deaths

In some places the news is of the passing of this week D. James Kennedy, pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church and founder of Evangelism Explosion.

But a person who has had more of an impact on me is Madeleine L’Engle, who in writing more than 60 books, including childhood fables, religious meditations and science fiction, weaved emotional tapestries transcending genre and generation, died Thursday in Connecticut. She was 88. L’Engle (pronounced LENG-el) was best known for her children’s classic, “A Wrinkle in Time,” which won the John Newbery Award as the best children’s book of 1963. By 2004, it had sold more than 6 million copies, was in its 67th printing and was still selling 15,000 copies a year.

Books and Culture writes:

For L'Engle, the price of writing candidly as a Christian to such diverse audiences has been steep. She has been perceived as too worldly by some conservative Christian audiences and too dogmatically Christian by some secular audiences. But it is L'Engle's Christian critics who have been by far the most vocal.

Ministers preach sermons against her; books and articles denounce her and any Christians who evaluate her work favorably or even evenly; librarians in Christian schools and churches handle her books as though they carried dangerous heresies, sometimes relegating them to back shelves where patrons must ask specifically for them, and sometimes banning them altogether.

One source of the confusion lies in L'Engle's refusal to be pigeonholed, her resistance to using evangelically correct language. Then there is her frequent declaration that her religion is subject to change without notice. And the legalistic amid her audience are given pause by her assertion that she is not a Christian writer but rather "a writer who is struggling to be a Christian."

wikipedia has a good summary of her work.

update:
Christianity has an interview with Madeleine L'Engle from 1979 and an article from the same issue.

2nd update:
James Bow has a good reflection, as does Maggie Dawn