I’m half way through.

I’ve finished the fall semester in my graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. I’ve completed 18 of the 36 credits I’ll need for graduation, and should have them all this time next year, the Lord willing. It’s all as time-consuming as I expected (no, more – I didn’t anticipate how intensive the work would be), but if I want to qualify for World Domination, sacrifices must be made.

I’ll try to post more often in the free time I’m about to have – the rest of December and most of January. But there are a lot of projects I’ve been putting off, and I find them clamoring for my evening time.

Anyway, thanks for your faithful readership.

Personally, I’m making physical progress. My new, android hip is working fine. The Original Manufacturer Equipment hip (the left one) still gives me some pain, but I’ve joined a health club and exercise it on a stationary bike three times a week. The improvement has been palpable, so I hope that with time I’ll be all better again.

And now, in keeping with the season, a Swedish Christmas song by Sissel:

Here’s a video of the panel discussion held October 24 during the 2014 Baylor Symposium on Faith and Culture, Faith and Film. It was called “The Lives of (Three) Others: Our Stories of Faith and Film.”

Participants:

• John Wilson, Editor of Books and Culture and Editor-at-Large for Christianity Today

• William Romanowski, Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences, Calvin College

• Alissa Wilkinson, Assistant Professor of English and Humanities, The King’s College and Film Critic for Christianity Today Movies

Godwin’s Law of Usenet discussions states that the longer a discussion of anything goes, the more likely someone will compare someone else to the Nazis. In other words, if you talk about My Little Pony in a discussion forum long enough, someone will call you a disciple of Hitler. So lets start this history post with our best foot forward.

Hilter admired Islam. “Both Hitler and Himmler had a soft spot for Islam. Hitler several times fantasized that, if the Saracens had not been stopped at the Battle of Tours, Islam would have spread through the European continent—and that would have been a good thing, since ‘Jewish Christianity’ wouldn’t have gone on to poison Europe.”

But Muslims did not return the admiration in full. “Few Muslims believed Nazi claims that Hitler was the protector of Islam, much less the Twelfth Imam, as one Reich pamphlet suggested. The Nazis’ anti-Jewish propaganda no doubt attracted many Muslims, as historian Jeffrey Herf has documented, but they balked at believing that Hitler would be their savior or liberator. . . . In the end, more Muslims wound up fighting for the Allies than for the Axis.” (via Prufrock)

Crossway Books is preparing “to distribute 250,000 free copies of the ESV Global Study Bible, to strategic leaders in strategic places, where the need is greatest.” They have large matching grants in place and ask for our help to get these Bibles printed and distributed. They are praying to receive the needed funds by December 31.

The ESV Global Study Bible has 12,000 study notes adapted from the popular ESV Study Bible, plus a global application of each book, fourteen articles written by global Christian leaders, introductions and timelines for each Bible book, nearly 900 highlighted Bible facts, and more.

With NaNoWriMo coming to a close, let’s look at November again as National Novel Generation Month. It’s the month in which you write code that will spew forth a 50,000 word composition when you’re done and work out the bugs. “Reading an entire generated novel is more a feat of endurance than a testament to the quality of the story, which tends to be choppy, flat, or incoherent by the standards of human writing,” remarks the guy who came up with NaNoGenMo last year. You might read a few pages here and there, but really, this isn’t Raymond Chandler. It’s not even on the same city block.

Caitlin Roper tells the story. “Once upon a time, around the turn of the century, in the sunny town of Burbank, there was a great old animation company that was no longer great. Its films were various kinds of bad, but they all had some things in common: They didn’t resonate with audiences, they didn’t introduce unforgettable characters, and they didn’t sell tickets or DVDs.”

Disney Animation wasn’t being run by artists anymore, perhaps not even by people who loved movies, Roper says. They had unremarkable business people picking stories and making movies happen.

