Just a note to let folks know that today will be lighter than usual on the blog.
I’m afraid that my neck was out last night. I’d went to my chiropractor after work, but my muscles had gotten too sore during the day and I had a really bad headache which interfered with blogging time.
I scheduled Michelle’s posts for the first ones in the day, but my own blogging will have to wait ’till tomorrow.
Sorry for the delay!
Professor and screenwriter Thom Parham has written a great analysis of why heathens make the best Christian films and why Christians themselves often fall down on that job.
"Secular filmmakers tend to observe life more objectively than Christians. They see the world the way it really is, warts and all. Christian filmmakers, on the other hand, tend to see the world the way they want it to be. Ignoring life’s complexities, they paint a simplistic, unrealistic portrait of the world."
I wouldn’t quite say that Christians do not see the warts or ignore the complexities. Many Christians are also quite objective in their analysis of the world. Rather, I’d say that many Christians in various artistic disciplines sometimes fear showing the warts or delving too deeply into the complexities, perhaps out of a misplaced scrupulosity that doing so is somehow "un-Christian."
"’If you want to send a message, try Western Union,’ said Frank Capra, a Christian who made hugely popular mainstream films."
This I do think is a huge problem for Christian artists. I can’t tell you how many defenses of The Message I’ve seen by Christian artists, whatever their medium. They tend to think of their art as a ministry and nurture romantic dreams of converting the world through a well-crafted apologetic. While I wouldn’t say that art and apologetics are mutually exclusive, I would say that the artist must be an artist first. The reason The Passion of the Christ worked so well as art and evangelization was because Mel Gibson is a Christian artist who has spent thirty years in the industry working as an artist on secular films. He knows how to make a great film and knows how to incorporate theme without sacrificing art. Until you’re as successful as an artist as is Mel Gibson, don’t try to do what he did.
"The idea that Christians will go see films targeted at them has not been borne out by the marketplace. Christians, it turns out, see the same films as everyone else."
And are as discerning about what constitutes a great movie as secular theater-goers. Christian artists must learn that they are not going to win a Christian audience by pandering to them. And Christian artists also are not going to win a secular audience by preaching to them.
(Nod to Relapsed Catholic for the link.)
BTW, the book from which this essay was taken, Behind the Screen: Hollywood Insiders on Faith, Film, And Culture, edited by Spencer Lewerenz and St. Blog parishioner Barbara Nicolosi, sounds great.
Over at her weblog, Open Book, Amy Welborn and her commenters are discussing an article written by a woman who chose to abort her child when prenatal tests indicated that the child had Downs Syndrome. The conversation there is well worth reading. But what struck me most forcefully about this article was how it opens.
"’So when do you go for the abortion?’ my friend asked, her voice sympathetic.
"’Wednesday,’ I replied, and then hurriedly got off the phone. I called Mike, my boyfriend, in tears, complaining about how inconsiderate people are, how no one thinks before they speak. The truth was, until I heard the word ‘abortion,’ it hadn’t occurred to me that I was actually having one.
"I was, of course. But we’d been using euphemisms for days, ever since my doctor called to say my amniocentesis results ‘weren’t good.’ We’d say ‘when we go to the hospital’ or ‘the appointment’ or ‘after the procedure, we can try again.’"
And this one of the ways in which abortion has gotten so embedded into our society. A woman doesn’t choose to kill her child, she simply "chooses," as if all choices were created equal and a choice for abortion were no more consequential than a choice to have her hair trimmed. An abortion isn’t an abortion, except to "inconsiderate" people who don’t think before speaking. No, an abortion is an "appointment" or a "procedure." Just get through this nasty little "procedure" and you’re free to "try again" for a "perfect" child.
The first step toward an abortion-free society may be educating people what an abortion is and stubbornly refusing to let it be redefined to mean anything that allows its practitioners to keep a clear conscience.
Last night I was e-mailed a press release from the family of Katelyn Sills, the plucky anti-murdrer student who was expelled from Loretto High School after her involvement in exposing a teacher who was assisting others in the act of committing murder. Here’s the text of the press release:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
November 15th, 2005
Submitted by Katelyn, Wynette, and Ed Sills
RE: Request for Public Retraction and Apology from Loretto Administration
for their defamatory statements about our family
Loretto High School is an outstanding college preparatory school for young women that we long desired our daughters to attend and from which our family has three alumnae. We have generously and loyally supported Loretto High School both financially and through dedicated volunteer efforts, since our daughter’s enrollment in 2004. We have also encouraged many other families to enroll. Katelyn has enthusiastically dedicated her time in numerous school activities, including Student Council, Choir, and most recently the Recruitment Team, which visits area 8th graders to invite them to join the LHS community. Sister Helen Timothy, President of LHS, is a very well respected administrator within whom we entrusted our daughter’s academic future.
