When Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke at the Harvard School of Divinity in 1838,

he delivered an address that should be required reading for evangelicals.  Basically, Emerson exhorted these young clergymen to turn their backs on doctrine to explore unfettered the limits of the human soul.  The phrase that is commonly attributed to Emerson is that doctrine is a set of bandages that blinds our vision.  Anyone who knows what happened to the Harvard School of Divinity (and Unitarianism) in the subsequent decades knows that they did just that: placed doctrine on the sidelines, calling it quaint and narrow.

Unfortunately, I hear the same thing from too many young evangelicals, who say that they are tired of doctrine and would rather “be” the church.  History, in their view, wastes our time and doctrine distracts our attention from the more substantial issue of changing our culture.  (more…)

Michael Been, the bassist and frontman for the band “The Call,” passed away this Thursday from a heart attack.  He was 60 and had been working sound for his son’s band “Black Rebel Motorcycle Club” at a pop festival in Belgium.

The Call never quite got over the hump on the way to topping the music charts, but they came out of the same impulse that yielded U2, early Violent Femmes, and other pop groups that were deeply influenced by their faith commitments.  Certainly most of them have ended up being prone to the kinds of excesses that plague the entertainment industry (Been aggravated me on a number of occasions), but The Call took their name seriously, introducing explicitly Christian principles to their lyrics as part of their mission.  “Everywhere I Go” spoke to Providence.  “The Walls Came Tumbling Down” to the power of faith.  “I Still Believe” to the enduring optimism that God produces in our lives, no matter the circumstances.  Videos for the songs still reside at places like youtube.

For those of us who came of age in the early 80s, these groups gave us an important release for the songs of our hearts.  I remember that our local Christian station programmers thought they were edgy because they played Sandi Patty; Amy Grant was too much of a rocker for them.  I was one of those who kept wondering, as the late Larry Norman so aptly put it, why should the devil have all the good music?  In the energy and authenticity of groups like The Call, I found succor for my spirit and balm for my youthful angst.  Like all things that are founded on God’s truth, Been’s music will live on well beyond his own life in this world.  Praises for the glory of God always do.

Back in 2005, Kazuo Ishiguro released his delicate novel “Never Let Me Go.” 

You may remember Ishiguro as the author of “Remains of the Day,” which was adapted into a motion picture of the same name starring Anthony Hopkins, Emma Thompson, and Christopher Reeve.  That novel explored the idea that the British Empire had seen the end of its day and that the Second World War would bring this reality to a shattering epiphany. 

“Never Let Me Go,” cited by Time as the best novel of 2005, is first rate science fiction (and was a finalist for the 2006 Arthur C. Clarke Award), but it is not what one thinks of as traditional science fiction.  There are no spaceships or whirling inventions, (more…)

I stumbled across John D. Steinrucken’s interesting essay “Secularism’s Debt to Christianity” in today’s American Thinker.  Steinrucken’s opening paragraph includes this provocative line:

Western civilization’s survival, including the survival of open secular thought, depends on the continuance within our society of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

This observation reminds me a great deal of Camille Paglia’s excellent essay from a few years ago in Arion, “Religion and the Arts in America,” which basically says that the loss of Christianity as a dominant force in the West is why art has declined over the past few years.   Paglia claims

I would argue that the route to a renaissance of the American fine arts lies through religion.

I do not wish to make too much of these kinds of essays, but they are balm indeed for the current level of heat regarding religion, particularly evangelicalism and Catholicism, in academe.  These essays are  particularly poignant as backdrops to an essay by Wheaton University’s  Timothy Larsen in today’s issue of Inside Higher Ed, “No Christianity Please, We’re Academics.”    My favorite line of that essay comes in the form of a professor’s comment on a student paper that C. S. Lewis quotations were inappropriate because he was a pastor.  Yeah, C. S. Lewis and T. S. Eliot were co-pastors outside of Nashville for a brief time, right?  I’d forgotten about that.  ;-)  The comments that follow the essay are simply amazing in terms of candor and, well, insight as to the view towards Christian faith (or any faith) by some in academe.

Perhaps some of those commentators should read Steinrucken and Paglia.

The tech world has been buzzing with yesterday’s ruling about the legality of “jailbreaking” one’s iPhone  (removing certain barriers to non-Apple approved applications for iPhones).  This means that phone owners have the right to alter their phones to download non-approved content or even to switch carriers. 

