In Case You Missed It
After returning home a few days from Denver, I’m starting to dig out from attending the International Christian Retail Show. One great (and new) event for me was the Christy Awards. Because the Denver airport was closed for several hours (weather related), I arrived late to the awards but managed to catch most of the program. I arrived during dinner and missed the opening prayer from Mark Kuyper, who is president and CEO of the Evangelical Christian Publisher Association. I listed the award winners while traveling (see this link if you missed it).
For the keynote message at the Christy Awards, Jana Reiss, Religion Book Editor at Publisher’s Weekly, introduced Andy Crouch, a columnist for Christianity Today and on the Editorial Board of Books & Culture. In a fascinating message, Andy spoke about fiction in a virtual world (follow this link for the entire talk). One of the great places to read is in an airplane—and many people in the past have been reading novels. Andy has been taking an informal survey about what people are doing on their laptops and finds they are playing solitaire. He says, “So this is what a surprising number of your fellow citizens are doing in that blessed quiet at 35,000 feet—in these waning days before cell phone conversations are allowed on airplanes and it is never quiet again—they are not reading a novel, they are not writing a letter, they are not even watching a movie. They are playing solitaire. Now I’m in a group of writers, and you all understand symbolism and metaphor, and frankly if you can’t see the metaphorical potential in a plane full of weary travelers using their laptops to play solitaire, you should be in a different line of work. So I won’t belabor the point, but the proliferation of airplane solitaire confirms to me that we are in the virtual reality generation.”
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