However, with regards to this recent situation, Loretto High School administration has misrepresented the facts of this case, defaming our family’s reputation, culminating in punitively and vindictively expelling our daughter, with absolutely no prior warning. This has been a very sad and distressing experience for EVERY member of the Loretto community. We acknowledge the negative impact this situation has had, but we are not to blame. For over eight weeks, we have simply desired that an incompatible hiring be handled in a discreet, compassionate manner, so that the integrity and reputation of LHS would be unblemished. In contrast, LHS administration has provided false and defamatory information to staff, students, parents, and media, against our family. This in itself has brought unnecessary negative attention to the school.
On Friday, November 4th, our attorney, Eric Grant, represented us by respectfully asking the Loretto High School administration to publicly retract their statements and apologize for their vindictive actions. Unfortunately, Loretto administration refused to do so. It is now time to let the truth be known. We have disclosed all information so that everyone can see exactly what we did and why we did it, along with all correspondence from President Sr. Helen Timothy. The documents are available to the public via Katelyn’s blog www.standupandspeakout.blogspot.com so that each of you can read for yourself and decide whether we have acted with utmost discretion and integrity.
Despite our polite and respectful requests for a meeting, phone calls were not returned for the last eight weeks. Throughout our daughter’s enrollment at Loretto High School, our family has NEVER been able to meet with President Sister Helen Timothy, nor talk with her on the phone. Instead, our entire communication with Sister Helen was done via email, and is now available to the public. Other than one disappointing phone conversation with Principal Sister Barbara Nelson (contents of which will also be published), Mrs. Sills has not had any contact with any LHS staff member regarding this matter. Even on the blog, our family has expressed nothing derogatory towards the staff of LHS, but in contrast, you will see several hundred comments from Loretto students, parents, and alumnae towards us, which are unkind and undeserved.
We do not seek re-admission to LHS, for clearly it is an unsuitable environment for this Catholic family who practices our faith and values the sanctity of human life. Also, at this time we do not plan to sue for damages, though it would be appropriate to do so and highly likely to succeed due to the administration’s vindictive and untruthful statements. Instead, we simply desire for the truth to be told, for Loretto administration to retract their defamatory statements and for them to offer us a public apology. We have asked Loretto administration to join us in mediation and arbitration so that litigation can be avoided, but unfortunately, they have not agreed.
We continue to ask for prayers for the entire Loretto High School community and for our family during this difficult time. Once the truth is told, followed by a retraction and apology by the Loretto administration, reconciliation can then take place, healing occur, and both parties can then move on.
Note in case it moves: THE POST ON KATELYN’S BLOG DEALING WITH THESE MATTERS IS HERE.
You might think that a commitment to home and hearth and the comforts of spirituality might make the one-time Material Girl (aka Madonna, aka Esther) more retiring about her personal life. Au contraire, but now it seems that home, hearth, and spirituality are just part of the pop-idol schtick.
"’I’m a totally different person now,’ says Madonna. ‘It’s the natural progression — most people just grow up (after) having children, being in a grown-up relationship, having so many years of life in the spotlight … having fame and fortune (and) realizing it’s not what everyone thinks it is, and what it’s all cracked up to be.’"
Mind passing me some Kleenex so that I might finish the article with dry eyes? Thanks.
"She says her children get much of the credit for the kindler, gentler Madonna that’s emerged in recent years (the former Sex author has even penned children’s books).
"But her devotion to Kabbalah, the Jewish mysticism that has gained popularity in recent years, also has been a factor.
"Her ties to it have drawn skepticism, and some people have even labeled it a cult — which makes Madonna bristle.
"’I think that people are bothered by it because it’s unfamilar to them,’ she says. ‘If you’re someone that people look up to, and you’re doing something that doesn’t fit into the expected behavior of a pop star, some people are going to be suspicious about that. But, you know, it’s not like I’ve joined the Nazi party!’"
Such trivialization of one of the worst evils of the twentieth century is one reason why we don’t turn to Reformed, Really!-popstars for social analysis, much less for spiritual guidance.
(Nod to My Urban Kvetch for the link.)
I went to a dermatologist yesterday because I wanted to ask him about a strange itching that developed on my lower legs on a couple of occasions recently.
