"The riddles of God are more satisfying than
the solutions of man."
G. K. Chesterton, Introduction to
the Book of Job
___
If a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing at the last minute.
___
O how I hate the sinful ways I love!
___
Things to do today:
* repent of my sins
*
believe the gospel
___
"I always think I'm right, but I don't think I'm always right."
___
"You have been chosen, and you must therefore use such strength and
heart and wits as you have."
Gandalf to Frodo,
LOTR i.2
___
"Oh, miracle -- thus to be able to give what we ourselves do not
possess, sweet miracle of our empty hands!"
Diary of a Country
Priest
___
"This is not pleasant to you, Emma--and it is very far from pleasant to
me; but I must, I will,--I will tell you truths while I can; satisfied
with proving myself your friend by very faithful counsel, and trusting
that you will some time or other do me greater justice than you can do
now."
Knightly to Emma
___
My writing is like Shakespeare's. At lease in the sense that I use many of the same words.
___
Tennis: what I lack in control, I make up for by over-hitting.
___
Catholic
righteousness by good works is vastly preferable to a Protestant
righteousness by good doctrine
-Herman Bavinck
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Nine-minute
Narnia trailer:
The commentary tracks on the Firefly DVD's are pretty uneven. As expected, you do get some of the back story (and backstage story) that adds to your enjoyment and appreciation of the work they did.
But the oddest commentary by far was for the episode Objects in Space. We get the show's creator and writer Joss Whedon telling us about a quasi-religious epiphany he had as a young man concerning the nature of object and its relationship to function. Or something. It was the vaguest and oddest philosophy of being I've ever heard from someone's mouth. And he explained how some of those concepts were what he was trying to get at in this episode. The room without River in it: is it still the same thing? The gun is for killing people; if it doesn't kill people, is it a gun?
All of which failed to spoil the episode for me, since none of it came across except as the delightful oddness of Early, the bounty hunter.
But what a confusing way to live your life.
The modern enlightened man characteristically scoffs at the idea of infant faith. Even in churches that teach and practice infant baptism, you rarely find anyone teaching that infants are capable of anything we could ever properly call "faith."
Thank God for Rich Lusk, pastor of Trinity Presbyterian Church in Birmingham Alabama. His recent book Paedofaith sits all alone on the shelf reserved for books written to address this topic Biblically. He asks us to consider the Biblical evidence, starting with Psalm 22, the nature of God's covenant promises, and along the way he gently rubs our unbelieving noses in the implications of the incarnation itself for infant faith.
Of course the whole question of infant "faith" depends on how you define "faith." If you have your mind made up that faith can only be something that requires an intellectual assent to nice theological propositions, then, fine, you've just defined infants out. But Lusk is asking us to define faith in a way that is more in line with what the Bible actually says.
Storyteller uber Story. Orson Welles adapted Shakespeare's Othello for the screen in a four-year stop-and-go European on-location shooting schedule that stopped when he didn't have money, and got going again when he did. If you are a film student, watch this movie. If you love Shakespeare, well, maybe. Everyone else can pretty much skip it. The visuals are overpowering, bizarre, stark, striking, and undisciplined. We are relentlessly presented with scene after scene shot at odd angles and funhouse perspectives. These are the kind of shots that you might enjoy in a gallery of black and white photography if you had the leisure to consider the composition, lighting, shadow, line and subject. But Othello backs up the truck and dumps the whole load on you. Many wonderful images, if only you can catch them before you are buried.
There are also some famous problems with the sync on the sound track. They eventually did some careful work to restore and repair, and I think the copy I saw was the repaired version, but the audio was still difficult. Welles reportedly knew he had sound problems, so he looped much of the dialog back in the studio, and I'm not sure he didn't finally settle for a ragged result, probably being out of money again.
If we ever get invited to the Great Black Tie Banquet of Evangelicalism, we want everyone there to be braced for the moment when we, on a pre-arranged signal, throw our dinner rolls at Pat Robertson.
