To have discovered Robert Penn Warren this late in life is like seeing a glacier for the first time at 40 years old. Warren has to rank among the top five American fiction writers of all time, and I haven't even read any of his poetry yet. Three pulitzer's, the national book award, the national medal for literature and America's first poet laureate. How come no one talks about this author??? Anyway, I just saw a trailer for the movie "All The King's Men". Do yourself a favor and read the book before you see the movie.

"'He is a romantic, and he has a picture of the world in his head, and when the world doesn't conform in any respect to the picture, he wants to throw the world away. Even if it means throwing the baby out with the bath. 'Which,' I added, 'it always does mean.'"

-----Robert Penn Warren, "All The King's Men"

"[Radical Postmodernists] insist that there is no 'text' external to the interpretive traditions and practices of particular reading communities.. . .this position--if rigorously and consistently articulated--is true neither to the actual function of Scripture in the theological discourse of classic Christianity nor to the general human conviction that texts have determinate ranges of meaning. It is, of course, true that all interpreters are embedded in cultural contexts and traditions, but to acknowledge that is very different from saying that there is no text or that the text itself has no power to generate or constrain interpretations. Historically the church has looked to Scripture as a word extra nos, a voice that can correct or even challenge tradition; such a view of Scripture was foundational to the Reformation. One may, of course, repudiate this construal of Scripture's role in the church, but not without far reaching theological consequences. At the same time, those who have immersed themselves deeply in Scripture repeatedly bear witness to the experience of hearing the text say things that they did not know or expect, things not borne to them in the ecclesiastical traditions in which they were raised, things that they perhaps did not want to hear. How are such experiences to be explained? Self-deception? The revelatory power of the Word of God? Or--more modestly--the commonsense acknowledgement that texts do have determinate ranges of semantic possibility and that a text's world of signification can be meaningfully distinguished from the tradition's construal of it?"

-----Richard B. Hays, "The Moral Vision of the New Testament"

"What should a Jewish Christian write on if not the Law? But notice that the choice of subject [the ten commandments] means no relapse into mere Judaism, not that need alarm the most Pauline of us. The author knows quite as well as any of us that Mr. Legality will never bring us to the Celestial City and had got over the fallacies of Moralism fairly early in life. She had good opportunities for studying it at close quarters. She knows that only love can fulfil the Law. That, I think, is the answer to a criticism which someone is sure to make of this book; that in most of its chapters we have much more about diagnosis than about cure. In reality , of course, a 'cure' in the sense of some recipe added at the end of each chapter--some 'law to be a fence about the Law' and inveitably breeding more Law--is not really being offered at all. The author is not a quack with a nostrum. She can only point, as in her concluding chapter she does point, to the true Cure; a person, not a set of instructions. Pending that, she is no more inhibited than her ancestors about diagnosis; one might frankly say, about denunciation. A Jeremiad? But should we never read Jeremiads? If it comes to that, should we never read Jeremiah himself? The Canon judges otherwise."

-----C.S. Lewis, from his introduction to "Smoke on the Mountain" by Joy Davidman, his then friend, and sometime later wife.

"The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can't know. He can't know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can't know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn't got and which if he had it, would save him. There's the cold in your stomach, but you open the envelope, you have to open the envelope, for the end of man is to know."

-----Robert Penn Warren, excerpt from "All The King's Men"