All posts by Phil

Fiction, Reviews

The Cross in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Leave a comment

The third season of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. came to a close this month on an interesting Christological note. I’ve been a fan of the show since the beginning and never had the complaints I read from others that it was too slow, didn’t have enough super powers, and whatever else. It’s a good show, and it didn’t get canceled like Agent Carter did (which is another good show, great show even, and it stinks that it’s cancelled.) The most recent season of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. focuses on a vision one of the agents has of someone’s death, and central to that vision is a cross pendant.

I doubt I can keep from spoilers.

The season opens with the vision. A ship in space, the arc of the earth through the cockpit windshield, the cross pendant and necklace suspended in air, and a S.H.I.E.L.D. logo on a sleeve. No face or identifiers of who, if anyone, might be in that aircraft. We learn after a few shows that an Inhuman (a substitutionary word for “mutant” with its own extraterrestrial history) has the ability to foresee details of a death when he touches someone. This ability brings him into contact with Daisy Johnson (Chloe Bennet), the Inhuman agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. who is working on putting together an Inhuman tactical team, and when they touch each other, they see the vision of the cross on a ship in space.

“I’ve seen the future,” she tells her team, “and one of us is going to die.”  Continue reading The Cross in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. →

Non-fiction, Religion

Wanting to Be Smarter Than God

Leave a comment

Sunrise

God in his grace also provides the solution: the God-man, the Word made flesh bore the sins of people of all nations in his body on the tree. We see him pinned there by our foolish pride. Our pride that thought it could build a tower bigger and better than God. That God that spoke us into existence with a word made his Word become flesh (Jn. 1:14) and that flesh was put to death on our behalf to save us from our wicked desire to be smarter than him.

Pastor Sean Nolan repents of his desire to be clever.

Authors

Did Bradbury Foresee a Bright or Dark Future?

2 Comments

Ray Bradbury is well known in two differing ways, as one of the bards of the dystopia to come and as an advocate for a great, big, beautiful tomorrow. Patrick West describes the difference.

We see the former in The Martian Chronicles.

‘We Earth Men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things’, says one trooper in the story ‘And the Moon be Still as Bright’: ‘The only reason we didn’t set up hot-dog stands in the midst of the Egyptian temple of Karnak is because it was out of the way and served no large commercial purpose.’ Man can leave his own planet, but he can never escape himself.

We saw the latter in the newspapers.

In real life, however, Ray Bradbury was a well-known and vocal advocate of the liberating potential of space exploration. Alongside Arthur C Clarke and Isaac Asimov, he has been hailed by NASA historians as a visionary without whom the space programme would not have been possible.

(via Prufrock)

space travel is boring.

Religion

Join the Party of All Time

Leave a comment

Doug Ponder describes the party that began at the beginning and will last forever.

The Trinity is so saturated with truth and beauty and goodness that their delight in each other spilled over the banks, like the Nile in flood season, creating life where there was no life so that others might come to share in God’s joy. Creation was God’s divine invitation to join the party of the ages.

Non-fiction, Religion

What Good Is a Small Church?

Leave a comment

ChurchPastor Joe Thorn said he’s seen many small churches, some being the salt of the earth, some needing a smack upside the head. Last year, he wrote a four part series on what small churches can do in their communities.

  1. “As I have seen several churches in my area continue to dwindle in size I have watched the leadership of many of these churches settle into into one of three dangerous mentalities: elitism, defeatism, and survivalism. These are mentalities I know well as they have characterized my ministry at one time or another.”
  2. “Many smaller churches feel extremely limited by their size,” but they don’t have to compete with other churches for market share or apologize to anyone for their size.
  3. “Smaller churches are no less hindered from doing what God has called his people to do than are larger churches. Having more people does not maker it easier.”
  4. “My wife and I once attended a Reformed Baptist Church that fits my current definition of a “small” church. There was no worship leader. No choir. No instruments. No overhead projection. No cool lights. The building was plain-Jane. Yet their gathering was powerful. Why?”

Thorn has a “three-book series on the confession, nature, and expression of the Church” coming out this fall from Moody, which will likely cover these themes and much more.

Goofing

Bless Me with Virality

Leave a comment

Barnabas Piper offers this thoughtful, relevant prayer for many people all over the Interwebs.

Lord, make me viral,
Because despite public opinion publishing isn’t all that lucrative.

I know fame is fleeting and often harmful,
But I’m pretty sure I’m the exception to the rule.

That’s like almost from 3 Peter that. Read the rest through the link.

Music

Field Marshal Montgomery Pipe Band

Leave a comment

Winners of the 2014 World Pipe Band Championships in Glasgow, the Field Marshal Montgomery Pipe Band from Lisburn, County Antrim, under Pipe Major Richard Parkes MBE and Drum Sergeant Keith Orr. This was their fourth championship win in four years.

Authors

Damning Praise for Alexander Herzen

Leave a comment

Tolstoy thought Herzen (1812-70) was one of the finest prose writers of his time, and so did Turgenev and Dostoyevsky. He was also an editor, a political activist and a scathing and ironical polemicist, castigating equally the Russian despots in Petersburg and his fellow socialists in exile in London, Geneva and Paris. In the years between the European-wide revolutions of 1848 and the czar’s brutal suppression of the Polish insurrection of 1863, he was one of the most provocative revolutionary minds of his time. When he was buried at Père Lachaise in Paris in 1870, a mourner exclaimed: “To the Voltaire of the 19th century!” That is not how he has been remembered.

Michael Ignatieff reviews a book on Herzen that offers reasons for remembering the old Russian author in more welcoming terms than someone whom Lenin praised. (via Arts & Letters Daily)