Douglas Wilson, A Serrated Edge
But seriously folks, Wilson makes a point that can't be dismissed as neatly as some would wish. The Bible comes to us from prophets and apostles who were not squeamish about smearing a thick layer of satire on the stubborn enemies of God. If we believe that the church is supposed to think, speak, and preach Biblically, then why are so many modern disciples so ready to pull the pastor aside and say, "do you not know that the Pharisees were offended by this saying?"
Absolute Power. Clint Eastwood plays an expert thief who has an unusual mix of patience and intelligence that allows him to steal from some very wealthy people. But in the midst of one heist at a mansion where nobody is supposed to be home, he sees the U.S. President involved in an affair that gets out of hand, and a young woman lies dead on the floor.
In the best movies of this type, the main character is smart, and all those who are after him make similarly clever choices. The D.C. police, the Secret Service, and the President's staff all have their reasons for wanting to catch the thief/witness. But the Eastwood character keeps a step ahead of them all, as he should.
The problem with every movie of this type, is how do you resolve it? The best example has the President face to face with Harrison Ford demanding, "How dare you... " and Harrison Ford throwing it right back "How dare you, sir!" (Clear and Present Danger)
So are we going to preserve the cover up and let the President off? Or are we going to blow open a big national scandal? It's somehow up to the man on the run to find a way both to save his own skin and to figure out how to direct things towards the kind of just solution that makes the story satisfying. Absolute Power doesn't quite find the solution it needs. The writers came up with a great premise and setup; they followed the logic of the story pretty well, (except for the awful scene where the President dances with his chief of staff -- that was absurd), but I think they found themselves painted into a plot corner at the end, and couldn't see how to bring it all to a conclusion worthy of the rest of the movie. That third act is the death of many a screenplay. Absolute Power doesn't exactly die in the third act, but it staggers to the end in something less than perfect health.
Laura. I picked this 1944 movie because it's supposed to be one of the best in the Noir Detective category, which I think is great fun. But Laura disappoints. For one thing, in a noir, I hope for lots of atmospheric shadows, rainy trench coats, and back alley stakeouts. Like an episode of The X Files. But Laura generally has nice, clean studio lighting. The detective does have a suitable seen-it-all hardness, but he comes across as bored rather than tough. The plot had enough mystery to keep us guessing till the end. Vincent Price in a pre-horror genre role, plays a tall, goofy, southern suitor. Clifton Webb plays a great Clifton Webb.
A League of Their Own. "There's no crying in baseball!" is one of the great movie lines, and that scene with Tom Hanks trying to deal with a weepy fielder on his professional girls baseball team is the strongest in the movie. But the rest of the movie is very uneven and does not lay enough of a foundation for the excessively drawn out ending, which is supposed to swell to bursting with all kinds of warm emotional payoffs. I mean, they used every heartwarming device they had in the bag, but none of them work because the first part of the movie didn't earn it.
The Prisoner of Zenda. This we saw from a TCM tape; it was simply delightful. It treats themes of love and honor with an unapologetically straightforward heroism that would be impossible in a movie today. Exhibit A in the case of why I love old movies.
I also had enough time to get most of the way through Douglas Wilson's short book on the use of satire in preaching and discourse, A Serrated Edge. Nobody writes with more wit and color. I don't see everything the way Wilson does, but he is just too much fun to read.
"I can kill you with my brain"
Take my love.
Take my land.
Take me where I cannot stand.
I don’t care, I’m still free.
You can’t take the sky from me.
Take me out
to the black.
Tell ‘em I ain’t comin’ back.
Burn the land and boil the sea.
You can’t take the sky from me.
Have no place
I can be
Since I found Serenity.
But you can’t take the sky from me.!"
That's the theme from Firefly, which ran for sixteen episodes on Fox and was dropped. Now the four-DVD series set is a bestseller, and I finished my first run-through last night. So I guess I'm ready to go see the follow-up movie Serenity.
The series assembles a nice crew/ensemble and establishes a workable premise: kind of a Han Solo meets the Old West. Given the constraints of a one-hour adventure episode (setup, crisis, heroic solution, resolution), the writers do pretty well with the characters and let us enjoy the stories with them by not taking things too seriously. When the crew is talking about the character River, who has unusual abilities, we get this sequence:
Wash: She can read minds? You mean like Sci-Fi?
Zoe: Hey. You're on a space ship.
