All posts by Phil

Poetry

Irony of Academic Distance

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Mindy Withrow talks about Poet Billy Collins:

He delights in paradoxes. In “Table Talk,” a dinner companion “asked if anyone had ever considered / applying the paradoxes of Zeno to the maryrdom of St. Sebastian.” All during the meal, pondering Zeno’s theory that no moment ever really arrives but only draws closer by half, Collins “kept thinking of the arrows forever nearing / the pale, quivering flesh of St. Sebastian, / a fleet of them forever halving the tiny distances / to his body, tied to a post with rope, / even after the archers had packed it in and gone home.” But then he wryly observes that “my fork continued to arrive at my mouth / delivering morsels of asparagus and crusted fish.”

Fiction

Chekhov Writes about Nicole Kidman, Eminem, etc.

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Ryan Britt praises Ben Greenman’s efforts in his short story collection, Celebrity Chekhov: Stories by Anton Chekhov (P.S.). Ryan says, “Speculative fiction should not only push the boundaries of what is possible in the various dimensions of existence, but also what is possible within the boundaries of creative expression itself. In this way, Celebrity Chekhov is no laughing matter, but actually quite profound. However, you’ll probably laugh out loud anyway.”

Religion

Our Self-swindling Hearts

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Burk Parsons on whether trials are meant to make us stronger:

When we as a human race fell into sin, our affections changed, and we who once had the ability not to sin became a people who could not help but sin and even found pleasure in sin, albeit fleeting pleasure. Sin ravaged our hearts and minds, and, like Tolkien’s Gollum, we began to wallow in the mire of sin-dependent idolatry all the while maintaining our autonomy from God and our supreme, though perceived, control over any and all our precious little idols, each of which possessed an uncanny resemblance to ourselves. . . .

Both the enemy within us and the enemies outside us exist as a natural result of the Fall, and in their natural course of existence they fight daily to gain our affection, allegiance, and dependence. Like Gollum’s precious little idol that seemed to want to be found, our self-swindling hearts seem to want us to find our immediate and ultimate fulfillment in anything that lures our dependence away from God. Meanwhile, our Enemy is content simply to draw our affections to anything but the one true God, and thus to make us less dependent on God and increasingly dependent on ourselves and on our hearts’ precious idols, which will come alive and do our bidding.

Writing

Inability

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Novelist Geoff Dyer talks about the craft in The Guardian. “Writers are defined, in large measure, by what they can’t do. The mass of things that lie beyond their abilities force them to concentrate on the things they can,” he says. You can’t practice through your weaknesses like a tennis player, but neither is your work as defined as tennis is. One thing’s for certain: “it’s far easier to give advice about writing than it is to do it.” (via Andy Crouch and Alan Jacobs)

Poetry

"The Perfection of Beauty"

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And now, a bit of performance poetry from rapper shai linne with Blair Linne presenting.

shai linne – “The Perfection of Beauty” ft. Blair Linne (Official Trailer) from Lamp Mode Recordings on Vimeo.

Authors, Fiction

The Offensive Stories of O'Connor

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Jonathan Rogers has written a spiritual biography of Flannery O’Connor. He writes about it here, saying, “People are offended by Flannery O’Connor’s stories, and they ought to be. They’re offensive… [They are] startling figures drawn for the almost-blind… If the stories offend conventional morality, it is because the gospel itself is an offense to conventional morality. Grace is a scandal; it always has been. Jesus put out the glad hand to lepers and cripples and prostitutes and losers of every stripe even as he called the self-righteous a brood of vipers.”

Fiction, Religion

Making Culture Courageously

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Filmmaker Anthony Parisi makes some good points in his overly negative review of the movie, Courageous. He writes:

Films like this reinforce the unfortunate impulse that anything we create must be explicitly “Christianized” or evangelistic. Churches are to spread the kingdom not by some sort of cultural revival but by the unglamorous life of local ministry God has founded on Word and sacrament. Making movies falls far outside the bounds of what the church has been called to do.

I sympathize with that first sentence. I chafe at the notion of seeing every cultural good in terms its value for evangelism. But I can’t agree with his next two sentences. Perhaps he means the institutional church should not make movies, and he’s probably right, but the church, as in the whole body of Christ or all Christians, should make movies if they have the skills and talent to do so. That’s what Mr. Parisi does himself or a variation of it.

Andy Crouch argues in his book, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling, that the only way to change culture is to make culture. Criticizing and boycotting the cultural goods others have made doesn’t go far enough, because we aren’t making anything to take the place of what we don’t like. With Sherwood Pictures, we have a group of people making movies (and movie tie-in material), and I wonder if they haven’t climbed up to a level where the Chesterton maxim applies: Anything that’s worth doing is worth doing badly.

Movies are not teaching illustrations. I felt that strain while watching Fireproof. Clearly, Mr. Parisi would make different movies, perhaps even better ones. Showing more of what Christ did for us and less of our moral lifestyle, as he says, would improve the story, but I think Courageous is a respectable story in its own right. It isn’t a bad film. I don’t say anything worth doing is worthy doing badly to say Courageous is a terrible movie. I mean it’s good movie which could be a lot better, if the producers had pushed toward the things Mr. Parisi describes. “The gospel,” he observes, “pulls us out of our fragile self-worth built on performance and centers our identity on God’s love for us in Christ.” If one of the Courageous movie characters had been shown blowing it repeated and asking his wife and children’s forgiveness, pointing to the grace of Christ in his life despite his sin, that would have been powerful. Perhaps something like that can make it into the next film. I wish them the best on it.

Speaking of movie tie-in material, I encourage you to look into this four-week study on fatherhood issues produced as a follow-up to the movie.

Uncategorized

Have They Discovered the Kracken's Lair?

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The four boats were soon on the water; Ahab’s in advance, and all swiftly pulling towards their prey. Soon it went down, and while, with oars suspended, we were awaiting its reappearance, lo! in the same spot where it sank, once more it slowly rose. Almost forgetting for the moment all thoughts of Moby Dick, we now gazed at the most wondrous phenomenon which the secret seas have hitherto revealed to mankind. A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing cream-color, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to catch at any hapless object within reach. No perceptible face or front did it have; no conceivable token of either sensation or instinct; but undulated there on the billows, an unearthly, formless, chance-like apparition of life.

As with a low sucking sound it slowly disappeared again, Starbuck still gazing at the agitated waters where it had sunk, with a wild voice exclaimed- “Almost rather had I seen Moby Dick and fought him, than to have seen thee, thou white ghost!”

“What was it, Sir?” said Flask.

It was not a Kracken, but a great squid which Starbuck said was rarely seen by whalers who lived to tell about it over a warm pint on shore. It was another sign of their doom.

Paleontologist Mark McMenamin explains how he may have discovered the Kracken’s liar by finding “markings on the bones of the remains of nine 45-foot (14 meter) ichthyosaurs of the species Shonisaurus popularis.” The bones are neatly arranged, as if the skeletons were taken back to the monster’s lair after succumbing. McMenamin doubts he will find evidence of a Kracken itself, because only the creature’s beak would have been hard enough to fossilize.