Good morning on this the fifth day of December in the year of our Lord 2016.

Yesterday my oldest son, who is seven years old, was asking me about the Hobbit, and whether we could go to the library and get it. I said that wouldn’t be necessary, since I have a copy of it, but last night when he asked me to get it, I couldn’t find it. My wife, who was helping me to look, did notice that I had a copy of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, and suggested that my son might enjoy that too. Whereupon I launched into an enthusiastic sales pitch because I really love the Chronicles of Narnia. (If I recall correctly, I own about 2 shelf-feet of books by C.S. Lewis.) At some point during my sales pitch my son politely interrupted me and said he was interested and could we start reading it tonight? If there’s one thing I’ve learned about sales (and there may in fact be only one thing I’ve learned about sales), it’s that you should never sell past the close, so I said yes.

He got to sleep a bit late, unfortunately, but we ended up reading the first three chapters, and it’s as good as I remember it. It’s also, aside from the occasional british-ism, very accessible to young children. I myself read it when I was a teenager, but it works at an age where children can read but still like to have things read to them.

In other news, I finished the first draft of my response to my friend’s nephew, so I should be editing the script today and if I’m lucky recording tomorrow. Overall I think it came out decently, though it is a bit scattershot. That’s part of the problem  with a question whose problem is a collection of errors embedded into the ground presuppositions of modernity. Like fabric, the errors that people make tend to be woven out of several threads spun by people who came before them. Ideally, I suppose, I’d address each point in its own video, but it can be very valuable to actually show in a practical way where such errors lead one wrong, and in any event the task at hand is answering this question, so it will probably do more good to do the task I’ve been given than to try to invent a different one for myself and ignore this one while I work on it. That’s not always true, of course; sometimes it’s better to start laying a foundation for what you’re going to do before you do it even if you’re under time pressure. But as I was recently reminded, that doesn’t really apply to videos, because you can’t assume people will have watched your other videos anyway.

God bless you.