Thinking a little more about my kids recently being scared to death by some slack jawed inbred yokel (term borrowed from writer I'm about to cite below) at their catechism class, I've got a response, which I'll settle for writing here, instead of saying directly to the slack jawed inbred yokel, who I don't know because they go to catechism class when they are at their dad's house, not mine:

Dust good.

No, not the stuff on my furniture that I'll swish away before my mother arrives for the holidays--the dust in Phillip Pullman's Golden Compass.

Father Jordan Stratford at Ecclesia Gnostica in Nova Albion on Authority and Dust. When Pullman kills off the Authority in his books, he's doing us all a favour. Rather than the mad Archon against whom the characters rebel, Pullman sides with the Dust, a barely detectable essence of permeating Divinity; a concept of God far more subtle, demanding more reflection, than pray-n-obey.

Well, he certainly said it a lot better than I can. But after contemplating the books for some time, this is pretty much how I see it too.

Ever since reading the Narnia series years ago for the first time, which I do love, by the way, I've been troubled by that train wreck C.S. Lewis gives us at the end.

Read it all.

(What's that little horse on the compass stand for, I wonder?)