
The Dunes by A.R.K. Watson
“The Dunes” raises questions that are relevant in any marriage: not just for the creepy, otherworldly couple who venture onto a lonely island to set up camp near prehistoric sand dunes for the last time.
Courtney has a few unpublished masterpieces in various stages of completion waiting for her four children to grow up so she can do something respectable, like getting paid for her work. At age five after watching a Billy Graham crusade on TV, she dialed the number on the screen and has been a Christian ever since. She was baptized into the Church of Scotland when growing up in Paris, France. Then after lots of adventures, she moved back to Houston, Texas and joined the Catholic Church.
She graduated with honors in the humanities from Stanford University (Class of ’92). Then, after four dark years in a Ph.D. program in comparative literature at Rutgers, she faced a choice between her faith and an academic career. The sort of people who are now throwing families with five children onto the street for declining to bake a cake were already ensconced in the Academy. She chose exile, motherhood, a job in New York and twenty years of comparing literature on her own.
On July 11, 2017, Feast of St. Benedict, she launched a blog called The Domestic Hermit. It offers a series of reflections on The Rule of St. Benedict, with a personal focus on character formation in the home. She connected with Catholic Reads after a friend told her about hearing A.R.K. Watson interviewed in a podcast. Now she’s taking on the Christian Classics challenge and hopes to share all the best of literature in English with anyone who loves truth, eloquence, wit and good sense.
“The Dunes” raises questions that are relevant in any marriage: not just for the creepy, otherworldly couple who venture onto a lonely island to set up camp near prehistoric sand dunes for the last time.
Beyond the adventure, the way to read The Lord of the Rings is not as an allegory but as a meditation on the human Story we are each caught up in, and in which we each have our part to play, our temptations to resist, and our task to accomplish.
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A Detective novelist who believes in conscience, and in the reality of redemption.
Flannery O’Connor dissected the Devil for a generation that was busy explaining evil away. She perceived God at work in grotesque places. Was she right?