The Bloomberg.com story linked above indicates that Apple routinely “withholds approval of applications because they have technical bugs or contain material such as pornography that the company considers inappropriate.”  This resolves, to some extent, the firestorm (heads-up on some of the graphics on this site) over Apple’s Steve Jobs ban of sexual content on these apps.   The last line in the Gizmodo.com essay (linked above) notes, “Steve Jobs knows his legacy and it isn’t sex apps.  It’s great hardware and software.  But why the hell can’t gadget porn and real porn coexist?” 

It will be interesting to see if this will now create a portal for viruses and other safety concerns to enter into the Iphone world, which appears to be part of the fear that Apple has with the ruling (jailbreaking apparently will continue to void all warranties and support).

It’s more interesting, though, to ponder these developments after reading Mary Eberstadt’s essay “The Weight of Smut” in the June / July issue of First Things.  I once heard a technology expert say that one of the primary driving forces behind most of the technological advancements of the past thirty years has been the hunger for easier access to pornography: cable, VCRs, camcorders, the Internet, cell phone cameras, and so forth.   I suspect that Eberstadt would agree with that observation.

I can’t remember the guy’s name, but I once saw an interview with one of the lead writers on the old “Batman” show with Adam West, which was a staple of my childhood.  Evidently the guy had a master’s in historical linguistics or something and he told a hysterical story about how the character King Tut (that corpulent villain in the faux Egyptian gear, played by the inimitable Victor Buono). 

  (from http://www.tvsinopse.kinghost.net/art/3/tut.htm )

Tut’s henchmen’s original names were actually obscure curse words and vulgarities in Coptic and they received loads of complaints from the few folks who knew that relatively rare language.  The network made them change the names on the ubiquitous black t-shirts that all of these guys wore.  At least that’s the story I remember.

Those names on the black t-shirts extended, of course, to the famous cave where Batman kept all of his wonderful computers and gadgets.  Each item was labeled clearly in block letters.  Nothing was, apparently, left to chance in the man of justice’s lair.  Even the phone was labeled with “telephone,” or at least it seemed that way to me.  

This morning I looked for some still photos of the show and ran across one of Batman and Robin standing in front of a computer labeled “Electronic Translator” at http://www.batmangiftideas.com/batmanbio.htm (you’ll have to scroll down near the bottom).  I couldn’t upload the still to this post, but it connects with my actual reason for this post: I thought of “Batman” when I read the incredible news that a computer has decoded Ugaritic script in only a few hours.  A few hours!  This breakthrough means that we will finally be able to crack, hopefully, important languages like Etruscan which, unbelievably, have so far eluded us. (more…)

As a former resident of Louisiana, I have a hard time wrapping my mind around the oil disaster.  The scope is difficult to contemplate.  In my travels around the Internet, I ran across this website, where you can put in your hometown or any other location and see just how large the oil slick is in our own local terms.  (h-tip: one of the coolest sites around, “strangemaps”). 

It’s a little disconcerting to see my own town in the darkest bull’s eye of the cloud and think, “What if this were happening where I live?”

Something I like about the site is the way that helps us to think about this event as one of shared humanity: one way to love one’s neighbor as oneself is to put ourselves in that person’s shoes through love (Lev. 19:18 / Matt. 19:19, etc.).  What if I were hungry?  What if I had need?  What if I were situated in the midst of a disaster?  What if it were my family that no longer could fish those waters or work those rigs or sell sandwiches at our restaurant? 

Material empathy in these kinds of circumstances reminds us of just how interlinked we really are as fellow persons.  Indeed, this kind of empathy should lead us to be reminded of our shared spiritual state as well.  The fallen nature of our world and our souls longs for solutions, even as they long for a Savior.

Peter Singer, the rather notorious Princeton ethicist, published a provocative essay in the New York Times blog “Opinionator” proposing that we should consider making this generation the last of the human species.  He pondered what would be wrong with universal sterilization throughout the planet, a planned extinction of the entire race.  Here’s a sample of his musings for the standard of choice for intentional reproduction:

“How good does life have to be, to make it reasonable to bring a child into the world? Is the standard of life experienced by most people in developed nations today good enough to make this decision unproblematic, in the absence of specific knowledge that the child will have a severe genetic disease or other problem?”

In all fairness, the essay does conclude with a tepid off-shrugging of the notion, even as it unfolds with great seriousness.

Perhaps I’m too much of an armchair psychologist, but I have a sense that many public intellectuals think that they are looking through a window when they see the world but are mistaken and are instead looking into a mirror.  What I mean is that when they think that they see something in the world at-large, what they really are seeing is their own life magnified and projected in a way that overshadows reality.