Wash: (doesn't get it) What?
The River character is the most interesting. As a brilliant young teen she was taken to a special "school" where, before her escape, she was tortured and treated and developed by evil government scientists and thus she ends up both with special intuitive abilities (indeed, abilities of many surprising kinds -- in a sustained series there would be a writer's temptation of a weekly "River ex machina" plot solution), but also a very troubled and damaged psyche that makes her a danger to herself and others. The viewers are less suspicious of River than the crew is, so when in a lucid moment, she tells Jayne simply "I can kill you with my brain", Jayne is afraid, while we are amused.
By the way, I finally placed the actor who plays Mal, the captain. He is the first (weepy) Private Ryan that Tom Hanks and his squad find in Saving Private Ryan.
"Free Movies!"
Here is an aspect of the Netflix experience that surprised me. See, you've already paid your monthly fee, so now you can order *as many movies as you want* and there is a real "without cost" feel to it. That is very unlike standing in the aisle at Blockbuster thinking, "yeah, I'd like to see this movie sometime, but do I want to blow five bucks on it, there being a good chance that I will not like it?" When I have to part with my cash directly, I am much less likely to take a chance. But when I get as many movies as I want at no extra fee, I feel free to risk it.
So I've got stuff in my queue like Raging Bull, and A League of Their Own, and GoodFellas, and The Right Stuff. At some point I'm sure I'll add My Dinner with Andre. And of course I'm also looking forward to old movies that I would not hope to find at Blockbuster, like Laura, Thief of Bagdad, My Little Chickadee, Foreign Correspondent, and Strangers on a Train.
Well, we'll see how it all works out. Netflix makes it easy to cancel without obligation. So after my free two-week trial and one paid month, when I've seen 25 movies and want my life back, enough may be enough.
In the mean time, Daughter Bess brought over the DVD's of the short-lived TV series Firefly, on which the recent movie Serenity is based. It's a fun mix of Cowboy and Outer Space that is well-made and enjoyable.
Millions is a British film about Damian, a young boy who loves the saints of the church, and who actually sees them sometimes. (How does he recognize them?) He sees one and cries happily "Francis of Assisi, 1182 to 1226!" He longs to be good himself, and he also longs to see his mother among the saints, for she has recently died. On the eve of the U.K.'s switch from Pounds to Euros, clever thieves steal a large shipment of old cash on its way from the banks to the incinerators. As it happens, one bagful of this money, soon to be worthless, lands in Damian's cardboard fort beside the train tracks. He considers it a gift from heaven and is determined to give it to the poor, if only he could determine who they are and how to give it to them.
That is one great setup for a movie, and I dearly wish the production team had come up with some better ideas on how to develop it. They come close at times, such as when Damian and his brother have parts in the Christmas play at their school and Saint Joseph shows up to guard Damian from one of the original thieves who has tracked down the money. Damian, disappears from the stage, and Saint Joseph ends up covering for him by supplying his lines, and by that I do mean *his* lines. There were many possibilities here.
But the opportunities are largely squandered. The thing that made up my mind against it was having Saint Peter soberly telling Damian the tired old liberal dodge that at at the feeding of the 5,000, Jesus didn't *really* miraculously multiply the loaves, he merely shamed everyone into sharing the food they were all hiding in their pockets. Oh, puh-leese.
Well, in the end, the storytelling in this movie suffers from the same failure to believe while still trying very hard to be heartwarming. If the filmmakers think they can have it both ways, then I guess they really do believe in miracles.
Goodbye Blockbuster. "No more late fees" -- so what? The selection is limited, and the cost of rental is too much. Hello Netflix. I like old movies. I went to the TCM site (we have neither cable nor satellite), and I took the names of several movies on the TCM schedule that I would watch. From a list of seven, Netflix had six. So with Netflix I can basically get the TCM effect without the $50 / month subscription, plus whatever recent movies we want to see.
I already have 20 movies in my queue.
