Religion

Hating Your Brother

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I was born and raised in the South. I’m glad to be a Southern. I think y’all is a great word–not a stupid slang term like you’uns. The literature of the South is better than it is everywhere else. But I hate stories like this:

[Dad] must have been about thirty years old at the time, a young man, sitting in that room with all his elders, trying to be respectful. But finally he said, “This church doesn’t belong to us. It belongs to Jesus Christ. And I don’t think he would keep anyone from joining because of their skin color.” And the man who had chaired the search committee looked at my dad and said, “Son, I don’t know what kind of religion they taught you in seminary, but we’ve only got one kind of religion here, and it’s that good old Southern religion.”

Pastor Jim Somerville writes about his father’s brief stint as a pastor of a Presbyterian church in Alabama sometime in the ’70s. How could so many goats fill the churches in southern states back then? What blindness do we have today, if lies like racism can live freely among God’s people at any given time?

Religion

The Friday Fight: Apollyon

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“Whilst Christian is among his godly friends,

Their golden mouths make him sufficient mends

For all his griefs; and when they let him go,

He’s clad with northern steel from top to toe.”

But now, in this valley of Humiliation, poor Christian was hard put to it; for he had gone but a little way before he espied a foul fiend coming over the field to meet him: his name is Apollyon.

(Artist Justin Gerard did some fantastic work on Pilgrim’s Progress, but the illustrations are no longer online. You can view his work on his website, Gallery Gerard.)

Then did Christian begin to be afraid, and to cast in his mind whether to go back, or to stand his ground. But he considered again, that he had no armor for his back, and therefore thought that to turn the back to him might give him greater advantage with ease to pierce him with his darts; therefore he resolved to venture and stand his ground: for, thought he, had I no more in mine eye than the saving of my life, it would be the best way to stand.

So he went on, and Apollyon met him. Now the monster was hideous to behold: he was clothed with scales like a fish, and they are his pride; he had wings like a dragon, and feet like a bear, and out of his belly came fire and smoke; and his mouth was as the mouth of a lion. When he was come up to Christian, he beheld him with a disdainful countenance, and thus began to question him. Continue reading The Friday Fight: Apollyon →

Fiction

Cinema: the devil’s zoetrope

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Tonight’s dyspeptic screed concerns the essential dishonesty of movies.

Which I mean in the most positive sense.

I’m not going to go off on a classic Christian Fundamentalist jeremiad against Hollywood as the Whore of Babylon, the cancer that is slowing destroying our culture.

(Although, when I read those old denunciations, I’m struck by two things: 1) they were in general factually correct, and 2) all the bad effects the critics predicted that movies would bring about have in fact come to pass. You can’t fault them as prophets.)

But my subject is the dishonesty that is inherent (it seems to me) in the medium.

Christians of a legalistic bent often complain that fiction is, by definition, “just lying stories.”

Without getting into that argument, I think I’m justified in saying that novels are scrupulously truthful when compared to movies. Continue reading Cinema: the devil’s zoetrope →

Goofing

Earth Hour, One Better

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Earth Hour 2009 is a movement to get one billion people to turn off their lights for an hour on March 28. Nice, but small-minded. I believe the blogscape can do one better. We can hold our breath for that hour as well.

Think of impact on carbon-dioxide levels if mankind would just be willing to hold its breath for the short, sixty minutes that make up an hour. The world would never be the same. Of course, some volcano could blow and undo all the good we accomplished, but think of the personal impact holding your breath would have on you and your family. Just think of it.

Non-fiction, Religion

More Free Books

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For March only, Donald Whitney’s great book, Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life, is available in audio from Christianaudio.com for free. You have to go through a normal check out and use a coupon code at the end to download it in seven mp3s. This book is very strong. If you haven’t read it and wouldn’t mind listening through it, you can pull it down now. See the author’s home page for details.

Also, I have neglected to tell you about a book on 1 Corinthians 13 by my pastor. It’s call The Most Excellent Way, and I recommend it to you–especially if your Pentecostal.

Uncategorized

The cons of Cons

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When I have an earworm, you must suffer.

Actually, the earworm’s a pretty good one. “Solace,” (also known as “Mexican Serenade”) by Scott Joplin. I picked up a cheap DVD of the movie, “The Sting,” and watched it Sunday, and now the song’s stuck in my brain (I was going to embed a YouTube performance, but couldn’t find one I liked).

“The Sting” got me thinking about the general falseness of the film medium in general, and the general awfulness of con men in particular. I’ll leave my deathless thoughts on movies for tomorrow. My subject tonight is con men.

One of the standard dishonesties of the cinema is to make us like somebody by putting them up against somebody even worse. The Man With No Name in the Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns, for instance, wasn’t particularly admirable, but he was an absolute saint compared to the desperadoes he gunned down. In the same way, the makers of “The Sting” got us to tolerate—even delight in—the dishonesty of the protagonists by making them the little guys, trying to get some revenge on the vicious crime lord, The Big Mick, who killed their friend Luther. Continue reading The cons of Cons →

The Press

Failure and Calls For It

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Bill Sammon has a remarkable report on certain Democrats desire for Bush to fail prior to 9/11. The morning of September 11, 2001, strategist James Carville and pollster Stanley Greenberg told reporters they didn’t want George Bush to succeed.

Sammon writes, “‘We rush into these focus groups with these doubts that people have about him, and I’m wanting them to turn against him,’ Greenberg admitted. The pollster added with a chuckle of disbelief: ‘They don’t want him to fail. I mean, they think it matters if the president of the United States fails.'”

It does matter, but the country, the economy, and the president are not all the same. In this case, the less Obama’s campaign policies are enacted, the better the country will be in the long run.

In related news, Democrat and culture critic Camille Paglia calls the Obama administration harsh words. She states, “The orchestrated attack on radio host Rush Limbaugh, which has made the White House look like an oafish bunch of drunken frat boys. . . . Has the administration gone mad? This entire fracas was set off by the president himself, who lowered his office by targeting a private citizen by name.”

Also, “If Rush’s presence looms too large for the political landscape, it’s because of the total vacuity of the Republican leadership, which seems to be in a dithering funk.” [via AmSpecBlog]

Uncategorized

Words Carry Our Ideas and Their Consequences

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Lynn Vincent points out some word usage in a terrible story of a couple who had a miscarriage within a month of conception. To sum it up, the mother discharged the tissue naturally at home and then wanted to cremate their child properly. Miscommunication began between all officials involved, and soon the police had entered their apartment on a report that they were keeping human remains.

The coroner is quoted saying, “The husband was nothing other than cooperative and gracious, and I felt very bad for him. We run into cases where people don’t want anything to do with the baby, and here you run into circumstances where someone wants to do the right thing. I was a little surprised to see a detective there.”

Note the coroner used the word baby. Lynn writes: “But with abortion-on-demand, this country has created a linguistic looking glass: On one side of it, a baby is a baby and the parents of a dead baby grieve. But on the other side is a lethal Wonderland where, as Alice said, everything is ‘nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t. . . .'”

God help us.

Book Reviews, Creative Culture