Kathryn Butler, “Here Be Dragons: What Christians Need to Know About Romantasy” (The Gospel Coalition)

“Whatever its origins, romantasy has soared in popularity in recent years. Onyx Storm sold 2.7 million copies in its first week, breaking a 20-year record. At the time of this writing, Yarros’s books occupy the top two spots on the New York Times bestseller list for hardcover fiction and the top three spots on Amazon’s ‘most sold’ list. Maas, another author driving sales in the category, has also seen meteoric success; her A Court of Thorns and Roses series has sold more than 13 million copies.

“Why have these books achieved such a wide readership over the last few years? Even more importantly, what should Christians know about romantasy—and how can we guard our hearts as these titles become increasingly prevalent?”

Alister McGrath, “Following the Clues of the Universe” (Plough)

“How do we make sense of our universe? Of ourselves? Human beings seem inherently driven to seek meaning in life, sensing that something deeper lies beyond the horizons of our present experience that makes life worthwhile and fulfilling. The cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz suggests that humanity ‘cannot live in a world it is unable to understand.’ We are ‘symbolizing, conceptualizing, meaning-seeking animals,’ who want to ‘make sense out of experience, and give it some form and order.’

“Human beings are always seeking meaning. Yet this ‘meaning’ proves elusive. It is not something that we observe; rather, it is something we have to uncover by interpreting what we observe. The universe stays silent about its own significance, compelling us, as its observers and interpreters, to discover ‘some form and order.’ P. D. James, who created the investigator and poet Adam Dalgliesh of New Scotland Yard, famously remarked that ‘what the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.’ Meaning is something that we uncover by following clues and discovering where they lead us.”

Peter Conrad, “‘He Contains the Whole of Literature’: Is Dickens Better Than Shakespeare?” (The Guardian)

“One Shakespearean motto lodged in Dickens’s mind, almost as an irritant. This was Prospero’s boast in The Tempest about his ‘so potent art,’ by which he means the magic that whips up storms and even resurrects the dead. Dickens was also a magician, who performed conjuring tricks at parties and thought of his poetic metaphors as verbal spells; he frequently quoted Prospero’s phrase, as if quietly asking whose art was the more potent. At the end of the play, Shakespeare’s magus wearily discards his book of charms and resigns himself to impotent mortality: he cannot match the creative energy of Dickens, who said that when writing he often felt that his head was about to explode ‘like a fired shell.’”