I’ve been a fan of C.S. Lewis for quite a long time, and have read a good many of his books. But somehow I never gotten around to reading Till We Have Faces, which many consider to be his crowning achievement and which he himself believed to be his best fiction work. I read it last weekend and was floored by its beauty. It seemed to be a culmination of so many of the ideas, images and themes Lewis had developed in other books I’d read—like The Great Divorce, The Weight of Glory, Narnia, Out of the Silent Planet—and yet it was perhaps the most literary, original and elegant of anything I’ve read of his.

This past week, Facebook users had another one of their patented uprisings, this time crying foul over the purportedly confounding privacy settings that make it hard for people to switch away from the “everyone sees everything” default settings. Out of anger about the great “invasion of privacy” phantom, thousands of users have vowed to delete their Facebook accounts in protest.

It was enough to force Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to call a press conference, apologize, and institute changes such as requiring only minimal information to be visible when people search for others (name, profile picture, and gender). Facebook had earlier required users to make more of their information public.

A lot of Christian hipsters today were raised in the evangelical Christian subculture in the 90s. Thus, while most of them have completely abandoned CCM by now, they still look fondly and nostalgically (with a smidge of irony) upon the Christian music they were reared on. Here are 20 albums that Christian hipsters today love to listen to for a trip down memory lane. What would you add to this list?

Amy Grant, Heart in Motion (1991)
Michael W. Smith, Change Your World (1993)

Television critics/theorists have had a tendency to talk a lot about the explosion of reality TV as being the quintessential post-9/11, decade-defining phenomenon on television. And certainly there is a lot to be sad about that. But we should recall that Survivor, the survival-on-an-island reality show that kicked off the whole “unscripted” boom, began in May of 2000, 15 months before 9/11. “Reality” may have been a sort of comfort food TV that carried us through the trauma of post-9/11 culture, but it wasn’t necessarily the ontological offspring of that fateful day.

A lot of exciting stuff has been happening on the book front this week, so I thought I’d note it all in one place, for those of you who may not have known about these things yet.

1) WEBSITE: It went live on Sunday, and has been a big success so far. If you haven’t explored it yet (particularly the quiz, and the “Anatomy of a Christian Hipster” section, which I toiled MANY hours to create), you should take a few minutes to do so now. Launching the website is a huge relief and I’m very proud of it. I’ve been working on it, with designer Tim Dikun and photographer Laurel Dailey, for about three months. So please enjoy it! And pass it on to any and all others who might be amused/provoked by it.

In recent weeks, a spate of prominent pastors have announced that they are either temporarily or permanently stepping down from the role of pastor. Here is a list of some of the big ones, followed by the reasons they’ve given as to their change:

John Piper: Taking a leave of absence until Dec 31, 2010 “because of a growing sense that my soul, my marriage, my family, and my ministry-pattern need a reality check from the Holy Spirit.”

A Prophet, directed by Jaques Audiard (The Beat That My Heart Skipped), is the French Godfather. It’s a criminal saga of the scope, dark elegance, and timeless gravitas of Coppola’s masterpieces, with a keen awareness of contemporary European socio-cultural tensions that makes it particularly timely and, perhaps, prophetic.

One of this year’s Academy Award nominees for best foreign film, A Prophet also won the 2009 Grand Jury Prize at Cannes and swept the Cesar Awards (the French Oscars). Set mostly in a prison, the film follows the gradual corruption of Malik (Tahar Rahim), a young Frenchman of Arab descent who during a 6 year prison stay transforms from a relatively good-natured kid to a hardened criminal kingpen. During his time in prison, Malik comes under the tutelage/rule of Cesar (Niels Arestrup), the Don Corleone boss of a Corsican gang who runs the prison from the inside out and all but forces young Malik to join his gang to “be protected.”