Fellow scholar Elise Trudel Cedeño and I are exploring a Modern Fantasy course at Signum University. I’m grateful for the shout out on her blog Teaching with Magic!

I will be speaking today at Signum University’s New England Moot, a reflection on twenty years as a religious educator. Specifically, I will address how the finest schools of magic influenced my work.

Here’s a link to my slides!

And this is the non-exhaustive list of books which I’ve been known to recommend on the general topic of ethical development:

The Harry Potter Saga by J. K. Rowling

Riddle Master of Hed (and sequels) by Patricia McKillip

Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin

everything by Ursula K. LeGuin

Snow Treasure by Marie McSwiggan

Number the Stars

Matty Doolin

Jenny Nimmo’s Snow Spider Trilogy. 

The Ranger’s Apprentice series by John Flanagan

Tamora Pierce, Song of the Lioness Quartet 

Star Wars.  Episodes 4, 5, and 6 

Howard Pyle:

Robin Hood.

Men of Iron.

Otto of the Silver Hand.

the Sherlock Holmes corpus, 

Frankenstein, Lewis Carroll, 

Swiss Family Robinson, 

Treasure Island! 

Red Berries, White Clouds, Blue Sky by Sandra Dallas

Enchanted Air: Two Cultures, Two Wings: A Memoir by Margarita Engel

A Night Divided by Jennifer Nielsen

In the Sea There Are Crocodiles: Based on the True Story of Enaiatollah Akbari by Fabio Geda.  

The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley 

“ABCs in Zero G” a short story by Elizabeth Moon; 

Falling Free by Lois McMaster Bujold)

 Everything by Lois McMaster Bujold

Star Trek. 

Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper.  

“Omnilingual” by H. Beam Piper.  

“Nodsaunce” by H. Beam Piper – 

Life As We Knew It & The Dead and the Gone by Susan Beth Pfeffer.   

everything Joss Whedon ever produced

The Curse of Chalion and especially its sequel, Paladin of Souls, by Lois McMaster Bujold. 

The Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold.

The Darwath Series, by Barbara Hambly

The Ladies of Mandrigyn, by Barbara Hambly

“The Cold Equations” by Tom Godwin

“The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” by Ursula K. LeGuin.

The Little Prince

The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M. Valente 

Vivian Apple at the End of the World by Katie Coyle

Speaker for the Dead  by Orson Scott Card

everything by Agatha Christie, but especially the mysteries solved by that strong female protagonist Miss Jane Marple

Friends, I’m excited to tell you what I’ve been working on for many, many weeks. The ducks, they are finally in a row… and I will open this in my community on Monday!

For those of you Word Fans who also enjoy my poetry blog, I’ve put my Kindle book of Morning Meander poetry on a 99-cent sale this week, so that we can all walk, write, create, meditate, and pray together from September 23d to November 1.

There’s a world outside of words? What could it be??? Don’t worry, Word Fans, my other life is also about words. I’m ticked to have Kindle-published a collection of poetry. Self-publications, of course, are un-curated, except by the bots which assure us that I have not violated copyright or decency laws. And Theodore Sturgeon’s adage remains relevant.

But this blog is un-curated – I’m the content chooser and approver. What an odd little world.

However! I hope you enjoy the poetry, there’s always more where it came from.

Friends, I knew that the wonderful Lexos folks had been adding features and goodness since my Lexos-analyzing heyday in 2015. Today I had cause to give it all a good look-see*. I am head over heels.

Expect some new and very sassy graphs, friends. Very. Sassy. Graphs.

*Look-see, a perfectly cromulent hyphenated word according to OED, and the related non-word “make-see” just took me down a vast and mighty rabbit-hole. You have been warned.

“look-see, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2019, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/110145. Accessed 6 March 2019.

I am listening to Verlyn Flieger’s lectures of the “Tolkien’s World of Middle Earth” course at Signum University.   I hope to showcase the marvelous words which she holds up for consideration.  Right there in Lecture 1, she exhorts us to look for exiles, outcasts, and orphans throughout Tolkien’s work.  I searched for every variation on exile, outcast, orphan, and widow.  Here we go:

1.017 and the unexpected luck of widows’ sons?
14.033 and aid for our widows
14.033 and orphans?’

Both “widow” and “orphan” are common words for our purposes; I’ll run and add them to the concordance.  Now it is for someone else to follow up with the other works!

Your word trivia for today is that “exile” has an obsolete meaning of  “Slender, shrunken, thin; diminutive.”  Thank you, OED, it’s nice to be back in your shelter.

“exile, adj. and adv.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, July 2018, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/66233. Accessed 5 October 2018.