Madeline L'Engle

Author Madeline L'Engle died last week at the age of 88. For a lot of kids, her classic book A Wrinkle in Time was an introduction to huge ideas about the universe, as well as an example of impressive storytelling built around a Christian worldview.

Love this Q & A with her over at ChristianityToday.com, especially this quote about using analogy to help herself past an atheist boyfriend's limited view of life after death.

My father died when I was seventeen, my last year in high school. That Christmas I had a date with a sophisticated young man—or so I thought.

He said that death was death and that was that. That we are our cerebral cortex. We think through it. When it's gone, we're gone. My outrage brought me an analogy. I'm extremely myopic. If I take off my glasses, there are no stars in the sky at night and all faces become vague little pink blurs. I said to him, "I can't even see you without my glasses. Are they doing the seeing? No. I am. I'm seeing through them. My brain isn't doing the thinking, I am. I'm thinking through it." That's analogy. Now, an analogy is never a provable fact. An analogy is something that opens the door or the window and gives us a glimpse of the truth that gives meaning to lives.

If you're a fan of her work, the whole interview is worth checking out. And here's an NPR story with a video of a physicist explaining (along with computer animation) the concept of tesseracts and the 4th dimension, an idea L'Engle built on to allow her characters to travel the universe.