For your reading pleasure

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  • NY journalist sneeringly laments miniscule down-tick in Gotham promiscuity.
  • One for the wife: A Touchstone article from a while back about forming children. It's a decent article, but I'm mostly posting it because my wife will enjoy his (entirely negative) take on The Giving Tree.
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The article's take on The Giving Tree; but I had a different reading.

The author is right that if you read the relationship between the tree and the boy as a positive one, intended as a model of human relationships, it is seriously flawed.

However, I felt the book quite accurately portrayed the relationship many of us have with God. We ask and we ask and we ask, we take and we take and we don't offer thanks or true love. And yet God loves us anyway, despite our faults.

Just look at how in the Old Testament Israel is continually portrayed as the faithless wife while God is the faithful husband who never turns his back on his beloved, never gives up, never stops loving.

I guess it depends on how you discuss the book and read it with children. Do you explain why the boy's actions are selfish and how the tree's love is like God's love for us. How our selfishness wounds God, each selfish act becoming a disfiguring blow, a nail driven into Christ's hands or feet, a whip across Christ's back. And yet he loved us while we were yet sinners. I love the Giving Tree because my child's heart always understood in the story a parable of the Father's boundless love for his undeserving, Prodigal children.

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This page contains a single entry by Papa-Lu published on July 13, 2007 5:18 PM.

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