Goodbye Sprint PCS. We use very few cell phone minutes. The monthly Sprint bill for our two cell phones is over $70. So I'm switching to a single cell phone with a pre-paid plan. It looks like I can by a $20 card every 90 days and keep the line open. So instead of $70 a month, it'll be $80 a year. I'm not quite sanguine about the switch because I had a horrible experience with AT&T prepaid wireless a few years ago. This time I'll use a different service, and hope that the industry has a better system in place now.
On the Sign Gifts
There is a deep human desire for an experience of the immediate, personal presence of God. Who wants to settle for an impersonal, inactive, religious non-experience? "We would see Jesus!"
In many cases, Christians who have been disappointed by the lack of anything very real and powerful in their church experience, will respond to some very nice, charismatic teacher who tells them that God has an immediate and personal experience just for them. "These signs prove his ongoing personal work among us." Isn't that what everybody wants?
And sure enough, they see stuff that looks like miraculous sign gifts being manifested in such churches: tongues prophecies, and healings seem to answer that deep need to be assured of God's immediate, personal presence. The charismatic Christian has this strong sense: "I know it's real because I've seen the signs and experienced them personally. No merely nominal religion for me!"
Okay, this is a large and difficult topic, full of juicy opportunities to give offense to many whom I love, and I hereby give most of it a miss. But I will risk making just two smallish points that have helped me think through these things:
(1) If manifestations of supernatural graces and gifts are taken as signs that validate theological teaching or doctrine, well, what doctrine is validated by this healing? Are you prepared to follow this sign? Why or why not? How do you explain it? Discuss.
(2) It should be no surprise that the unmet need to experience the tangible, personal, and powerful presence of God is to be found in churches that fail to teach, believe, and practice the tangible, personal, and powerful sign that Jesus actually did give his church when he said "this is my body, take and eat." What is more personal and immediate than coming every week to receive bread in your hand, smell it, taste it, and know that God thus mediates his real presence and favor to each one whom he has called? That's why they call this gift a sign of the new covenant.
While I'm tromping on toes and sticking my fingers into various eyes, in order to be an equal-opportunity offender, I need to pass along something from one of my correspondents. He suggests another reading of yesterday's story. Instead of substituting "government" for "Islamic", use "home school." Then the 8th grade son's spiritual crisis would find him saying to his parents, "I am thankful that I don't dress like those government school kids, or watch the movies they do, or listen to the music they do, for I am good and moral."
At which point the parents would wake up and say, "Great Odin's Beard! We've raised a priggish little Pharisee!"
Like I said, I'm an equal-opportunity offender. Thus I'd balance the observation I made in closing yesterday by saying that every Christian parent also needs to realize that home schools and Christian schools are likewise not without their characteristic dangers.
So the homeschoolers could say "oh yeah!" yesterday. All the others can say so today. Now, if there's anyone I've missed offending with my treatment of this most sensitive of subjects (our insecurity about our kids), just let me know and I'll see what I can do.
Once there was a loving Christian couple whom God blessed with a beautiful son. They took the child to church and had him baptized. They taught him to sing Jesus Loves Me and to pray the Lord's Prayer. He was the joy of their hearts.
When he turned five and it was time to send him to school, they sent him to an Islamic elementary school that was nearby. They knew that he would be expected to participate in the religious exercises required of all students, and they knew that the Islamic teachers at the school would teach an unapologetically Muslim world view that was clearly prejudiced against the church and Christianity. For 30 hours a week, he attended the Muslim school and was taught Islam, then he came home and watched TV, played video games, said grace at the dinner table, had a bedtime story about Winnie the Pooh, and said his prayers.
After he finished the elementary school, his parents sent him to an Islamic Middle School. He played on the school soccer team and went on overnights with some of his school buddies.
Then in the 8th grade, he had a crisis of faith. He told his parents that he doubted his baptism and had questions about the truth of Christianity. His parents were grieved and confused. How could such a thing happen?
Now re-read our story, but this time substitute "government" for "Islamic."
Okay, full disclosure: I have five kids, and every one of them has attended government schools all the way through, and every one of them has, by God's grace, maintained a clear and evident Christian faith. So the story above does not say that it is not possible to raise Christian kids unless you choose the Christian school or home school option. Most Christian schools are prohibitively expensive (even if the family moves it's tithe out of the church), and many Christian parents are not suited for home schooling. (What will you tell a newly converted family where the father is a day laborer, neither parent finished high school, and the mother has a disability?) Obviously, I don't go along with those who make sweeping proclamations that any father who sends his kids to government schools is unfit for church office or whatever.
