ZEDS Blog


I enjoy the essays of Dafoe, Addison, and Samuel
Johnson, all of which were published in pamphlets. Pamphlets were in vogue from 1650-1800, providing writers a forum to express views on politics, society, religion, and art. This has been revived in modern times in the form of blogs.

This is now a slight revamp of my blog that started in 2008.
My reading has become a little more specialized, although previous books commented on show I was heading this direction. At this point I will review mainly Christian texts or other texts from a Christian perspective. I intend to post more regularly with book reviews.

I consider reading and writing as part of the spiritual
journey toward maturity and, I hope, wisdom. These are postings of what I’m learning along the way.

Rod Zinkel, August 19, 2015


Sunday, January 24, 2010

Lewis's The Great Divorce

In The Great Divorce the narrator takes a bus trip to Heaven. He travels with people with a variety of beliefs. When he arrives he realizes he is insubstantial; he, like the other passengers, is a Ghost. They are met by inhabitants of Heaven – Spirits, or Solids – who come to this pickup point to guide them in the new land. The passengers have the opportunity to go back, or to become more substantial here, if they make the rest of the difficult journey. The passengers confront those matters that have gotten in their way to God. This may be refusing to forgive someone, loving someone more than God, or self-pity to the point of denial that the joy of Heaven could exist, or a refusal to take part in it. In every situation, it is the person’s choice.

The story is another spiritual journey, a common subject to Lewis, as is shown in Pilgrim’s Regress and The Chronicles of Narnia. Like Pilgrim’s Regress, this story takes after Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. For example, the journey, once arrived in Heaven, is to a mountain. The Great Divorce differs from Regress in its conversational tone and address of everyday living. Regress addresses philosophies; Divorce addresses common beliefs and behaviors, in a way that Screwtape Letters does. The former work is more academic than the latter.

The narrator does not make the journey, but is told by his teacher this is a dream. He wakes with dawn. Odd that he hears the sound of the hunt just before waking. It could just mean it is early morning, or perhaps it reflects Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, another dream.

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See the latest on Sheepshead Review, UWGB's Journal of the Arts:

www.uwgb.edu/sheepshead


Chapbook: Two Natures

The Neville Museum series has published a chapbook of 15 of my poems. They are of human and spiritual natures. Here are two poems from the book:

Two Natures

On still water of the pond
two natures you may notice--
where scum has been gathering,
there also grows the lotus.

One Way

There's a boy
who stands knee-high
to a July cornstalk.
He stares one way
down the dirt road
his mother has gone.
He find Fortune
has desrted him,
like the poverty-stricken,
society-forbidden parent.
"I can't take care of you," she said.
I am the child who mirrors
his mother's tears without knowing why?