Sono pazzi questi Romani!
Discuss:
Your love is extravagant
Your friendship mmmmm intimate
I find I’m moving to the rhythms of Your grace
Your fragrance is intoxicating in our secret place
Your love is extravagant
My take on this "worship" song: Sung by one lover to another, it is erotic. Sung by the Church to its Creator and Saviour, it is obscene.
Music is a fair and lovely gift of God which has often wakened and moved me to the joy of preaching. St. Augustine was troubled in conscience whenever he caught himself delighting in music, which he took to be sinful. He was a choice spirit, and were he living today would agree with us. I have no use for cranks who despise music, because it is a gift of God. Music drives away the Devil and makes people gay; they forget thereby all wrath, unchastity, arrogance, and the like. Next after theology I give to music the highest place and the greatest honor. I would not exchange what little I know of music for something great. Experience proves that next to the Word of God only music deserves to be extolled as the mistress and governess of the feelings of the human heart. We know that to the devils music is distasteful and insufferable. My heart bubbles up and overflows in response to music, which has so often refreshed me and delivered me from dire plagues.
- Martin Luther, quoted in Roland Bainton, Here I Stand (New York: Abingdon, 1950) 341.
is up at Rebecca Writes. Looks like some good stuff this week. Coincidentally, Rebecca chose a George Herbert theme to present the posts; I read my first Herbert this weekend. My submission was my review of Life of Pi.
Other highlights:
Reynaldo Reynoso at the Bible Archive writes about God's work and man's response:
Healing is for the sick and salvation is for the sinner and Jesus said it the best to those haughty Pharisees who sniffed at Him asking “What, are we also blind?” He turned to them and said that they were not blind, for if that were the case they would need Him to heal them…yet they say they can see and that being the case their sin remains.
Theophilus at notes from the front lines has a challenging piece on the disconnect between our prayers and the confidence we actually have in them:
We were talking about how the "many people" who had gathered at Mary's house to pray for Peter's release from prison refused to believe it when he showed up on their doorstep in the middle of the night. Why not? They were obviously committed on some level to prayer -- they were meeting in the middle of the night to pray specifically for Peter, after all -- so why didn't it seem as if they were praying with any level of confidence or boldness? Why couldn't they believe it when God actually answered their prayers?
On the other hand, Ray Pritchard has a piece about the power of corporate prayer:
When we pray, things happen (in us and in the world around us) that would not have happened if we had not prayed. God has ordained that the prayers of his people are part of his plan to bless the world.
Belief Seeking Understanding has a nifty piece about the object lesson inherent in a drug store in the middle of nowhere. Hey, anything centred around roadside attractions is OK by me:
In 1936, as they were about to leave, they noticed a number of cars traveling on the nearby highway, and they realized that after driving through South Dakota on a hot day with no air conditioning, a glass of ice water would be like manna from heaven. So they made these series of Burma-Shave-like road signs, mentioning that they offered free ice water. It was a smash hit! Even a drugstore in the middle of nowhere can remind you of the words of Jesus when He said "And whoever in the name of a disciple gives to one of these little ones even a cup of cold water to drink, truly I say to you, he shall not lose his reward." Even a drugstore in the middle of nowhere can remind you of the words of Jesus when He said "Give and it shall be given to you."
Finally, despite her admitted inexperience, Ambra Nykol delivers a devastating counterblast against abortion on demand because of potential birth defects:
The lovely song of many women who have terminated their pregnancies for defectal reasons is of course, "I did it for love". This type of "love" believes that certain types of children will be better off dead in the womb than suffer in life. I suppose I can understand the logic. When the doctors are telling you that a child may not live beyond three months when born, why not end a life now to avoid more pain and suffering than necessary in the future. Why not? Because we are not God and we don't get the luxury of making such decisions. I realize this defies human logic, but that is the essence of faith.
Well, not quite.
According to the FilmCan Web site, the Mayfair Theatre was playing The Day After Tomorrow followed by The Core. "Great," I said to myself. "What better way to spend an otherwise useless Tuesday night than taking in two disaster movies notorious for implausible science?"
But it didn't turn out that way. There must have been a communications breakdown somewhere between the Mayfair people and the FilmCan people, because the second feature turned out not to be The Core, but The Corporation, a Canadian documentary by Mark Achbar (Manufacturing Consent). Oh well. I'd already paid for the double feature, and I'd never seen a documentary on the big screen before, so I decided to stick around anyway.
