Goodbye Christopher Robin on DVD. Complete with, shall we say, problematic English parents, it rings more or less true. Although I understand considerable liberties were taken with the facts of C.R. Milne's life. There's a bit of a sentimentalized and fictionalized ending. Kelly Macdonald's Olive, AKA Nou, with a sensible nannyish hairstyle, looks so much like a former professor of mine it's uncanny. I never read the CR/Winnie the Pooh books, nor, uniquely among Americans, that one by Harper Lee. I do remember the “Christopher Robin is Saying His Prayers” song from fourth grade, taught to us, ironically I suppose, by a non-Christian teacher. In my family one didn't kneel by one's bed before retiring to say prayers, with or without Kelly Macdonald presiding, but the parental attitude toward religion strikes me as similar. No fervor; one ought not to be an enthusiast in the old religious sense of the word. But it's just assumed that children should be taught the basics of Anglican Christianity. It's proper. That sort of dull, English propriety—it doesn't surprise me that occasionally someone pushes back. Maybe that's how England can give rise to a D.H. Lawrence or a Christopher Hitchens. The religious propriety, or proper religiosity, may be dull, but, to be fair, maybe it also carries the seeds of its own transcendence: if religion is presented more or less as stories for children, the children who hear them may tend to leave religion behind when they stop being children.