Novelist and neocon Roger L. Simon hasn’t started believing in God again, after a lifetime of atheism.

He’s just beginning to have some doubts.

The doubts rise, not from an experience of God, but from a confrontation with Evil. He writes of his experience at the Durban II conference:

Well, just as there are no atheists in foxholes, maybe no one is an atheist when confronted with what he finally acknowledges to be Evil. If there is Evil, there must be Good, no? And some force governing this game, something that, well, looks over it.

I know I am being irrational here, so I will stop. Being in the presence of Ahmadinejad’s evil, fleeting and haltingly put me in the presence of something else.

Tip: Gene Edward Veith at Cranach.

Publishing update: Looks like the new book will actually be released sometime around May 22.



On Monday, I replaced my desk flag.

It must have been late in 1968, my first semester at Waldorf College, Forest City, Iowa, when I bought a miniature Norwegian flag on a stand-up base for my dorm room desk. It’s been with me ever since, in several states, and in several states of being. But only recently I noticed that, in addition to being kind of limp and faded, it had actually started to show holes, produced not by any kind of friction, but just by the aging of the fabric (nylon, I think).

So I sent away to Ingebretsen’s Scandinavian Shop for a replacement. And I had to discard the old flag.

This makes me sad. Continue reading Flag at half mast →

Patrol: I feel like, especially in my generation, there’s this backlash against Christian cheese.

Winter: Look, nobody starts out to make a bad movie. Everyone starts out with good intentions. People have differing skill sets to do that and different reasons and purposes.

I think that movies are better at entertaining people than transmitting content. And I think when we try to convince people of the truth of the Gospel, movies aren’t the way to do that. That’s where you can get in trouble. It would take tremendous skill to make a movie to do that. And I look at movies that just touch on it a little bit.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Ben-Hur. I just saw it—I watch it every Easter. It’s a powerful movie. And you never see Jesus’ face, you never hear him speak. The conversion process that happens for Judah Ben-Hur is after he stands at the cross and sees Jesus, he comes back to Esther, his then sort-of girlfriend, and says, “When he spoke, I felt the sword fall from my hand.”

And you know from that three-hour journey you’ve been on that that’s a big deal to him. And that’s his conversion; it happens off-screen. But you begin to see the results of that, it changes who he is and how he acts. Those are powerful, entertaining stories that make you question why. It would take a very, very skilled filmmaker that could figure out how to do that and be evangelistic without being cheesy. I can’t imagine at that moment what that movie would be. It’s better at asking questions. It’s better as an art form.

Mark Upton has an interesting post to a heart-breaking story on PRI’s This American Life. The whole show is interesting, but Mark’s focus is the story of man witnessing to woman over the phone. The dialogue we hear on the radio show sounds like the man was answering without fully listening. There’s a bit of conversation in the comments.

Benjamin Plotinsky writes about how religion, particularly Christianity, has surged in popular sci-fi and fantasy movies and books lately, overcoming dominate politic themes, but politics appears to be coming back a bit. He points to Star Wars as the best example, saying the original movies had a bit of Christian imagery, but nothing like the more recent prequels. “More generally, why has mainstream sci-fi and fantasy as a whole become so religious? One reason may be the religious revival that the United States and much of the world have been undergoing since the 1970s. This ‘revenge of God,’ in French scholar Gilles Kepel’s phrase, has seemingly begun to be felt even in secular Hollywood.”

Plotinsky points to the recent Battlestar Galactica series as an example of political themes coming back.