“Disney’s movies just seemed to lack … heart,” Roper says. “Take Home on the Range. From its predictable opening song to its by-the-numbers plot about a cow that’s lost her home and her friends, the movie was a dusty ride through stock archetypes and one-note sidekicks. In contrast, Pixar’s The Incredibles, which came out the same year, immediately introduced audiences to a unique and relatable protagonist as he struggles to attach a microphone to his spandex supersuit…. Mr. Incredible may be a superhero, but he’s just like us. That epitomizes Pixar’s approach to storytelling. ‘The connection you make with your audience is an emotional connection,’ Lasseter says. ‘The audience can’t be told to feel a certain way. They have to discover it themselves.’”

In Theodore Dalrymple’s essay “Eternal Youth, Eternal Kitsch,” we learn of the dangers of inscribing a book to just about anyone. Of course, the reason a book has been discarded and subsequently found in a second-hand shop isn’t necessarily singular, so you might dedicate a copy of Love Everlasting to “My Dearest Wife without whom I could not live” and find that you no longer have the space for it in your library (or that the story was pretty awful) and, despite the love note, discard it. I find the book in a second-hand shop, I am not forced to conclude that your love did not last. But there are other lessons. (via Anecdotal Evidence)

One of the lessons it teaches is that one should never inscribe a book intended as a gift with a poem of one’s own, for it is sure to be bad and probably pretentious, ridiculous in the eyes of anyone other than the person one wishes to impress with it. Bad poetry fulfils a social function, of course, for reading bad poetry is an easy way to learn to appreciate good poetry; but still the rule holds that if you feel a compulsion to inscribe a gift with poetry, it is best to quote someone else’s.

I’m familiar with three of the people you see in this trailer, and I’m confident in the quality of their work. On that basis I’m sure this is worthy watching with a small group. It asks what our salvation is for and offers compelling answers.

Joshua Rogers, writing for Focus on the Family, says, “I suppose the most remarkable thing was how the series helped me fall in love with the Gospel in a way that I hadn’t since that awesome spaceship-themed Vacation Bible School at Calvary Baptist Church when I was in fifth grade.” He means that in the best way possible and gets the director to answer some questions on his objectives.

Andy Crouch says, “It is designed to help the church reclaim our true calling: to live out our salvation, in the words its title borrows from the Orthodox writer Alexander Schmemann, “for the life of the world.” …Schmemann’s breathtaking sacramental view of ordinary life is here, as are Kuyper’s distinctive spheres” (subscription required).

Learn more about For the Life of the World here.

Mike Cosper, pastor of worship and arts at Sojourn Community Church in Louisville, Kentucky, has a new book on the stories we tell and our longing for truth. Here are some quotes of his ideas carried in Christianity Today.

“When people, against their better judgment, find themselves hooked on a show, we can trace the line back to find the hook in their imagination.”

“Our most perfect creations—our efforts at playing God— always stumble into the inherent problem of human weakness, creation’s unpredictability, and the impending threat of evil.”

“If we believe the Bible to be true, we must admit that there is more to this world than we perceive. Powers and persons that we can’t see or comprehend are at work, but somehow we intuit them. That intuition works itself out in our imaginations, and we tell stories that try to explain what we feel and comfort us from fear of the shadows.”

One of his chapters is entitled “Honey Boo Boo and the Weight of Glory.” That’s probably worth the price of the book alone.

A judge for the Noble Prize for Literature said professional writers suck and are dragging everyone down with them. Judge Horace Engdahl remarked, “Previously, writers would work as taxi drivers, clerks, secretaries and waiters to make a living. Samuel Beckett and many others lived like this. It was hard – but they fed themselves, from a literary perspective.”

They soaked in Parisian culture too, which I assume is important to the world of letters. Honestly I can’t tell if Engdahl is making a great point or a silly one. On the surface of it, he seems to be the voice of the establishment complaining that the establishment is cannibalizing itself.

Observer critic Robert McCrum said: “Engdahl’s bracing remarks reflect quite a lot of informal comment within some senior parts of the literary community, especially those grey cadres that are anti-American. At face value, these comments are an odd mixture of grumpy old man and Nordic romantic. I’m not sure that the author’s garret is the guarantor of excellence.”