodreads goal by the years’ end. But I managed to squeeze by with one book to spare in hitting my goal of hitting 75 books. I’ll blame my September move from small town North Carolina to river town Pennsylvania for why things came down to the wire this year.
I find myself re-reading books more often as the years go on, so the list of new titles I read each year is slowly shrinking. But there were some deeply moving and resonant new works I read this year. So here are my 10 favorite books I read for the first time this past year (book titles linked to my longer Goodreads reviews).
10. The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk
This was a rather eye-opening look at the very physical ways that trauma can affect people—and what true healing really looks like. Both as a writer and as someone who wants to know how to best help others who may struggle with trauma in my own life, I found this book quite helpful.
Earlier this year, I saw a film with a rather Marxist villain who complained about the protagonist being rich and entitled. By the film’s end, this psychotic villain was defeated and all his arguments were shown as deeply flawed and inaccurate.
Imagine, then, my surprise when I came home to find a Christian film reviewer blasting the film’s “wokeness” because of the villain’s speech. Never mind the fact that the film clearly showed this villain being in the wrong. This reviewer seemed to conclude that, because the villain gave a monologue that wasn’t immediately rebutted, that apparently made this belief part of the film’s message.
Christians want moral stories. But sometimes we fail to understand a story’s actual message. Sometimes this failure leads Christians to condemn stories with moral messages. And sometimes Christians trust stories that slip in devious messages.
The first episode for Rings of Power may have been one of the more surprising first episodes of a TV show I’ve seen.
Not because of any shocking plot twist within the episode itself. But because of how low my expectations were going into the show. A bad marketing campaign made me quite worried that the show was just being used as a cash cow with little intent to meaningfully adapt Tolkien’s world. And the fact that the screenwriters’ only prior experience had been as uncredited writers for Star Trek Beyond didn’t give me much trust either.
But then the first episode intrigued me. It was slow. But Tolkien didn’t often write fast-paced fiction, and I was quite open for a slow-burn approach. The showrunners seemed to have a deep passion for Tolkien. Middle-Earth looked stunning. And by the end of the second episode, I at least liked Elrond/Durin & Arondir/Brownyn’s plot lines. And my dismal hopes turned into rather rosy expectations.
With slow shows, however, you can’t really measure how good they are until you see the ending they’re building toward. So aside from a few side tweets here and there on Twitter, I intentionally avoided saying much about the show until I could see it in its entirety.
Now that I’ve seen the ending, though, while I didn’t hate the show, I can’t help but feel that the showrunners made a colossal mistake.
Christian cringe is real.
As Lorehaven’s Fantastical Truth podcast explored in episode 126, Christian fiction shares plenty of campy conversion scenes, bad parodies, and simplistic Christ-figures to poke fun of.
There’s a reason many of these tropes come off as cringy: they don’t feel true-to-life. We know cringey events can only work in a fictional world. And so many readers rightly want more in the fiction they read.
Could we enter a new “golden age” for fantastical Christian fiction?
This question has featured in several Lorehaven podcast episodes over this past year, most notably episode 110, in which E. Stephen Burnett and Zackary Russell devoted to this question. While I’m hesitant to use the phrase “golden age” just yet, I favor the idea that we could at least be entering a “silver age.”
If you look at the fantastical Christian novels published over the past several years, you will see many admirable works, from Nadine Brandes’s Fawkes to Catherine Jones Payne’s Breakwater to Harper’s Silence the Siren to Kerry Nietz’s Amish Vampires in Space. To riff off Realm Makers’ old slogan, this isn’t your grandmother’s “corny Christian fiction.” Today’s Christian fantastical fiction often faithfully grapples with robust themes in entertaining ways.
Some critics too easily claim that Christian-made stories often portray characters with non-Christian beliefs in cartoonish ways. You might already know the stereotypes: the villainous atheist, the angry Muslim, or the scheming liberal.
These figures may appear in evangelical movies. Contrary to some critics’ charges, such characters aren’t terribly widespread in Christian-made novels. But even when these novels don’t turn non-Christian characters into cartoons, the novels don’t always present compelling arguments for the non-Christian’s position.
Lani Forbes’s Mesoamerican-inspired fantasy The Seventh Sun is one book that does present non-Christian characters who are complex and sympathetic—and even dares to portray people who defend human sacrifice, of all things.
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