From the Editor...

Welcome to the seventh issue of The Inklings Review which is now located at its permanent website: www.inklings.review.com. This issues starts with book reviews from three new contributors.

Gail Mitchell reviews Searching for Home: Sprirituality for Restless Souls by M. Craig Barnes, former pastor of the National Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C. In Searching for Home he blends personal stories, biblical teaching, and insights from Dante's Divine Comedy to argue that Heaven is our true home, the church is its threshold, and Christ's sacrifice is the path our contemporary nomadic souls must follow to find rest.

Lon Atkins reviews D.G. Hart's Defending the Faith, a thorough and balanced biography of J. Gresham Machen that Lon says "reads almost like a novel." Lon also reviews Machen's classic Christianity and Liberalism.

Rebecca Hurt opens the main theme of this issue, Fantasy, Faith, and Philosophy, with a review of Harry Potter and Philosophy: If Aristotle Ran Hogwarts, a collection of essays by 17 experts in philosophy who investigate the ethical and philosophical aspects of J.K. Rowling's immensely popular fantasies. The contributors include at least two Christian philosophers well-known to evangelicals: Tom Morris and Jerry Walls.

S.N.D., our sometimes diligent scribe, continues the main theme. He first reviews Tree of Tales: Tolkien, Literature, and Theology, a collection of papers presented in a 2004 symposium hosted by the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts in the University of St. Andrews. This symposium marked the 65th anniversary of J.R.R. Tolkien's famous Andrew Lang lecture on fairy stories.

S.N.D. finally reviews Lord Dunsany's serenely beautiful fairy tale The King of Elfland's Daughter and considers how it realizes the four literary values that, as Tolkien argued in his lecture, fairy stories offer "in a peculiar degree or mode." These are Fantasy, Recovery, Escape, and Consolation.

We hope you find these reviews helpful and the books reviewed enlightening and edifying.

Blessings to all.

Under the mercy,
Ed Hopkins