Dennis Quaid plays Jack Hall, a government paleoclimatologist researching the cause of the previous Ice Age in Antarctica when the entire Larsen B ice shelf decides to take a walk. He warns the United Nations that global warming is causing the icecaps to melt, which will ultimately result in a massive disruption of the Northern Hemisphere's moderate climate and a new Ice Age. Asked when this will occur, he opines, "Maybe a hundred years, maybe a thousand." Turns out he was about a hundred years off: the next day, the British Isles are at the centre of a massive storm system drawing supercooled air from the upper atmosphere, and all the Brits are Individually Quick Frozen. On the other side of the world, massive tornadoes unexpectedly destroy Los Angeles.
Meanwhile, Hall's son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) and two friends are in New York City for an academic competition where, unbeknownst to them since the geniuses don't turn on the news, the next superstorm is forming right above their heads. A massive tidal wave strands them in the public library. After the newly formed Lake Manhattan freezes over, the majority of the library refugees decide to take their chances outside. Sam, his classmates, and about half a dozen others take shelter in a reading room and burn the books to keep warm, resulting in a pointless argument about censorship. (They couldn't have just burned Danielle Steel instead of Nietzsche? Better yet, how about the wooden furniture?) In the meantime, back in Washington, Hall learns that Sam is still alive in the Big Apsicle and, drawing on his experience in arctic climates, mounts an expedition with his two co-workers to rescue him.
To call the science in The Day After Tomorrow "implausible" would be an understatement. Willful suspension of disbelief is simply impossible. Apparently Emmerich, wanting to sound a warning about the dangers of global warning, was aware that superstorms simply could not form in such a short time, yet decided to accelerate the action anyway for entertainment value. Put another way, he tried to make a serious point with a deliberately stupid plot. (Good plan.) Meanwhile, the human story is equally wretched, with the characters one-dimensional and the situations manipulative. Hall's wife, a doctor, elects to stay behind after everyone else at her hospital evacuates, so she can take care of the cute little bald boy with leukemia whose parents are missing. (Feel that tugging in your chest? It's Emmerich pulling on your heartstrings.) While walking to New York in a blizzard, tied together for safety, one of Hall's buddies falls through the skylight of a buried shopping mall. He cuts the rope, plummeting to his death, to save the others. ("Nooooooo!!!!") On the other hand, the CGI (supplied by major effects houses such as ILM, Dream Quest, and Digital Domain, amongst others) is breathtaking for the most part, except for some rather obvious CG wolves.
When you see "Written by Roland Emmerich" and "Suggested by the book The Coming Global Superstorm by Art Bell and Whitley Streiber" in the credits, you know you're not going to see a Nova documentary. Art Bell never saw a bit of crank science he didn't like. Once upon a time Emmerich wrote a wonderful movie called Stargate but since then his screenwriting talent has devolved into movies that are long on eye-candy and short on intelligence, such as Independence Day and Godzilla. Emmerich appears to be in competition with Michael Bay (Armageddon, Pearl Harbor) to see who can produce the loudest, stupidest blockbuster before he dies. Thanks to The Day After Tomorrow, Emmerich takes a solid lead.
After an intermission of about 20 minutes came The Corporation. The premise of this documentary can be summed up thus: According to the judicial interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment of the American Constitution, a corporation is a person. But what kind of person is it? Given its disregard for the law, endangerment of life and environment, and refusal to accept responsibility for its actions, the producers conclude that the corporation is psychopathic.
The Corporation scores a few good points: corporate arrogance, multinational corporations operating outside the law, exploitation of Third World and child labour, the pervasiveness of advertising, patents on life forms and even human genome information, the selling of "terminator seeds" that prevent farmers from saving seed from season to season, and privatization of the water supply. Specially singled out for special attention is Monsanto, which has brought us such fine products as Bovine Growth Hormone (BGH), genetically modified wheat, and Agent Orange.
On the other hand, the whole tenor of the documentary is anti-corporation and anti-capitalist. A lengthy segment discusses the suppression by Fox News of an investigative report on Monsanto and rBGH produced by Steve Wilson and Jane Akre. While focusing on Fox's cover-up of a story that was in the public interest to report because it would affect their bottom line, the producers overlook the fact that Wilson and Akre were able to sue the same corporate entity for dismissing them in retaliation. Similarly, "Big Tobacco" could not be sued, nor could polluting oil companies be prosecuted, if it were not for the same legal standing that is the subject of this documentary's criticism. Focusing on the cons while ignoring the pros is unbalanced. A short sequence about Arcata, California's drive to ban chain restaurants from the city also appears to paint even small business owners unsympathetically.