Nevertheless, every Christian parent needs to realize that the government schools are not a neutral influence, and consider seriously what that means for the rest of their family life.
Well put ...
... Far be it from us to immediately denounce the [Catholics who attempt to live a purely religious life through mysticism and asceticism] with the Protestant judgment that since such piety issues from a false principle -- righteousness by works -- it is therefore worthless to God. For no matter how much truth that judgment may contain, before we utter it we must remind ourselves that the Catholic righteousness by good works is vastly preferable to a Protestant righteousness by good doctrine. At least righteousness by good works benefits one's neighbor, whereas righteousness by good doctrine only produces lovelessness and pride.
-- Herman Bavinck, The Certainty of Faith
I have never been an Adam Sandler fan. When an actor characteristically chooses to make movies like Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo and Little Nicky, one gets the sense that one can always pick the movies not to see simply by looking for Sandler's name. Nevertheless, many in our living room have had an enduring fondness for The Wedding Singer, and now we should add to that list Spanglish, which is a surprisingly good movie. Sandler plays a 4-star chef / restaurant owner in very comfortable L.A. circumstances. His hyper-tense, insecure wife hires the gorgeous Paz Vega, who speaks only Spanish, as a domestic. As the husband-wife dynamic plays through a very rough sequence, the domestic observes and becomes sympathetically involved, first with the couple's awkward adolescent daughter, played brilliantly by Sarah Steele, and then gradually with the suffering Sandler character. But this movie manages to avoid the predictable, and instead delivers a much more satisfying story. (Directed by James L. Brooks, who did one of my favorites, As Good as It Gets.) A good performance by Tea Leoni as the mono-polar wife, and special kudos to Cloris Leachman as the live-in mother-in-law who was a well-known jazz singer in a previous generation. And of course, my favorite is Sarah Steele. It is common to see juvenile and adolescent actors who are passable, but nothing special. It is uncommon to see an actor like Sarah Steele, who is absolutely perfect in every moment.
Jeff Meyers makes a good case for saying "Yahweh" instead of "Lord" where the prophets wrote "Yahweh." Semper Reformanda.
LHS jazz band concert last night. Son Joe plays trombone. They had a guest artist of some accomplishment join them for two or three pieces.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Live music is better than recorded music. It's a different experience altogether. It gives you a living, breathing immediacy that no recording has. You not only share the music with the performers, but you share the music with all the others in attendance. So I'd rather hear the LHS jazz band live than listen to much more proficient musicians on a CD.
I should go to more live concerts.
I have a few photos in a Flickr set.. .
The Interpreter. I'm not a big Sean Penn fan, but he did a good job as the agent trying to prevent an assassination at the U.N. while protecting Nicole Kidman, the interpreter who overheard the conspirators. It's a watchable suspense story, but not one we'll buy or watch repeatedly. Sydney Pollack is the director, and he has some interesting stuff to contribute in the special features. Which also has an alternative ending that is more dramatic, but waaay less believable.
Speaking of alternative endings, we watched The Girl from Paris, which was quite enjoyable, though the ending was surprisingly abrupt. There was an alternative ending in the special features that I liked better.
The most interesting thing among the special features was a short collection of out-takes. Watching them, I concluded that the company worked without a script. They told the actors what this dialog was supposed to accomplish and where the beats were along the way and then turned on the camera and tried it several times until it came out right. The resulting dialog has a very natural, off-balance feel. You get very few Meaningful Lines that have been crafted and loaded by the writer, and instead enjoy a fresh, different kind of performance. Woody Allen dialog has a kindred rambling, improvised quality, but its difference takes you in quite another direction.
We also bought a copy of Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, which I continue to enjoy without apology. Most interesting things from the director's commentary: they originally wanted Dick Van Dyke for the American flyer, and Peter Sellers for the German. Second most interesting was the backstage info about how they built and flew replicas of those antique airplanes.
