I never liked The Wonder Years. I the problem had to do with the pain of self-realization. I was right about the age of the characters and didn’t like my life being shown up for the total uncoolness it really was.
However, there was one scene that I have always loved, and I share it with you now. It pertains to the wonder of sex ed, and the resolution of the great mystery of gym coach’s unmarried status. Enjoy.
I’ve recently engaged a couple of stories whose force lies in causing us to reconsider our world–either the presumed superiority of the reality we know, or the presumed superiority of the reality we might long for.
The Left Hand of Darkness is a story that takes place on a largely frozen planet, as told through the eyes 
of two different characters. It is a story about cross-cultural failures, about how having one’s eyes opened to surprising realities behind misunderstood surface-level actions–and ultimately about discovering love in what one thought was not even an object to which “love” could be applied.
The story sets you up to walk through the transformation of perception along with the protagonist, to have your understanding of what is good in this strange world turned upside down, and inside out–to discover that light is the left hand of darkness.
From the opposite direction, the film Pleasantville enters into an idealized world and deconstructs that ideal. A world full of “perfection” is shown up as boring. The world “as it’s supposed to be” is brought into question as foreigners (in a sense) who enter into it introduce love and conflict, imperfection and rain.
What is a perfect world? What is a good life? What brings in color and beauty? These questions are raised in Pleasantville, and even if the answers given leave something to be desired, the calling into question of the “givens” of pleasantness, or “life as it should be,” are well done.
Today I gave a seminar highlighting some online resources for studying the Bible. Many of your contributed your favorites when I asked for them a few weeks ago. Thanks!
Below is an outline of my talk, including hyperlinks. We spent most of our time with Net Bible and Blue Letter Bible, and how you can use those to study biblical passages.
The outline contains all sorts of different resources, most of which are geared toward lay people without Greek or Hebrew knowledge, but if you do know Greek or Hebrew you can do a lot more.
I’ll probably keep this somewhat updated, and eventually take out the “talk outline” elements from the first couple sections, leaving the resources more generally described. Enjoy. And, happy studying!
Here’s the Google Docs link, Kirk on Technology for Bible Study
For the past several weeks, I have been streaming All Eternals Deck at every opportunity. The new Mountain Goats album is officially released today for us consumers to go about our business of consumption.
So go get it. $5 to download the whole thing. Seriously. Get on it.
This album continues the musical trajectory from both the last Mountain Goats album, Life of the World to Come, and John Darnielle’s side project, “Undercard” which he produced under the rubric of The Extra Lens.
What I mean by this is that Darnielle’s songwriting has increasingly moved from being so lyrically driven that the music hardly matters to richly orchestrated music that is, itself, a voice in the song.
Like all of Darnielle’s music, the songs on All Eternals Deck repay careful listening and attention to the lyrics. On the one hand, this album’s entrance into the world of vampire mythology can be heard as simply playful riffs on a fad that I, for one, hope will pass without much more ado. But upon closer inspection, these songs aren’t ultimately about vampire bites and some sort of demonic antipathy for the song Hotel California (although the latter is a particularly amusing moment).
Wooden idols. Aviator shades. These are trinkets from Crusades. Hmmm…
As with Undercard, Mountain Goat regulars will be pleasantly surprised at the varying styles of the songs on this latest album. High Hawk Season is throw-back in its harmonies and vocal accompaniment–underlaying typical Darniellian lyrics.
So, even though I still think that We Shall All be Healed is the greatest album ever produced, All Eternals Deck is a must-listen for all Mountain Goats aficionados, and a great entry point for folks who want an entree into the work of one of the greatest lyricists of the current generation of songwriters.
I’m giving a presentation in a couple of weeks on electronic Bible study resources. I have a few go-tos that I use on my computer and on my Android. But I’d like to be able to present a more full slate of resources.
What do you use?
In particular, I’m interested in free websites and apps, or apps that are less than $2.
What do you use? And what do you use it for?
If you want to be an effective communicator of the Christian message, remember that ours is first and foremost a story. Become a great story teller, and don’t think that when you’re “presenting the gospel” you are supposed to shift in to didactic theology mode, and you’ll be well on your way.
Telling stories well usually means being able to read and understand stories well. This explains half of my advice to undergrads who would be biblical scholars: Double major in (English) Literature and Classics. Classics so you understand the world and languages of the New Testament, Literature so that you can cultivate the skill of reading and the art of interpretation.
This is also why learning how to watch and interpret and talk about movies can be an important part of engaging the twenty-first century North American world.
Enter Windrider.
Last night Fuller Northern California did a warm-up film watching event, in anticipation of the upcoming Windrider Film Forum in April (April 28-30).
The short films we watched were “The Little Gorilla” and “Kavi.” Both were about children who were faced with opportunities to overcome obstacles that stood in their way: internal and external. Both raised significant issues about family and its ability to help or hinder the realization of a child’s potential. Kavi also opened the audience’s eyes to the horrors of modern slavery.
You can watch Kavi here. Also, check out the website.
But the things that I took away from the film were less about the films themselves than a few conversations that ensued afterward.
One line of conversation that developed was prompted by the messy ending of one of the movies. It’s not all neat and tied together. The deliverer does not deliver a full redemption. In response to this observation by an audience member, Chap Clark spoke for a few minutes about how that is not only what “life” is really like, but that is what the Christian life is like as well. We too often present the gospel, especially at camps and to young people, as though accepting the gospel is the end-point that ties all the loose ends together.