Something like 40 different talking heads appear in this film to give their opinion: CEOs, lawyers, activists, economists, and others. Two people get significantly more "face time" than others. The first of these is linguist-turned-activist Noam Chomsky - not surprising, since he was the subject of Manufacturing Consent, the documentary that launched Mark Achbar's career. The second person was not so wise a choice: Michael Moore, who is not an expert on corporations or economics, but a like-minded filmmaker. His inclusion seems less like informed commentary than incest. Ironically, toward the end of the documentary he cackles in a most capitalistic fashion about using major corporations to distribute his films, which preach against what they stand for.
Overall, for a leftist screed, The Corporation is intelligent and, for the most part, balanced. However, at nearly two and a half hours, it is longer than it needs to be and tends toward the pedantic.
Last year my church kicked off its fall season with a church-wide study based around Rick Warren's book The Purpose Driven Life. In the main it went well enough that the powers-that-be decided to do something similar this fall, to get everybody on the same page for a few weeks. This time, they put together their own six-week series, titled "Better Together," a study of Romans 12. The subtitle of the accompanying study guide is "Finding Your Fit with God and Others." (Had I been in charge, I might have chosen to call it "The Scripture Driven Life," but there's probably a good reason I'm not in charge.)
Before the pastor got into the series itself, though, he started last week with some review: a whirlwind trip through the first 11 chapters of Romans.
You get a breathtaking view of God's mercy . . .
Paul's case: Everyone is born lost in sin.
Why does Paul tell us this? Because we can never understand the mercy fo God without first understanding ourselves. To see the mercy of God, we must first see our own misery.
Two key words to understanding God's mercy in rescuing you:
This is done freely because of God's mercy. We are no longer lost, but found, and freely justified and credited because God is merciful.
We don't need to live like we used to live, because we aren't who we used to be! These are some of the most important chapters of the Bible.
Three key words to understanding new life in the Spirit:
When we do these things, our new life becomes evident to ourselves and others, and it is all due to the mercy of God.
Paul defends the faithfulness of God, arguing that he is keeping his promises, not only to the Jews, but extending them also to the Gentiles. By God's mercy, anyone who believes in Christ can get in on these promises. What can be better than this? Who is greater than God (11:33-36)?
In view of God's mercies, therefore, we give ourselves to God (12:1). Our proper response to God's mercy is gratitude.
Here is Better Together, week 1:
Paul appeals to his readers to make this decision:
This is personal, total, complete dedication.
This is evident in Paul's imagery, which is that of sacrifice. Paul's Jewish readers would have been familiar with the idea of sacrifice. They knew that it involved the whole body of the sacrificial animal.
Likewise, Paul is asking for total commitment, not a token commitment. This means God owns our eyes and controls what we see. It means he controls our ears and controls what we hear. He owns our mouth and controls not only what we put into it, but what comes out of it. God gets us all, from head to toe.
Not merely a sacrifice, but a living sacrifice - not something we do when we die, but while we live. "Living sacrifice" is seemingly an oxymoron, but there was a precedent. The Levites, who assisted the priests in offering the sacrifices in the Temple, were "living sacrifices." See Num. 8:10-11, where Aaron lifted up the Levites before God as "wave offerings" to God. They were set apart to serve God for their whole life. This commitment is now for all Christians to offer.
God asks us to give our body to him because he has given his Son's body for us. Now he offers forgiveness, family status, and a glorious future. "Salvation is by grace; dedication is out of gratitude." Our response, out of gratitude, is to give ourselves to God.
Worship is not just something done on Sunday morning at church. It happens wherever and whenever we are, all of our lives.
After dedication comes transformation; we begin to see changes. Paul tells us a few things about transformation:
God wants to change us into something better, but it takes time. But God will see it through (Phil. 1:6).
He does the work. We are involved, but we're not the ones in charge. The passage says "be transformed," not "transform yourselves."
We are changed from the inside out. God starts with our thinking, steering us away from wrong patterns of thought. The Word of God becomes the filter through which our thinking is changed.
As God changes us we no longer conform to the world but start to live out the will of God. This is a positive change, as God's will is good, pleasing, and perfect.
Are we ready to make a decision to make a total dedication to God that will result in the total transformation of our lives?
I threatened to observe the strict decree
Of my dear God with all my power and might.
But I was told by one, it could not be;
Yet I might trust in God to be my light.
Then I will trust, said I, in him alone.
Nay, ev'n to trust in him, was also his:
We must confess that nothing is our own.
Then I confess that he my succour is
But to have nought is ours, not to confess
That we have nought. I stood amazed at this,
Much troubled, till I heard a friend express,
That all things were more ours by being his.