Singer’s essay is really a commentary on or extension of the thoughts of David Benatar, a South African philosopher whose book “Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence,” is, I suppose , the reductio ad absurdum of solipsism (the idea that the self is the only thing knowable or real in the universe).  Check out Singer’s summary of Benatar: (more…)

I was sitting at my son’s baseball game last night catching up on some reading when I picked up the latest issue of PMLA, the journal of the Modern Language Association (March 2010).  The first essay was by Timothy Morton: “Queer Ecology.”  Prof. Morton calls for a merger of Queer Theory and Ecological Criticism, two staples in literary studies.  The essay is fairly wide-ranging, but I thought I would provide two provocative bits for a reaction from our readers:

“Ecological critique has argued that speciesism underlies sexism and racism ([Carey] Wolfe [Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory.  Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991])—why not homophobia too?  How do we think about life-forms and their diverse sexualities and pleasures?  Any attempt at queer ecology must imagine ways of doing justice to life-forms while respecting the lessons of evolutionary biology—that the boundary between life and non-life is thick and full of paradoxical entities” (276).

“Queer ecology will worry away at the human-nonhuman boundary, too.  How can we ever distinguish properly between humans and nonhumans?  Doesn’t the fact that identity is in the eye of the beholder put serious constraints on such distinctions?  It’s not just that rabbits are rabbits in name only; it’s that whether or not we have words for them, rabbits are deconstrictive all the way down—signifying and display happen at every level.  Nothing is self-identical.  We are embodied yet without essence.  Organicism is holistic and substantialist, visualizing carbon-based life-forms (organic in another sense) as the essence of livingness.  Queer ecology must go wider, embracing silicon as well as carbon, for instance. . . .  Queer ecology would go to the end and show how beings exist precisely because they are nothing but relationality, deep down—for the love of matter” (277).

 As Mike Myers used to say via his Linda Richman character on SNL, “Now, talk amongst yourselves!”

This list caught my eye: the “Most Brilliant Christian Professors.”  Their institutional affiliations and specialties are all over the map, which is interesting in its own way, and it reminded me of a conversation I once had in graduate school.

One of my professors took me to the side after class and asked, “Is it true you are a Christian?”  “Yes,” I replied, uncertain of where the question was leading.  “I’m surprised,” the professor continued, “since your work is very strong.  That’s really interesting.”

The question bothered me, not as a point of offense (“anti-Christian bias in the academy”), but rather that the reputation many Christian students have is that they are intellectually lazy or perform shoddy work.  Certainly a bias may be in play, as well as the reality of the general ennui of being an 18-22 year old, but when I taught at secular institutions, I found this to be true way too often.  I see it too often at Christian colleges as well. 

Part of the great Christian Intellectual Tradition is the playing out of the intellectually apt principles that derive from biblical revelation: the existence and knowability of truth, the ultimate meaningfulness and purpose of the universe, and so on.  Another part, though, is the belief that how we apply ourselves to tasks matters as well.  We are to do things with all of our might (Eccl. 9:10) as unto the Lord. The luminaries cited in the list have certainly fulfilled this principle. 

There are, however, countless other Christian intellectuals laboring in relative obscurity who lift up students’ eyes and minds to see transcendence and discovery throughout the academic universe.  I thought I would prompt our readers to give “props” to some of these professors, especially those at Christian colleges where the teaching loads, mentorship responsibilities, and paucity of resources limit their ability to run with the “big dogs,” but who are stellar thinkers and disciplers.  

Any names come to mind?

In a few weeks I will start reading through the student evaluations of the faculty members I supervise.  My favorite part of this task is scanning the written comments for the kinds of nuggets that only students can produce.  Perhaps my all-time favorite came to my attention several years ago.  It was for a course taught by one of the most popular male professors on campus, a married man who was both fit and funny.

The handwriting was obviously feminine and the stark complaint both floored me and made me laugh out loud: “Each day in class I stare at Dr. “Y”s wedding band and I wish his wife were dead.”

I’m sure that the student didn’t mean it as a death threat but rather as a compliment on the professor’s handsome face and quick wit, but it was more than a little frightening. 

Sometime later I thought about that observation as I read Matthew 5:21-30, particularly the connection between murder and adultery as companion sins of the heart.  I was struck by just how often our sins would be enabled if we could just get someone out of our ways. 

This is the basic urge that would enable the lust after the hot neighbor’s spouse, the ambition that seeks after the job that is held by another, or the appetite for that real estate or vehicle that outshines our otherwise perfectly fine possessions.  No wonder the first post-Edenic sin we read about was that of Cain, which distilled how many other sinful thoughts (jealousy, pride, anger, etc.) into one single vulgar act of murder.   Perhaps all of our sins are merely incremental slouches toward murder.  (more…)

A few years ago, on my 40^th birthday, I spent the day walking silently with my family through the gates of the Nazi work camp at Flossenburg, Germany, wandering among the monuments to the dead.