Picture 1: The way I took it. Exposure problems. (Operator error.):
Picture 2: First attempt to fix it. Used both PixWizard and Photoshop. Lost the sky:
Picture 3: Roxio PhotoSuite has some tools designed for just this kind of job:
My regular readers will understand that one of my ongoing concerns is the wacky, divided, sectarian-and-proud-of-it episode in church history where we live. One part of my concern is that our lamentable divisions and associated irrelevance is not even a concern to many in the church. Another part of my concern is "yeah, but how would any kind of reunion ever be possible: the dividing issues run so deep."
Peter Leithart has been doing a lot of work in Samuel and Kings recently. His piece on Division and Reunion is very helpful, offering a way to view the church as one (including those others who are just so *wrong*), and suggesting what we might expect God to do about it all.
If Leithart is right, I worry that his view of the way forward seems to relieve us of our responsibility rather than hold us to it.
Anyway, it's a good piece.
Lawrence of Arabia has been on my list of need-to-see movies for some time. So last night I made the popcorn and waited it out. It is a huge movie with grand desert vistas and ... uh, sweeping panoramic, uh, vistas. At the end I wanted to say something snotty like "never have so many done so much to accomplish so little."
By many measures, I allow that this thing does belong on the list of Great Movies, if only for the sheer accomplishment. You know, Epic Scale, two years in the making, cast of thousands, and all.
But at the center of the whole thing is this Lawrence character who is such an enigma, one wonders, why this huge movie about him? The movie opens with his funeral and then presents the rest of the story as a flashback. At the funeral, the camera moves from one conversation to another where we hear those who knew him unable to answer questions about him; reluctant to call him a hero but not quite ready to say exactly why.
Then the movie takes you back to the man himself, and one expects that we will be able to make some kind of judgment or come to some kind of understanding. But judgment and understanding are just what we don't get. We get a lot of sand and sun and battles and desolation, but the man himself doesn't settle down to one thing or another. He succeeds and he fails; he perseveres and he quits; he holds to his principles and he breaks them; He is followed loyally and he is abandoned.
The end.
Yeah, well thanks for the three hours. Quite a story you got there. I guess. One hesitates to be critical of a Great Work, because it usually indicates nothing about the Great Work and everything about you, viz. that you are a clod.
Um, okay.
In Ebert's review, he quotes a character in The Age of Innocence saying something like
"real loneliness is living among all these kind people who ask you only to pretend"
That is a strikingly true observation. Nobody is more alone than the person whose life is devoted to pretending, to keeping up appearances. We long for truth and intimacy. We fear truth and intimacy. We long for truth and intimacy. We barricade ourselves against truth and intimacy.
Please, just pretend everything is fine. Which is a recipe for deep loneliness. Not the only recipe, but it's a good one.
And the solution has to be something like risking love and forgiveness. Otherwise I have to pretend everything is fine and ask you to play along because I'm afraid that if we looked honestly at all the things that aren't fine, well, I can't count on you to love me any more. See, I heard you say something once about "well that's one thing that I just can't stand." And that means you just can't forgive me, and that means we have to pretend, and that means that I will be lonely, because you are not loving me, you're loving the pretend me.
But I do the calculations, and I make the safe choice: I'd rather have you love the pretend me than reject the real me.
Which works pretty well -- with everyone except God, who is so kind he never pretends.
1776 is a very good Broadway musical. One reason it isn't produced more often is that it has only two women in the cast. That's not a problem for a professional company, but it makes the show harder to choose for a school or community theater. But if you ever get a chance to see it on stage, go. The music is fun and the story of the continental congress getting to the point where they were ready to sign the declaration of independence is given a dramatic shape that works very well. I'm sure the careful historian would make many qualifications and corrections, but hey, this is musical theater.
I just saw movie version on DVD, and I have to say I'm disappointed. Oh, the performances are fine and all, but the production decisions illustrate how hard it is to translate a show that makes full use of the dramatic conventions of the stage into the realistic settings possible in a movie. These songs and scenes, conceived for the stage, just don't work outdoors, in the streets, forests, and fields. Movies like those settings. But this musical does not lend itself to them.