What Adam had, and forfeited for all,
Christ keepeth now, who cannot fail or fall.
- George Herbert
I wonder what it is about shipwreck or survival stories that fascinate people so much? As a child I read at least a half dozen stories of this genre, both classic and not-so-classic: Gulliver's Travels, Robinson Crusoe, The Black Stallion and several of its sequels, Island of the Blue Dolphins, Strange Companion, and Jack London's short story "To Build a Fire." And, of course, three seasons of everyone's favourite guilty pleasure, Gilligan's Island. So I guess I shouldn't be surprised that I was so easily drawn into Yann Martel's Booker Prize-winning masterpiece, Life of Pi.
Piscine Molitor Patel, named after a Parisian swimming pool and known to all as "Pi" Patel rather than the more obvious and unpleasant alternatives, is the teenage son of a zookeeper in Pondicherry, India. Discontented with the state of affairs during Indira Gandhi's state of emergency in the 1970s, his family decides to close down the zoo, sell the animals, and emigrate to Canada. They leave India aboard a Japanese freighter, bringing some animals with them that are to be sold to North American zoos.
Then the ship unexpectedly and inexplicably sinks with a "monstrous metallic burp" somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Pi, the sole human survivor, climbs aboard a lifeboat occupied by a zebra with a broken leg, a hyena, a female orangutan that floats aboard on a bunch of bananas, and a 460-pound adult Bengal tiger improbably named "Richard Parker." Infighting ensues; predictably, Richard Parker climbs to the top of the lifeboat food chain. Next on the menu, Pi is physically unable to defeat a tiger in a fight. He realizes that the key to his own survival is to keep Richard Parker alive and happy.
This is a beautifully written novel. Martel's straightforward prose is a pleasure to read, vivid and descriptive without being flowery or pretentious or excessively verbose. The first third of the novel recounts Pi's childhood in Pondicherry: how he learned to swim (and how he got his unusual name and subsequent nickname), how he was brought up by his zookeeper father to respect the danger of wild animals, and how he converted to Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam. While some readers might it excessive that a full third of the novel is devoted to backstory, it sets up the real story by explaining how Pi managed to acquire the specific skills that enabled him to survive his ordeal. (Perhaps the author missed an opportunity here for a lesson about divine Providence.) Readers who worry about such things will be pleased to know that there are no "adult situations" or bad language in this novel, apart from the obvious childish puns about Piscine's full name. There are, however, many graphic descriptions of animal-on-animal violence.
Life of Pi is very much a self-conscious postmodern novel. Martel plays with postmodern skepticism about the knowability of true truth and the distinction between fact and fantasy. The book begins with an "Author's Note," purportedly about how Martel came to write his story. This is the part of the book that we instinctively understand to be factual, rather than fictional. Yet partway through, Martel, sitting in a café in Pondicherry, encounters a minor character from the story, who tells him he knows a story that will make him believe in God, and that he should look up Pi - now a middle-aged zoologist living in Toronto with his family - and hear it for himself. (At this point, I turned back to the page with the copyright and CIP data, to see if the standard disclaimer about this being a work of fiction and resemblances being purely coincidental, yada yada yada, was there. It wasn't.)
So right off the bat Martel creates doubt about whether this story is factual or fictional. He propagates this doubt all the way through the novel. Written as though it were a combination of Pi's memoirs and Martel's investigative reporting, it begins as a simple memoir of a childhood in Pondicherry amongst the zoo animals. Then it turns into a rousing adventure of survival on the high seas. However, some of Pi's later adventures begin to test the limits of your credulity. Finally it wraps up with a sequence that calls everything you have read into question. (Since this is a book review rather than a critical essay, I won't give away the ending; suffice it to say that if it's true M. Night Shyamalan wants to make this novel his next film project, it isn't just because he, too, hails from Pondicherry.)
Another postmodern touch is Pi's religous plurality. He is a devout Hindu, Christian, and Muslim, and sees no conflict between these three mutually exclusive faiths. By contrast, in a humorous (and cleverly written) chapter in which his priest, imam, and pandit encounter him in the zoo and quite rightly attempt to persuade him to give up two of his religions, they are portrayed as buffoons rather than wise men. "I just want to love God," the young (and naïve) Pi retorts.