It first happened when I went on my roadtrip ot Arizona and New Mexico. After a few days, my ankles and calves started itching like fire, and when I scratched them it raised a red rash that drove me nuts. The problem went away entirely after a day or so back in San Diego.
Funny thing was, same exact thing happened when I went to Mexico last week, and I wanted to find out what the cause of the phenomena was and how to prevent it.
I hadn’t experienced this phenomena before, but it turns out, according to the dermatologist, that it’s a pretty normal thing.
According to him, men in particular often have problems with their lower legs itching when they are in very arid, low-humidity environments (like Arizona, New Mexico, and Mexico, f’rinstance).
The way to prevent it from happening, according to him, is simply to put lotion on your lower legs when in such areas so that the skin doesn’t dry out and start itching.
Being a guy, that’s something I’m not used to doing. Lotion and I aren’t really on speaking terms. (I wonder if that’s part of why this happens more to men than women?) But if it’ll avoid the horrible itching, I’ll give it a try.
So . . . tip to the men in the readership: Put lotion on your lower legs when going into climates more arid than you’re used to. It’s not an overly macho thing to do, but it beats acute low-humidity lower leg itching by a longshot!
This took care of the concern that brought me to his office, but since I don’t get a chance to talk to a dermatologist every day, I couldn’t resist asking him some additional skin-related questions out of curiosity.
F’rinstance: Sometimes you hear (e.g., in movies) that if you paint over your body completely and don’t leave any skin exposed that you’ll die. Is that true?
Yes!–according to my dermatologist. If you were to paint over all your skin then your body couldn’t dissipate core body temperature. You’d get a runaway fever and die.
My dermatologist mentioned something like this happening in the movie Goldfinger, though I haven’t seen that one. I have seen other movies where something like it happens (and with gold paint, too).
He also mentioned that there is a condition in which people are born with no pores or very few pores and can’t sweat. They can survive if they don’t get too hot, but if they exercise then they build up internal body heat that they can’t release and they die.
Ouch!
Unfortunately, this is a genetic condition and until we have a form of in-utero gene therapy that could detect and treat this, I don’t know if there’ll be much to do for it.
British journalist and author John Cornwell — whose book Hitler’s Pope could be said to be the felix culpa that launched such fine defenses of Pope Pius XII as Hitler, the War, and the Pope by Ronald J. Rychlak and The Myth of Hitler’s Pope by Rabbi David G. Dalin, and who blasted John Paul II in his last days with the book The Pontiff in Winter — has now turned his spotlights on Pope Benedict XVI.
Although he cannot resist a mean swipe by speculating unfairly on the possible hidden portents of a child frightened at the prospect of meeting the Holy Father, Cornwell seems astonished that Pope Benedict is not the metal-ball-rolling, hard-eyed Grim Rottweiler that Everyone Who Knew Anything about Pre-16 predicted him to be.
"First indications were ominous. Within a week of the papal election, Tom Reece [sic, Reese], editor of America, the leading US national Catholic journal, was sacked (for alleged unorthodoxy); Sister Lavinia Byrne, a former Catholic nun known for her espousal of women priests, was disinvited from a Catholic speaking engagement in Australia; and a senior Jesuit professor withdrew a theological work from his publisher fearing it was too critical for the new regime.
"As it happened, these were precipitate acts of self-policing rather than sweeps of a hard new papal broom. Seven months on there is still no sign of the purge. In the view of William Rees-Mogg, writing in The Times last week, Benedict is even happy to endorse the validity of Darwinian evolution (provided, of course, God is seen as its ultimate architect), thus distancing himself from the rabid creationist Christian right. As Pope, Benedict XVI is indeed looking complex if not exactly progressive."
A kindly reader e-mailed me a link to
THIS EXCELLENT ARTICLE IN CHRISTIANITY TODAY.
It’s an interview with Ben Witherington about a new book he has out critiquing various schools of Evangelical theology, such as Calvinism, Wesleyanism, Dispensationalism, and Pentecostalism.
The central point of the book is that these theological schools tend to go wrong exegetically when it comes to the things that are most distinctive of them. For example,
Ben is dealing with a phenomenon that struck me back when I was an Evangelical: The various Evangelical schools of thought are vulnerable exegetically because they attempt to over-systematize Scripture. They treat it as if statements in Scripture were axioms of systematic theology that just need to be strung together in the right order to produce an overall systematic theology.
But that’s not what Scripture is. Not remotely. And if you try to handle the text in that manner you will inevitably force your own system onto the text of Scripture instead of deriving your system from Scripture.
