Just noticed the Broadsheet section while surfing Salon.com. I am VERY pleased. The new blog/news section gave me a whole new area to explore (with links!!) and I like what I see so far. I have been a feminist all my life, but dislike some of the too PC slant in many of the traditional womens organizations publications. Its nice to see a womens section in a major publication that doesn't have the persistant moralizing and preachiness that so many feminist sites indulge in. I am so ready to see a practical take on womens issues that merely presents the information we need rather than sermonizing on what we as feminists should fight against or believe. Let me choose the issues that matter to me. Good Job Salon! Keep it up. -B

I find this whole question of how "Christian" C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien are or aren't to be completely silly. Does it matter? I don't remember how old I was when I first read the Chronicles of Narnia, but I can tell you that I had no idea at the time what a "christian apologist" was, and did not for one moment suspect that they were thinly veiled New Testament stories/parables.(what have you) Even if I had, I wouldn't have cared. There were talking animals, and fauns, and centaurs!! There were kids like me, fighting for right, and trying to save each other and their friends. There was a magic LION for chrissake!! When I was 7-10 I wouldn't have recognized a "Jesus Symbol" in a fantasy story if you had smacked me with it. And I like to think I was a pretty smart kid. I loved the Chronicles because they were neat, beautiful, cool.... Because they had magic and were well written and exciting. I still love them. I am no type of Christian, and don't really trust or like any sort of established religion. However, that doesn't mean that I can't and don't appreciate the Bible. I think its great as a story and as a semi-historical/mythological chronicle of a people. I even think it has some good ideas on morality and ethics. (note the SOME... some of its ideas are just straight crazy) The point, though, is that when I was just a little kid, the STORY was what was important. NOT the ideas or morality behind it. It just wouldn't have signified. I did, however, look up fauns and dryads, I looked up witches and warlocks.... I went from there to Greek gods and other mythologies. Eventually I had a pretty good education in history, theology, and anthropology. Oh, and along the way an I picked up an extreme wariness of fundamentalism and religiosity. I grew up in Texas, and there were ALWAYS yahoo's trying to ban Lewis and Tolkien from our public libraries. But it never mattered to me. It was always the story that I cared about, and I would have found a way to read them. Lewis and Tolkien opened my world, and just because they were both "christian men" doesn't make my world any less open. I would also like to mention that they were both Church of England theological scholars, and NOTHING like American Fundamentalist Christians or even just Christians of today.