For instance, the John Adams - Abigail correspondence. On stage it can be done very effectively in front of the proscenium, the characters on opposite sides at their writing desks, and then as the dialog develops they can move towards the center, meet without touching, and finally finish back at their desks. That's just the kind of scene that the stage loves, because the space on stage between the actors is physical, yet abstract. But the movie doesn't find a way to present that.
What makes King Claudius think he can get away with making Hamlet's death look accidental in the fencing duel he plans between Laertes and Hamlet? If Laertes succeeds in scratching Hamlet with the poisoned blade so that Hamlet dies, does the King think that nobody will ask any questions? "Hmm, just a scratch, but he's dead. Is that normal?"
Of course Claudius has a masterly ability to talk his way out of trouble. But I don't think he was expecting to fool Gertrude. Maybe he plans to accuse the triumphant Laertes of something and kill him quickly, too, since Laertes would always thereafter have been something of a threat, especially since he would have some dirt on the king
We watched 1944's Gaslight with Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer. The TCM host informed us that Charles Boyer was the inspiration for the Warner Brothers cartoon character Pepe Le Pew.
The critics generally point to this as a great example of a suspense / psychological thriller combo. Even though it was made in 1944, it has many elements that anticipate the Film Noir stuff more typical later in the 40's and early 50's. Which is even more of an accomplishment because it is set in Victorian England.
The suspense builds duly and the direction and cinematography are top notch. Every shot is carefully composed and beautifully executed.
The way the Bergman character is dominated and manipulated by her husband is a bit frustrating for the modern viewer, but I think that's because we don't have much sense of how strongly subservient the wife's role was at this point in history. We are itching for the Bergman character just to stand up to her husband and show some spine (sooner than she does), but we don't understand that the domestic politics of the day just didn't offer her many options. And those who oppose the many absurdities of modern feminism should make it clear that this Victorian arrangement is definitely not the alternative anybody is advocating.
It's a bit odd how the Joseph Cotton character is a detective for Scotland Yard, but makes no pretense of being anything but American. His non-British accent is as obvious as anything, but the story makes no attempt to explain what he's doing in England. Did they think we wouldn't notice?
Daughter Anne picked up a bargain table copy of Carl Reiner's notobiography, My Anecdotal Life: A Memoir, and read aloud several chapters that had us laughing. We have a special fondness for Reiner, having enjoyed so thoroughly the DVD collection of the Sid Ceasar television shows.
Sermon Text for November 6: Romans 5:12-21
Sermon Title:
No Matter What You Do
Sermon Notes:
ROSE
I just want you to know. No matter what you do. You are going to die, just like everybody else.COSMO
Thank you, Rose.ROSE
You're welcome.
Introduction
Paul was the apostle to the Gentiles. Romans
1:5-6: "… we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the
obedience of faith for the sake of his name among all the nations, [6]
including you who are called to belong to Jesus
Christ,..."
Because of the way he insisted that the doors of
God’s household be held wide open for the gentiles, Paul had a lot of
problems with the Jews. Obviously he had problems with the unbelieving
Jews; those who rejected Jesus and persecuted the church. But not quite so
obviously, Paul also had trouble with the believing Jews; those who
believed the gospel message and who made up the core of every new church
he started.
Already In this letter to the Romans, we have seen Paul
hard a work on this task in the way that he talks about the gospel from
both the Jewish and Gentile side of things. The Gentiles are under sin.
The Jews are under sin. The Gentiles are saved by Grace. The Jews are
saved by Grace. After all, look at Abraham.
He had to build his
argument this way this way because the believing Jews in the church had a
strong sense that they still had a big advantage with God because of their
relationship to the law. It’s that attitude that we saw in Romans 2:17-18
“But if you call yourself a Jew and rely on the law and boast in God [18]
and know his will and approve what is excellent, because you are
instructed from the law; ...“
Through the Law, the Jew could ensure his good standing with
God and remain in God’s favor.
Not by being perfect or
somehow earning God’s reward. I don’t think any Jew would claim that he
was perfectly sinless. They knew about the sin problem.