Martel (through Pi) does make one insightful comment about atheists and agnostics, which is the key to understanding the meaning of the whole novel. I quote chapter 22 in its entirety:
I can well imagine an atheist's last words: "White, white! L-L-Love! My God!" - and the deathbed leap of faith. Whereas the agnostic, if he stays true to his reasonable self, if he stays beholden to dry, yeastless factuality, might try to explain the warm light bathing him by saying, "Possibly a f-f-failing oxygenation of the b-b-brain," and, to the very end, lack imagination and miss the better story. (70)
This, according to Martel, is true faith: to believe the "better story" even if it flies in the face of "dry, yeastless factuality." I am reminded, somewhat, of C. S. Lewis' comments in the radio talks that eventually became Mere Christianity:
Reality, in fact, is always something you couldn't have guessed. That's one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It's a religion you couldn't have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we'd always expected, I'd feel we were making it up. But, in fact, it's not the sort of thing anyone would have made up. It has just that queer twist about it that real things have. So let's leave behind all these boys' philosophies - these over-simple answers. The problem isn't simple and the answer isn't going to be simpler either. (Broadcast Talks 42)
And he writes, in his essay "Miracles":
Each story must be taken on its merits: what we must not do is to rule out the supernatural as the one impossible explanation. . . . When the Old Testament says that Sennacherib's invasion was stopped by angels, and Herodotus says it was stopped by a lot of mice who came and ate up all the bowstrings of his army, an open-minded man will be on the side of the angels. Unless you start by begging the question, there is nothing intrinsically unlikely in the existence of angels or in the action ascribed to them. But mice just don't do these things. (27-28)
Lewis seems to be saying here that the better story is the more unlikely one. But I think his point is actually the opposite: in the final analysis, we should prefer the angels not because they make for a better epic, but because common sense has to trump wishful thinking. It would be nice for someone inclined to disbelieve in angels if the mice conspired to sabotage Sennacherib's archers, but unfortunately conspiracy is foreign to mousey nature. So if we're honest, we're stuck with the angels anyway.
I daresay Lewis is right, and that in the final analysis Martel's analysis of faith lacks depth, along the lines of Twain's schoolboy "believing what you know ain't so," merely because it makes for a gripping yarn. Faith in the Biblical sense isn't blind optimism in the "better story." It means taking God at his word: specifically, believing the Bible when it promises that the sacrificial death of Christ is sufficient to turn away the wrath of God on account of our own sins. "In other words," says Lewis,
I believe it on His authority. Don't be scared by the word authority. Believing things on authority only means believing them because you've been told them by someone you think trustworthy. Ninety-nine per cent. of the things you believe are believed on authority. . . . A man who jibbed at authority in other things as some people do in religion would have to be content to know nothing all his life. (Broadcast Talks 58-59)
Still . . . don't let Martel's deficient understanding of faith keep you away from what is still a gripping yarn in its own right.
Lewis, C. S. Broadcast Talks. London: G. Bles, 1942.
---. "Miracles." God in the Dock. Ed. Walter Hooper. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970. 25-37.
Martel, Yann. Life of Pi. Toronto: Vintage - Random House, 2001.
Last night on the way home from the library, the guy who boarded the bus right behind me was a tallish, heavy-set Marine-looking type with blue eyes, a blond crewcut, and tattoos all over his neck and arms (and presumably upper body): a Confederate flag on the back of his neck, a KKK cross on his left elbow, a Nazi stormtrooper on his right bicep, various Celtic and Norse symbols and other images I couldn't identify here and there.
Of all the seats he could have chosen on this not-too-crowded bus, he sat down next to a young and very black girl. Not to stir up crap or anything, as he didn't pay her any more attention than common courtesy required.
Oddly enough, if I hadn't just started reading the short stories of Flannery O'Connor, full of snobs and bigots and hypocrites of all kinds, I might never have noticed the incongruity.
It kind of made me wonder what his story is - or better, what it could be if I had a mind to write one. Is he the white supremist thug his decorations suggest? Or is he over that, having recently found God, but unfortunately there isn't enough skin in the world to graft over his tattoos? And why that seat in particular if he could have chosen any number of nice Aryan seatmates to share with?
I may never know. Any aspiring authors want to take a crack at it?
Having sex with corpses is now officially illegal in California after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a bill barring necrophilia, a spokeswoman said on Friday.
The new legislation marks the culmination of a two-year drive to outlaw necrophilia in the state and will help prosecutors who have been stymied by the lack of an official ban on the practice, according to experts.
The really creepy part of this story is the fact that it took two years of debate to make it reality.
Unless indicated otherwise, Scripture taken from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Science Fiction Free September 2026:
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See Ransom's reading journal on Google Documents.
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Created September 4, 2003 by Scott McClare.
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