How very difficult it is to resist an entire culture, and especially for children to do so, because it is a right"and good thing for children to grow into awareness of being members of a broader community.
The new visual media is pleasurable, but it is a tyrant. While the reader's imagination can select what it wishes to focus on, in electronic visual media the mind is pummeled with powerful stimuli that bypass conscious and subconscious defenses.
For all those teachers and parents who feel uneasy -- without quite know why -- about the whole genre of modern children's fantasy, i.e. Goosebumps, Fear Street, and the Dune novels, here is Michael O'Brien's incisive analysis...
Michael O'Brien reviews all the major Disney films in terms of the moral lessons they teach our children. While some of the early films are quite good, more recent Disney remakes of the timeless classics tend to trivialize the characters and strip the tales of their original moral content.
About forty years ago there began a culture-shift that steadily gathered momentum, a massive influx of children's literature that appeared good on the surface but was fundamentally disordered became the new majority.
To those who think the first and last words in Catholic American literature are Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy,"comes a worthy successor in, contemporary novelist Ron Hansen.
The best Catholic novels seem to be written by those who know, no matter how far they've fallen in faith and morals, that the truth is there.
Why have there been so few really good holiday films? It seems there's this little catch: Christmas is about Christ, and Hollywood knows Him not.
With five million copies in hardcover and three million in paperback, the Harry Potter series is a dramatic success. But not everyone is wild about Harry.
With enjoyment as well as instruction in mind, Wyeth O. Burgess offers the following suggestions, for young readers from about age four to early teens.