The camp is almost empty of structures, though a few chapels dot the grounds; its gravel quarry has been transformed into a lush garden spiraling into the earth.  The oven building, where corpses were reduced to ash, stands in the lowest level of the pit, with a wooden ramp slanting from the oven to the huge mound of human cinders.

Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who wrote “The Cost of Discipleship,” was the camp’s most famous casualty.  I wondered if any of the molecules of his body still resided in the mound.  Standing there, I swatted away large black flies that bit at my arms and legs.

As we walked past the oven, my wife Lisa whispered, “What a contrast from Neuschwanstein, eh?”

Two days previously, we had toured the fairy palace that inspired Walt Disney’s Cinderella castle.  It was packed with tourists who paid dearly for the price of admission.  Words cannot convey the beauty of the structure, so packed with artwork, nor its setting, so high in the Alps on a ridge of rock overlooking a gorgeous lake. 

Visitors from around the world gasped with every turn of a corner on our tour, each of us having the same thought in our native languages: “What if I ruled this castle?”

Flossenburg, by contrast, sits on a dead-end road.  It has no gift shop.  It was not crowded.  There were no thoughts of, “What if I were a prisoner in this camp?”

This, then, is the basic impulse of the human experience: we self-identify with kings and queens rather than the downtrodden and the oppressed.  We amble through a concentration camp and imagine that those “poor people” were not quite as human as we are, even as we walk through a palace and imagine ourselves to be royalty.  We forget that the prisoners were husbands, sons, brothers, and fathers like me, or wives, daughters, sisters, and mothers like Lisa. 

History’s pages are written in red letters of a kind, with the death tolls of an expansive roster of peoples providing an endless source of ink.  The 20^th century’s marriage of prejudice and technology merely stepped up the efficiency of the millennia-old waves of genocide that have washed over the face of our planet, interlacing the stories of our ancestors with those of everyone else’s.  At one time, all have been oppressors; all have been victims.  As a species, we are blood-bound together.

In Mark 12:31, Jesus reminded his followers of the great commandment found in Leviticus 19:18: “Love your neighbor, as yourself.”  This ethical imperative means, “Conduct yourselves as though you and those around you are one and the same.” More often than not, though, we turn blind eyes to the suffering of fellow persons and ask, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”  Such words, however, reprise those of Cain, history’s first perpetrator of a murderous atrocity. 

Indeed, however, we should remember another saying of Christ, “Forgive, and you will be forgiven” (Luke 6:37), for resentfulness is a cancer that leads too often to foolish reprisals and devastating revenge.

At Flossenburg, the only other visitors on the grounds were an elderly couple.  As we passed them, the woman pointed to our children and said to me in broken English, “You teach them.  This never happen again.” 

This is Holocaust Remembrance Week, so I am taking her words to heart; for all of our vows that these events will never occur again, history proves us stubbornly forgetful.  We should commemorate not only the loss of our Jewish brothers and sisters but also the joy of our shared humanity.  The moment that we forget that we share our nature with the foreign woman on the news or the homeless man we pass at intersection is the moment we begin to enable those would deny our fellow persons their rights or even their lives.

Such tragedies should never happen again; they are inexcusable.

(published at The Jackson Sun )

I heard this song recently:  “Why” by Nichole Nordeman.  I love much of Nordeman’s music (the tone of her voice is just so fragile and honest) and the song certainly is moving.  As I once heard songwriter Babyface Edmonds term it, it’s “waterfall music”: it turns on the tears like a waterfall.  Indeed, the final words of the song are among the truest of all history: Christ came to suffer, die, and be resurrected because of my sins; the song personalizes this reality. 

I am hesitant to be overly critical of the theology of artists because they are not professional theologians (neither am I; I’m a writer and literary critic), but these lyrics are being sung in churches across America for the next two Sundays and pastors and worship leaders need to understand what the lyrics actually state.

In the second part of the song, the point of view shifts from the perspective of a little girl to that of a supposed dialogue between Christ and God the Father.  The lyrics are on the slides in the link above.