But that’s not reality. And we need to learn to be comfortable with the loose ends and to think about how we tell the story such that it matches up a bit better. How do we tell our story? And do we tell the story as well as these film makers?
Another line of conversation was opened up by someone asking about the spate of spiritually-interested Hollywood films. Ralph Winter spoke about this being a long-running theme in the entertainment industry, but one that’s getting more press right now. He talked about the opportunities that are opened up for us to address spiritual issues by the films and TV shows that serve them up for us.
But what I really wanted to know was not so much how we as Christians can sponge off the great stuff already being done. I wanted to know what he thought we as Christians needed to learn in order to make better movies and write better shows. Why is it that the Coen Brothers make the best Christian movies in Hollywood even though they aren’t Christian?
His response was spot on, in my opinion:
The way that Winter explains Christianity’s failure in the entertainment industry parallels what I would say is its failure, overall, to understand itself. We have too often forgotten that our faith is a story. It’s not a statement.
We think that to tell about Jesus we have to give an atonement theory. The early Christians thought that to tell about Jesus they had to narrate his death: in Gospels, in a meal, in a baptismal ritual.
As Winter suggested, we should be the greatest story tellers of all. But before that will be true of us, we have to really start believing that the story’s the thing.
Once we do that, not only can we, perhaps, make better films and write better fiction. Perhaps we can even engage good stories, stories without the particular content we would have put in, and see there the stories, or even the Story, we wish to tell.
The Mountain Goats’ new album, All Eternals Deck, is available for audio streaming on NPR.
My thoughts on the album, no doubt, coming sometime soon.
This past week I have been reminded that prophetic voices are sometimes found in surprising places. And no, I’m not just talking about the Coens’ latest cry in True Grit.
Two other things were brought to my attention.
First, there was an article in The Onion. Yes, the Onion–that satirical piece that brought us such classic commentaries on culture as its mocking report about the Macbook Wheel. And sometimes the beauty of satire is its ability to disarm us enough to show us the truth about ourselves.
This week, the Onion facetiously declared, “The Gap Between Rich and Poor Named 8th Wonder of the World.” Here’s a snip:
“And thanks to careful maintenance through the ages, this massive relic survives intact, instilling in each new generation a sense of awe,” Jean- Baptiste added.
Sometimes fiction is the only way to depict the truth.
In a matter equally serious, but through a venue much more raw and intense, the creator of The Wire, David Simon, responded to a scathing criticism from Baltimore’s chief of police.
He argued that the show’s creators owe no apology for their own implicit critique of reality through their fictional tales. No–story telling is a means of dissent, a prophetic cry that the narrative being told from on high is wrong:
But publicly, let me state that The Wire owes no apologies — at least not for its depiction of those portions of Baltimore where we set our story, for its address of economic and political priorities and urban poverty, for its discussion of the drug war and the damage done from that misguided prohibition, or for its attention to the cover-your-ass institutional dynamic that leads, say, big-city police commissioners to perceive a fictional narrative, rather than actual, complex urban problems as a cause for righteous concern. As citizens using a fictional narrative as a means of arguing different priorities or policies, those who created and worked on The Wire have dissented.
Stories are powerful. Fiction is powerful.
The means of dissent open to us are many. And these two episodes over the past week have the potential to open our eyes to see problems besetting our world, and to expand our horizons as to the means available at our fingertips to lodge our protest.
Last night I was finally able to break away and see True Grit.
Dear Christians, stop making movies. Stop writing books. Go ahead. Put your cameras down. Fold up your laptops.
Now, go watch True Grit, Ladykillers, and O Brother Where Art Thou?, and learn from Joel and Ethan Coen how to tell the Christian story in popular media.
The film begins with an invitation to recognize that the biblical world is operative here: a citation of Proverbs 28:1 from the KJV, “The wicked flee when no man pursueth.”
This raises all sorts of interesting questions–is there something especially apropos in this film’s particular bad guy being chased by a girl? Should we supply the second half of the proverb to epitomize our heroine, “but the righteous are bold as a lion”?
As is so often the case in Coen Brothers films, the place of God in the storyline is undergirded by the soundtrack. In this case, the music for Leaning on the Everlasting Arms provides the wordless motif. But again, are we supposed to supply the words ourselves? “What have I to dread, what have I to fear, leaning on the everlasting arms?” Cf. the Proverb quoted above.
The composer/ arranger of the film’s music, Carter Burwell, had this to say, ““Ethan and Joel and I had the same idea—a score rooted in 19th-century hymns. The songs Mattie would sing if she had time for such frivolity. Our model was the hymn ‘Leaning on the Everlasting Arms’, composed in 1888 by Anthony Showalter, an elder of the First Presbyterian Church in Dalton, Georgia, and used memorably in the film The Night of the Hunter. This, together with other hymns of the period, forms the backbone of the score, which grows from church piano to orchestra as Mattie gets farther and farther from home.”
As the voice of the grown-up heroine (25 years after the events of the film) introduces the story, she says of the man who murdered her father:
As we follow Mattie on her quest for justice, we are acutely aware that hers is not an errand of grace, and in the end she must pay a price for the justice she seeks.
The performance of Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie is oscar-worthy, and Jeff Bridges somehow manages to pull of the role of drunk hero. Who’d have thought?!
The Coen Brothers have done it again. This is a fantastic film.