A fundamental problem I found toward the end of my time as an Evangelical was that the different Evangelical theologies just didn’t "stick close enough" to the text exegetically. They were always trying to systematize aspects of it that reflected a much messier reality.
Ben deserves a lot of credit for pointing this out. It’s a gutsy move. I love the part of the interview where this comes up:
[N]ow that you have gone public in this book
with a critique of the key teachings of Calvinist, dispensational,
Arminian, and Pentecostal theologies, do you plan to have any friends
left?I’m obviously a naive person. I’m going to give some lectures in
Abilene next week on "Dispensing with Dispensationalism." This is going
into dispensational territory, as you know. If you hear of my
martyrdom, write a nice obituary.
I’ve corresponded with Ben before (back during the St. James ossuary business), and he was a real nice guy. I may contact him and express my appreciation for the theme of his new book (which I plan on getting) and wish him luck.
I wouldn’t want such a contact to come across in a triumphalistic sense, though I can imagine the topic coming up of how well Catholicism squares with Scripture exegetically. One might ask: Doesn’t Catholicism have its own system that departs from Scripture in the same way that the different Evangelical theologies do?
It certainly has a system that goes beyond Scripture in that it also appeals to Tradition for the data with which it does theology. This is not a problem for Catholics in the way it is for Protestants, though. If you have the idea of sola scriptura as one of your founding theological principles and you don’t give Tradition a normative role then you’ve got to derive your system from Scripture alone.
That’s when you run into problems, because there are many questions that Christians need answers to (e.g., "Who is it okay to baptize and just how do you administer baptism?") that aren’t answered in Scripture. Scripture thus points beyond itself to Tradition for these answers. In fact, Scripture itself is simply the written component of Tradition.
Without the extra-scriptural complement of Tradition, Scripture does not contain enough data to provide confident answers to all the questions that need confident answering (such as the ones mentioned above), and so one attempting to operate from the perspective of sola scriptura will inevitably have to propose some kind of system that can’t be fully grounded in Scripture in order to answer those questions.
But if you reject the premise of sola scriptura and allow Tradition to fill in the missing pieces, you end up with enough data to build systematic theology–even if the result is a system that must, by definition, go beyond Scripture in the data it treats as normative.
There also are places where elements from Tradition exist in exegetical tension with elements in Scripture (i.e., where the two don’t at first blush seem to square), but then this phenomenon exists within Scripture itself, as witnessed by the numerous passages that are proposed as "biblical contraditions" and such. Just as it is the job of the exegete to show possible harmonizations of these alleged discrepancies between different passages of Scripture, it is the job of theologians and exegetes to show possible harmonizations of alleged discrepancies between Scripture and Tradition.
Tradition (including Scripture as its written component) is just a bigger dataset, but the same kinds of issues arise. The difference is that Tradition is a large enough dataset to provide for the needs of systematic theology whereas Scripture apart from Tradition is not.
As an Evangelical, Ben might not agree to all that, but his new book suggests that he’s thinking along the right lines, and the interview itself shows that he’s got significant insight into the nature of the problem.
One night on the cruise this year I came back from dinner and found this little creature sitting on my nightstand.
At first I was charmed (at the obvious cuteness of the object).
Then I was impressed (at my cabin attendant’s obvious skill in fashioning an elephant out of towels).
Then I was confused (at why he’d take the time to do this).
Then I was mildly disturbed (at the fact that those are MY sunglasses and to retrieve them my cabin attendant had to venture a little farther into one of my unzipped tote bags than I was comfortable with).
Then I realized the potential for a blog post and whipped out my camera.
Little did I know that this was only the first whimsical towel creature that would visit my cabin over succeeding nights.
Given the reproductive preferences of many atheists, the atheist dating service I linked earlier is not likely to be a major threat to civilization.
I mean, it’s not like it’s going to produce a world awash in atheists or anything.
Mankind always has been and will remain a religious species.
Some atheists, though, have come to recognize at least part of the truth of the pro-child mentality that is more common in religious circles.
Some are even pro-life.
A reader writes:
I found an interesting site devoted to the furtherance of the Pro-Life
movement. It’s run by Matthew Wallace, aka the Compleat Heretic. It’s the
official site for the Atheist and Agnostic Pro-Life League, or AAPL.
http://www.godlessprolifers.org/home.htmlHere’s the list of members: http://www.godlessprolifers.org/members.html
It’s really interesting to read the "Nontheist postion" and then the
"Pro-Life position" of each member.
Indeed!