I was sad when I heard them because these lyrics state that Christ had no idea what He had gotten into on the Cross, which is a direct contradiction of the Gospels.  At every turn, Christ revealed to the disciples in particular why He must come, that He was the fulfillment of the plan that had been effected from the foundations of the earth.  The entire arc of the Son of Man self-revelations that run through the Gospels show that Christ was fully aware that He had to suffer and die for the sin debt of humankind.  The cross was not a divine mugging by a secretive Father on a naïve Son; such a view is completely alien to the Scriptures.  Indeed, the statement of Christ in Mark 15:34 (“My God, My God . . .”) is not an appeal to a lack of knowledge on His part about what was happening but rather was a direct statement that He knew exactly what was happening: the prophecies about the death of the Messiah in Psalm 22 were being fulfilled!

The song is an emotional powerhouse, but it is built on theological falsehoods.  The Son knew exactly what He had gotten into on the Cross. 

The love that John wrote about in 1 John 4:19, “We love because He first loved us,” did not begin on Golgotha.  That love began before He had even created Adam.

My home state of Mississippi breeds storytellers like Washington DC breeds scoundrels.  We lost a giant yesterday, Barry Hannah (1942 – 2010).  I met him a few times, once when I lived next door to his son and Barry rang my door bell by mistake (our apartments were indistinguishable). 

Hannah’s writing was cynically dark, a breathless, frenetic prose that acerbically depicted the hypocrisy of many parts of Southern culture, which he believed to be a microcosm on American society as a whole.  In this way, he was one of Faulkner’s greatest heirs, an unblinking eye of scrutiny that scanned the horizon. 

For those of us in Christian higher education, Hannah’s Geronimo Rex should be required reading, especially the second part.

It is a thinly disguised depiction of his days at Mississippi College, where I once had the great pleasure of serving as the chair of the English department and teaching creative writing myself to a new generation of Barry Hannah’s.  Geronimo Rex is not for the faint of heart; it is distinctly profane in parts and immensely brutal toward many people whom I call dear friends.  It possesses a worldview bereft of any hope of optimism.  Someone has noted rather famously that to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail; Hannah’s early work in particular makes the point that to young man with angst, everything looks like an offense.  It is proof that ennui and irony are luxurious bedmates.  My hunch is that what he thought was a window to the world was really just a mirror to his own heart at that time.  Misery, as we know, loves company and finds it almost everywhere. (more…)

By now you may have heard about the Russian figure skater Evgeni Plushenko who has been sulking because he lost the gold medal to American Evan Lysacek.  Plushenko has taken a fairly audacious strategy to elevating his claim to superiority: his website apparently announced that he has won the “Platinum Medal” at the Vancouver Games.  

I am not the guy to analyze the judges’ scores in the event, but when I heard about Plushenko’s self-designed award, I couldn’t help but remember something that I heard Alistair McGrath say at a lecture:

“Reality is what faces you when you are wrong.” 

You may believe earnestly that the moon is made of Cheetos, but that doesn’t mean that it “really” is.  You may believe that the check you have deposited in the bank was worth a million dollars, but if the check writer’s account does not hold such funds, your check is worthless, no matter how genuinely you may believe otherwise. 

I don’t want to be too hard on Plushenko (particularly since I’m not sure how seriously he has proposed this medal), but the story has provided us with a really nice example of the problem with the kind of relativism and solipcism that permeates contemporary culture.   As good as our Jedi mind tricks may sound in our heads (“I won the medal!”), we delude ourselves if we think that they will work in the real world.  These kinds of self-serving lies are rooted in the original Jedi mind trick offered in Eden: “Did God really say . . . ?” (Gen. 3:1).

The final chapter of James W. Sire’s delightful Naming the Elephant (IVP  2004) surveys the overlapping of worldview analysis and academic disciplines.  When he arrives at literature, which is, in many ways, his own first love, Sire observes: “In the past several decades, Christian literary scholarship has begun to become more self-consciously Christian, and while I have not noticed much use of worldview analysis in this scholarship, I am delighted to see it begin to proliferate” (156).

I thought of that when I received a recent copy of Laura Barge’s Exploring Worldviews in Literature: from William Wordsworth to Edward Albee (Abilene Christian University Press 2009).

Barge is one of the great “balcony figures” of Christian literary scholarship, someone who is not a well-known name outside of the discipline, but who has quietly mentored, encouraged, and supported young scholars for many years, including significant service in the Conference of Christianity and Literature.   I personally have benefitted from many conversations with her over the years, especially when we taught at different institutions in the same town.

To some extent, Exploring Worldviews is the culmination of this lifetime of work, exhibiting a teacher’s tender heart at every turn, even as she is not averse to unleashing a salvo on the secularists’ intellectual inconsistencies (the first chapter in particular is a nifty overview of the place of Christian thought in literary studies).  Each chapter traces the ways that Christian thinking has influenced literary studies on a variety of topics, ranging from Christ-figures to scapegoats to metaphysical understandings of the world to even atheism as an oddly profound place to find the immanent presence of God. 

