There's Beauty in the Bellow

From an interview with Barbara Nicolosi in Salvo magazine: A story "haunts you because of its paradoxes. How do you haunt an audience? How do you create paradox? What is the nature of paradox? These are the stories that Christian storytellers should be asking themselves. Unfortunately, most Christian filmmakers are just trying to figure out what will sell; they're trying to find the next Facing the Giants . But Facing the Giants is supremely unparadoxical. It's just porn for Christians. It's easy; it makes you feel really good; and it's a fantasy lie. What is that except porn? This made me think of another movie popular with Christians, Chariots of Fire . But Chariots of Fire is not just a feel-good movie about someone who "stood up for what he believed in." The story of Harold Abrahams is almost totally ignored. What gets overlooked is that Abrahams and Eric Liddel are in the same struggle. Abrahams, as a Jew albeit nominally so, did not have any probl...

On the way to Spokane back in December. Looks like the moon, doesn't it? But it's only Washington. From the plane. On the way back north, we flew over the Rockies and the Cascades. All beautiful. In the Seattle airport. It was Russian-looking in style, I thought. It was thrilling to step into the airport and see this after coming off the cold runway (there wasn't actually a gate open, so we had to walk across the cold tarmac). We have sunshine today! Right now it's -4 degrees outside--up from -8 just an hour earlier. The snow is so beautiful.

From a discussion on the New York Times website as the value of a BA To the Editor: Charles Murray needs to recognize that the liberal arts degree, at its best, validates its holder as one who has skills needed for some of our biggest jobs. A good half of the liberal arts curriculum is about thinking analogically. The degree says this person has studied “humane letters” and so knows his or her way around a metaphor: how it opens up vistas, alters viewpoints, both frees and constrains thought and affects decisions. No one should try to motivate a work force, lead a corporation, plan military strategies or run a government who does not know how a metaphor works. Math and science, the other half of the liberal arts curriculum, develop skills that are scarce, yet needed, in our society. They are all about knowing a fact from a factoid, reasoning from data to underlying patterns and practical implications, all while feeding careful observation through the strainer of valid logic. The libera...

Adrienne Sandvos says in a piece for Radiant magazine (based in Orlando, for Christian twenty-something females). We tend to fall back on song when we want to worship. It’s easier, I suppose, than employing other art forms which require a whole lot more materials than a voice and the memory of the song you want to sing. But relying on those songs is like ordering the exact same dish every time you go out to eat. There’s a whole world of food out there, and you keep settling for spaghetti. In the same way, seeking variety in our worship allows us to connect to God in a totally different way. What she doesn't point out is that we draw our worship practices from observing worship in the Bible, specifically formal worship. (David's dance at the return of the ark was not formal worship.) We aren't "falling back" on music, we are following the pattern laid out for us. Generally the church has taken the second commandment as a warning against the visual arts in the san...