Grandfather and goose face-off

An entertaining classic

Jon Dykstra | Jul 18 2017 | comment

The Big Goose and the Little White Duckby Meindert DeJong
written for ages 7-10 | recommended
published in 1963 (1938) | Harper & Row Publishers | 169 pages

It begins with a big boy buying his mother a big goose for her birthday present - she's always wanted one for a pet. But there is just one problem: to buy the goose he has to borrow money from his gruff grandfather.

Now the grumpy old man was more than happy to loan the money, but only because he misunderstood what the big boy intended. He thought the boy was buying it for his birthday - for his eighty-eighth birthday just a few months away. He thought the boy was buying it so that Grandpa could, for the first time in his long life, have a taste of roast goose.

So the fun in the story is seeing how this can all conclude with a happy ending! It was a great read-aloud to share with my young daughters. The big goose is an excitable character, and the grandfather likes to bellow, which means that I got to get loud too.

DeJong won both the Hans Christian Anderson and Newbery awards for children's literature. If mom or dad is reading it, this is good for ages 4 and up.

Jon Dykstra and his siblings blog on books at ReallyGoodReads.com.

July 19, 2017

Most of us are pretty good at seeing what other people are getting wrong, but not very good at seeing what we ourselves are not getting right. Just keeping our principles intact is not really enough. Just correcting other people’s ideas is not enough either. If it were, Christians would not be losing the marriage debate because, goodness knows, we have said enough about this subject.

In an interview conducted by Peter Jon Mitchell for our friends at the Canadian think tank Cardus Family, British psychologist Glynn Harrison says Christians have to tell “a better story about God, sex and human flourishing” (the title of his new book). But having a better story to tell would not get us very far unless we were living it, he suggests.

Living the Christian story about marriage and family: there’s a challenge for all of us.

Moving from the sublime to the weird – the article below about zombie film-maker George A. Romero, who died this week, is by special request of Michael Cook, who is a fan of the genre. I am sure this is not for any trivial reason, but it is something he will have to explain himself sometime.