For those of you who still think that words mean things, or know someone whose graduate program is beating such belief out of him / her, Exploring Worldviews is a great tonic, and a welcome addition to the Christian intellectual tradition of applying the faith’s philosophical / epistemological framework to a variety of traditional academic disciplines.

Since my family is filled with NASA wogs, I keep half an eye peeled for news from the space program. This week the big news was the installation of an observation window on the International Space Station. This seven-paned, chunky  bubble will allow astronauts an amazing view of the cosmos when it is unshuttered (a shutter system will be employed most of the time for safety reasons).

The stated purpose for the window system is direct observation of the robotics area external to the station, but commentators all note that the “beauty” that may be seen through station’s portholes.  The headline for the above link is “Nice View! Space Station Gets a Bay Window.”

Some recent postings about aesthetics had put me in a mind to comment on how the aesthetic impulse of beholding beauty was overshadowing the scientific reason for the window’s installation, but when I read the story to the end, I was astounded by something that the reporter included:

“Looking out on the Earth is just inspiring,” said space station resident Timothy “TJ” Creamer. In fact, it’s the crew’s No. 1 pastime in the off hours — at least it was before the Internet came aboard [my emphasis].  Now “we can actually surf the Internet and find diversions,” Creamer told schoolchildren in a TV hookup this week. . . . “First thing I did on internet? Order my wife some flowers,” commander Jeffrey Williams wrote in his online Twitter account.

I can’t help but find a parable in this: you’re in outer space, achieving the dream of a lifetime, with the opportunity to spend time gazing on a view that only a handful of people have ever beheld, and you end up spending your time on Twitter? (more…)

I recently made a post about reading 1984  and suggested watching the 1984 adaptation starring John Hurt.  It’s been a while since I’ve seen the full release (i.e., unedited), having seen it recently on a cable network that edits for content; this means that I forgot that the film contains both male and female nudity.  I saw that a commenter noted that for those who might view the film and I appreciated the reminder.  Indeed, everyone has their own standards and considerations for viewing film, and I do not wish to be responsible for anyone’s stumbling. 

One of the things that I find troubling in my own experience is that I will mention a film or even show one in class that I haven’t seen in twenty years, back before I was a father of tweens and thought about content issues differently.  I know that this happens with faculty colleagues as well; we sometimes forget the full content of a film (or, in my case, slept through parts of the movie, especially those midnight movies that were so popular when I was in college).

At the risk of offending some folks’ artistic integrity or sensitivities, I thought I would post three helpful hints for viewing films. 

1. Check out http://www.dove.org/ for family friendly reviews.  This site is very helpful for those of us with children, especially older children where the ratings begin to get mushy.  They include evaluations of sex, language, nudity, drug use, and worldview issues.  My family checks this site routinely before heading to the theater or placing online orders.  I also recommend this site to faculty and student affairs folks to see if films being used in class or in sponsored activities might have material that will be troublesome.
2. Check out http://www.imdb.com/ for a secular take on things, but one that often includes ratings for sex, language, and so forth in the “parents guide” near the bottom of each film’s top page.  This site is particularly helpful in that it includes almost every film ever made, including foreign films.  It also contains an unbelievable amount of information that can identify other films on similar themes that might be helpful.
3. If you are concerned about some of the content identified above, for movies that have moved to cable, it is often possible to view edited versions that have deleted the more prurient sex / language content.   

We live in a post-literate society and film is one of our primary ways of employing narrative.  I hope that these tips will help folks to avoid the visual traps that can accompany this format; they aren’t perfect, of course, but I have found them helpful in my own life and work.

Lots of folks are talking about the current Vanity Fair story on the Creation Museum in KY.  I’ll let someone else start a chat about the story in particular or the museum (follow the Scott Lamb link below for one such discussion); I wish to deal with something more general and foundational.

Check out this quotation from the Vanity Fair story (heads up: if you follow the link, remember the nature of VF’s photography): 

“This place doesn’t just take on evolution—it squares off with geology, anthropology, paleontology, history, chemistry, astronomy, zoology, biology, and good taste. It directly and boldly contradicts most -onomies and all -ologies, including most theology.”

(h-tip: Scott Lamb , who notes that the VF story seems surprised by this wide-ranging engagement on the part of the museum.)

Now compare that with this quotation from Abraham Kuyper:

“In the total expanse of human life there is not a single square inch of which the Christ, who alone is sovereign, does not declare, “That is mine.”

These two statements distill the essential difference between a secularist worldview and a Christian one.

