All posts by Phil

Fiction

The Realism of “The Witch”

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I’ve read that the historical accuracy of this year’s powerful horror film The Witch is very strong, not just in the setting and costuming, but also in the roots of the story. A New England family isolates themselves in an effort to maintain their purity and in doing so imperil themselves. They aren’t entirely innocent victims of Satan’s disciples, but they cannot foresee the repercussions of what we might consider accusable sins.

Jeffrey Overstreet writes:

The realism of the film is also powerful because of how spiritual evil only seems to grow more and more persuasively present the more closely we attend to the real-world details, and the farther we travel through this time warp into the 17th Century. That has bothered some critics — that Eggers “literalizes” the evil forces that people believed in back then.

That’s a complaint from people who would snicker at the suggestion that the devil is an actual person, not a symbol of human ugliness or a boogeyman for our enemies. But you can’t literalize what is real.

Uncategorized

How Politically Diverse Are Christian Colleges?

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Historian Thomas Kidd says he’s long had a theory about Christian colleges and universities. He thinks they “may be the best educational institutions today for fostering real political diversity.”

My theory is that if Christ is the center of a Christian university, that commitment can open the door for a real range of views on politics, because politics becomes a second-order priority. (Traditional seminaries, I would argue, are a different matter— there you must have stricter theological standards that tend to produce more uniformity in all areas of life and thought.)

He offered this theory to historian Molly Oshatz, who has written about hypersensitivity to differing points of view in elite colleges. She attested to the truth of this theory, citing experience at Florida State.

… my classes there included many students with strong faith commitments who were able to bring their perspective to the classroom in appropriate ways. Perhaps even more importantly, their fellow students responded to these contributions with respect and civility. A politically, religiously, and ­ideologically diverse student body, as well as a faculty that did not see their job as one of indoctrination, made for an excellent teaching environment.

Poetry

Can Poetry Be Popular, Fun Again?

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No one has perfected a method to restore poetry’s place in public culture. It is unlikely that the art will ever return to the central position it once held. But is it unreasonable to hope that poetry can acquire some additional vitality or that the audience can be increased? Isn’t it silly to assume that current practices represent the best way to sustain the art into the future? There are surely opportunities for innovation, renovation, and improvement. Literary culture needs new ideas.

Poet Dana Gioia learned “students actually liked poetry once they took it off the page.” He recommends exploring new ways to revive the place of poems in our lives.

Poetry

Hatin’ on Poetry

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Ben Lerner’s elegant, amusing essay turns on a distinction between Poetry and poems. Poetry is Caedmon’s dream, a virtual ideal that actual poems can’t live up to. “The fatal problem with poetry,” Lerner writes, is “poems.” Every poet is, inevitably, “a tragic figure.”

Peter J. Leithart reviews Lerner’s 96 page essay on the aspirations and failures of poetry. “Poetry isn’t hard,” Lerner says, “it’s impossible.”

Speaking of the impossible: Wendy Cope.

He tells her that the earth is flat —
He knows the facts and that is that.

Read the rest of Cope’s poem.

Religion

Babel Was Not a Model for Segregation

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Segregation Signs

Last month, the Presbyterian Church in America officially repented of its members’ involvement in racial discord in the Civil Rights era and beyond, including “the segregation of worshipers by race; the exclusion of persons from Church membership on the basis of race; the exclusion of churches, or elders, from membership in the Presbyteries on the basis of race; the teaching that the Bible sanctions racial segregation and discourages inter-racial marriage; the participation in and defense of white supremacist organizations; and the failure to live out the gospel imperative that ‘love does no wrong to a neighbor’ (Romans 13:10).”

Jemar Tisby, who is the director of the African American Leadership Initiative and Special Assistant to the Chancellor at Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, Mississippi, explains what encourages him about the PCA’s resolution.

The problem with not having an explicit statement repudiating racism, especially during the Civil Rights Movement, as a Southern Presbyterian denomination is that African Americans and other ethnic minorities will always wonder, “Are these folks still cool with racism?” That’s putting it bluntly, but there’s truth to it. As a black person in an overwhelmingly white branch of the church, I have to constantly evaluate whether I’m truly welcome here or not. A strong statement repenting, not just of racism generally, but the more recent lack of vocal support for racial equality during the Civil Rights Movement, is necessary because silence about the matter tacitly communicates either support or indifference.

One charge related to the PCA is the view by some founders and members that racial segregation is a biblical directive.  Continue reading Babel Was Not a Model for Segregation →

Fiction

In Which Sin Is Like Smoke

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“Imagine a world in which sin is visible,” writes Hannah Beckerman in her review of Dan Vyleta’s fantasy novel, Smoke.

In which anger, lust, envy and avarice erupt in plumes of smoke and the clothes of the sinful are stained in dark soot. In which London is a city of vice, inhabited only by degenerates, its air polluted not with diesel but with transgression, its sewers running with the soot of sinners.

Reading

Reading in Parking Lot Seen as Suspicious Behavior

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A thirty-three year old, former high school English teacher spent a couple hours at Stonehaven Wharf, “a parking lot for fishing boats that’s frequented by tourists to the Canadian province of New Brunswick,” according to the Washington Post. He sat in his small white hatchback, reading Lewis’ Mere Christianity and a book by Tim Keller.

On his way home, he was pulled over by Canadian police, because someone had reported his behavior as suspicious. Of course, the officer quickly saw there was nothing suspicious about the Hamilton, Ontario native, and wished him well. The driver said:

I do not know the true motivations behind the individual who called the police to report my presence at the Stonehaven Wharf, but I struggle to understand why my actions of driving my vehicle to a public space, reading a book, and never once exiting my vehicle was cause for a level of suspicion which prompted this individual to call the police.

Fiction

Nothing to Hide by J. Mark Bertrand

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She rolls her eyes. “The Song of Roland. Don’t get me started. That was the first one we had to read. If that’s chivalry, then you can have it. That book infuriates me.”

“Really.” I flip through the pages, many of which are underscored. I’m familiar with the story, of course, though I can’t recall having actually read the poem. In fact, before now I’m not sure I realized it was a poem, with all the stanzas and verses. “He’s supposed to blow the horn to signal the ambush, is that it?”

“He’s supposed to blow it if they need help. Only Roland’s too proud for that, so he waits and waits until everybody’s basically dead. Does that sound like heroism to you?”


Bertrand’s third thrilling novel in his Roland March series begins with a body dumped in a recreational park. The head is missing and the hands, one of which is pointing, have been ‘degloved,’ which is a clinical word for skinned. March’s partner on the case, Jerry Lorenz, suggests the hand is pointing at something, maybe the missing head, and March nearly breaks his back looking for it. No dice.

I don’t care to outline the plot any further, because I enjoyed jumping into this novel having forgotten almost everything I’d heard about it. It’s a fun story, as are all of Bertrand’s March novels. Personal moments are filled with dialogue like the above interchange on The Song of Roland, showing Bertrand’s appealing bookish style. This brief description of the poem absolutely foreshadows the plot, which is exactly the way they do it in the movies, which reminds me how someone should be throwing money at Bertrand for the honor of taking his March trilogy to the big screen.

March isn’t any kind of super cop or brilliantly quirky detective. He’s a seasoned professional, like many homicide detectives on the force today. He has overcome the difficulties of his past, put numerous criminals behind bars, and continues to seek (and question) trust from his colleagues. He solves his cases by hard, honest work: asking questions, following leads, and pressuring forensics to cough up the right evidence. Like the title suggests, Nothing to Hide drives its story to a bold climax where all cards are on the table and everyone’s exposed.