But
they believed that God had given Israel a favored position and that
favored position was to be maintained and honored by their keeping the
law. We don’t see them claiming to be sinless; but they could employ the
law’s built-in provisions for getting forgiveness, through offering
sacrifice, and giving restitution. And that meant that if you were
careful, you could, like Paul himself, be "blameless according to
the law". That doesn’t mean you were claiming you led a life of
sinless perfection: it only meant that when you did sin, you were careful
to do all that the law required to be restored to your standing in God’s
favor. And then you were careful to maintain that position of favor by
honoring and keeping the law.
Of course this strikes us as a
big mistake and a wrong use of the law. But it will help us understand
Romans if we can get around to seeing how this idea could makes a certain
kind of sense to the Jew. And even those Jews who believed the gospel, who
believed that Jesus died on the cross as God’s suffering servant, and who
believed that God raised him from the dead and exalted him to his right
hand as King and Messiah – these believing Jews did not therefore
automatically understand that they needed to repent of the way they were
using the law.
And what’s more, they also needed to repent of the way they wanted everyone else to use the law, too.
So this challenge occupied a great deal of Paul’s attention and effort in his ministry. It actually took a long time for the church to work through matters that seem to us like obvious implications of the gospel. Remember In Acts 15, many years after Jesus died, many believing Jews in the church were unapologetically trying to get the church to require Gentiles to be circumcised and to obey the law of Moses. And the events of Acts 15 probably happened fewer than 10 years before Paul wrote Romans. This was a question that was not easily answered or quickly settled.
...
A nice shot from First Things column While We're At It from October 2005:
... the Episcopal Cathedral of St John the Divine up on Morningside Heights invited Muslim feminist Amina Wadud to act as an imam in leading the Friday services. She gathered about a hundred very progressive and ostensibly Muslim men and women to join her, while hundreds of others stood outside protesting the violation of Islamic tradition in having a woman lead services and not separating men and women in public prayer. Having taken the lead in breaking up the Anglican communion, Episcopalians appear to be raising their sights to interreligious possibilities....
A good Harry Potter article.
Einstein Fun
(That's the wit of Rev. Wayne Larson, ladies and gentlemen ...)
(Note: I have a friend in the business who asked me to pass along this announcement. I owe him a favor, so ...)
The SUV at Crazy Al's.
Crazy Al's Discount Bible Warehouse is proud to announce the availability of the new Student's Underlined Version (the SUV). The SUV does all the underlining for you, so when you open your Bible at your weekly Bible study, small group, or Sunday School class, the others in your circle will see a well-marked Bible, whether you've ever read that part or not.
When you pick up your SUV at Crazy Al's, be sure to specify whether you want your copy in the Reformed, Lutheran, or Baptist version (Catholic versions have no underlining), so you get the right set of underlining. (Nothing can be quite so embarrassing in a small group as having your neighbor ask you why you have 1 Peter 3:21 underlined: Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you).
And of course the SUV is available in red-letter editions: words of Jesus in red in the New Testament, and words of Yahweh in red in the Old Testament.
That's the SUV. Big. Colorful. Underlined.
Available now at Crazy Al's Discount Bible Warehouse. Remember, "Nobody Discounts the Bible like Crazy Al."
INDEX
May
2004
June
2004
July
2004
August
2004
September
2004
October
2004
November
2004
December
2004
January
2005
February
2005
March
2005
April
2005
May
2005
June
2005
July
2005
August
2005
September
2005
October
2005
Harry
Potter 6 (spoilers)
My Friendly Flickr FAM BLOGS
Exsamination
pontifikate
Valerie
Karen
Becker Blog
Daniel
Micah
BLOGTHERS
Leithart.com
BLOG and MABLOG
CACOETHES
SCRIBENDI
KataJohn
Carrifex
Rich
Bledsoe
sacra
doctrina
adversaria
Barlow Farms
annie's blog
Rabbi Saul
Hierogrammate
Mark Horne
The Japery
Mere Comments
League of Extraordinary
Gentlewomen
View from the
Prairie Box
The
Grand
ALSO ONLINE...
The New Pantagruel
Covenant Renewal
Theologia
First Things
Touchstone
Biblical Horizons
Credenda-Agenda
CRTA
larknews.com
Townhall.com
OpinionJournal.com
The Presbyteer - Keith Ghormley - Lincoln Nebraska