A Christian worldview is relentlessly unified, viewing knowledge itself as pointing to an ultimate unity.  Christ is Lord over all (Acts 10:36 & Phil. 2:10-12).  He is reconciling all things (2 Cor. 5:19).  We are called to take captive every thought to Christ (2 Cor. 10:5).  Indeed, the hermeneutical key to the entire universe is God’s self-revelation of Himself.

A secularist worldview is hopelessly fractured.  Each academic discipline is a silo.  Each perspective on the world, no matter how contradictory, is equally valid; there are no “priorities.”  Each opinion is entitled to a seat at the table of ideas (except, of course, for any opinion that dares to point out the logical inconsistencies of the other opinions).  There can be no meaningful interpretive key for knowledge because there is only disintegration and brokenness among the various stakeholders.

Once we understand these radical differences, we can see how high the stakes of the conversation really are, and how far-reaching, whether in cultural issues or theological disputes.

Okay, can I admit that I have an utter fascination with Christopher Hitchens?  While I grieve for the state of his soul, I admire his intellect and his ability to cut to the heart of an issue.  Perhaps it’s because he’s an intellectual ninja who is, unlike of most public intellectuals, honest and straightforward.

I mention this because I ran across a recent interview with him by a Unitarian minister in Oregon (h-tip to Matt Friedeman).  When the interviewer says, “I don’t believe in the doctrine of atonement (that Jesus died for our sins, for example),” Hitchens produces, completely off the cuff, an incredible defense of the necessity for Christians to believe in the resurrection.  The best line, perhaps, is when he taunts her: “If all Christians were like you, I wouldn’t have to write the book.”  Ouch!

Clearly Hitchens knows his Sun Tzu: “If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the results of a hundred battles” (from The Art of War).  I wish all of my fellow believers understood the scale of the stakes the way that Hitchens does. 

The interview is here.

Before we move too far beyond the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, I thought I’d post one more thought about the subject. After I’d had my moment when babies became real (see my last post), I had an overlapping experience that greatly shaped my understanding of literature.

While I teach English now, that was not my major in college, so when I decided to pursue graduate work in literature, I had to take some courses to demonstrate my analytical skills. In one class, our professor taught Ernest Hemingway’s brilliant short story, “Hills like White Elephant,” which is about a young couple contemplating the prospect of an abortion.

The story is intense. The man tries desperately to convince her that it’s no big deal. “It’s not really anything,” he says. “It’s just to let the air in.” He asserts, “We’ll be fine afterwards. Just like we were before.”

Our professor used that “let the air in” line to talk about symbolism. “It’s not just letting ‘air’ into the woman’s uterus, it’s letting ‘air’ into their lives. The procedure will let their relationship continue to breathe. It’s symbolic air.”

Since I had developed my thoughts on abortion fairly recently, I read the story as a damning indictment of the man’s calloused failure to protect his romantic interest and their child. I thought it was a great illustration of the seriousness of the issue. To my utter disappointment, the professor never said a word about the ethics of the fictional discussion. The couple could have been buying a can of beans for all our in-class analysis indicated. There was no passion (in either direction of the issue) and no wrestling with the realities of the rhetoric. We learned about the facts and techniques of the story but we didn’t learn anything from it.

Since I knew that I wanted to teach English, I decided then and there that I would never teach students about literature without making sure that they learned from it. Sure, I would teach the technical characteristics and historical contexts, are incredibly powerful tools for analysis, but I thought there should be so much more: a look at how literature can inform our own thoughts in terms of ethics. I don’t mean that I was going to be an ideologue who used literature to make my point at the expense of serious discussion, but I wanted for my students to know that they could argue over the most important issues of the day based on their readings of important works of literature. I wanted them to know that literature is a living, breathing commentary on our lives and our world.

Ethical readings of literature ruled the pedagogical roost until the twentieth century. I personally think that one of the reasons for the decline of English as an undergraduate major is because students aren’t dull enough to sit through hours of professors telling them that words don’t mean anything. Such an approach has caused the study of literature to rise up like yet another intellectual white elephant.

January 22nd is the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision. In anticipation of the events marking this date, I thought I’d tell the two-part story of when babies became real to me, whether in utero or in bassinets.

As a high school guy, my world rarely included babies. None of my friends had them, I never helped in the church nursery, and at that time, the early 1980s, pregnant classmates disappeared for visits to relatives in other states. I wasn’t pro-choice, which would have been the “cool” position, but I wasn’t pro-life either; I’d just never thought about it much. Babies were, well, an abstraction. They didn’t really exist in my world.

In college, I spent most of my time in the campus science building, which was crammed with carefully prepared specimens, charts, and cabinets. One particular cabinet, a tall glass case with four or five rows of shelves, caught my eye from the start. The case contained thirty-odd jars, each containing a human fetus at a different week’s gestational development. From the tiniest speck in the smallest jar to a nearly full-term specimen in the largest, the fetuses floated in a state of suspension, palish pink in the fluorescent lights. A small placard on one shelf noted that the contents had been collected from “spontaneously aborted pregnancies” at the local hospital.

One day a classmate showed me that if the cabinet were hit in a certain way, the jars would slosh slightly, causing the specimens to move slightly. We laughed at this, touched by the absurdity of so many fetuses wiggling in unison. It was surreal.

Sometime later, I repeated this move for a friend, bumping the cabinet with my hip sharply and saying, “Look at the babies waving!” On cue, the specimens shuddered, the more advanced ones moving their arms slightly.

I froze at the sight: I no longer saw fetuses. I saw babies. Jars of babies, from the tiniest, most fragile, to the largest, most viable-looking child. I was horrified that I had made a joke out of it. This was the start of my shift from neutrality to having a firm opinion that babies were babies, no matter their stage of development.

A few years later, a very good friend of mine, a high schooler, became pregnant. I watched her make the determination to carry the baby to term, eventually placing the child up for adoption. I heard about the callow comments their fellow church members made. I knew about the rumors she dealt with at school. I saw her transform into a godly woman who understood grace in a way that was real, as she restarted her life after her child was born. She is one of the people I most respect in this world.

One off-hand comment from that experience has rung in my ears for almost three decades now: “The people who are the most vocal opponents of abortion are sometimes the very ones who most make young women want to have one. It’s easier to have one and keep it secret than to deal with the tongue clucking.” I was horrified for a second time, realizing that my own snarky words had, at times, not treated those babies like real babies.

Revelation 13:8 reminds us that the names recorded in the Lamb’s Book of Life were written “from the foundation of the world.” This verse underscores the longevity of our relationships with God: through His foreknowledge, He knew our names before He shaped the dust of the ground into Adam. Life does not begin at conception, then, but rather, in a very real way, with the asynchronous relationship that God has with us. As Psalm 139:16 notes, God planned our days “before a single one of them began.”

If a baby could be so real to God at the foundation of the world that He would peer into history and know that child, the least we can do is find ways to protect that child, in the womb, throughout her life, and at the eventual end of her days in this world. This means being pro-life at every stage, whether we are advocating for the unborn, working for justice for the poor and the oppressed, or protecting the elderly from so-called “pragmatic healthcare.” Babies, and people, are real.

Recently I opened a jury duty summons for one of our local courts. My report date hasn’t arrived quite yet, but I’m looking forward to the possibility of serving. I’ve only been empanelled once and it was a nightmare; I’m hoping for a better experience this time. The accused was clearly guilty; everyone identified him as the culprit (it was a robbery and stabbing), there were multiple witnesses, and the case was solid from start to finish. The accused even admitted that he had done it, but he claimed, with a straight face, to have stabbed the guy “accidentally” four, count ‘em, four times: once in the chest and three times in the back after he flipped the victim over. He threw the icepick (he claimed it was a meat thermometer) into a river, he said, while fleeing to another state because he was afraid that he would be charged with a crime.

Incredibly, we ended with a hung jury because one of my fellow jurors kept saying, “Who am I to judge this man?” It was a case of eleven angry men and women and one owner of a half-baked hermeneutical approach to Scripture, in this case Matthew 7:1-3, which she had denuded over and over in a refrain of its first two words: “Judge not.”

If we take that verse out of context, not only from Matthew 7 but from the broad panorama of Scripture, we then are left with a kind of soft anarchism that leaves all possibility of justice from the earth, expecting God to act as a legal deus ex machine whose failure to intervene in the smallest instances of justice leave us paralyzed to act. If there is no justice, no consistent, measured kind of justice, in this life, then how can we have any hope of knowing justice in this world? Instead of passing the buck to some sort of moral deism, the point of the passage is that justice begins in our relationship with God: we are called to judge ourselves first according to God’s standards, and to act on God’s behalf out of a sense of holy humility and righteous integrity that expresses itself in concern for the oppressed, no matter who they may be.

This is particularly important to the form of government that we enjoy in our nation. If I were on trial, I would find hope and comfort if I could be assured that the judge and jurors would base their deliberations out of a sense of prayer, fairness, and adherence to the highest standards of the law. If I were a victim, I would find the same kind of comfort in such knowledge. I hope that I can be that kind of juror when I am called upon.