Gleanings Quick Links

Christopher Nolan’s Achievement: The Dark Knight: “The title of the Nolan’s latest Batman film calls to mind medieval chivalry in a postmodern key. The dark knight embraces extraordinary tasks and fights against enormous odds; his quest is to restore what has been corrupted and to recover what has been lost. In so doing, he takes upon himself a suffering and loneliness that isolate him from his fellow citizens and inevitably court their misunderstanding and scorn. He is a dark knight, in part, because the world he inhabits is nearly void of hope and virtue, and, in part, because some of the darkness resides within him, in his internal conflicts between the good he aspires to restore and the means he deploys to fend off evil. Of the many filmmakers designing dark tales of quests for redemption, Christopher Nolan is currently making a serious claim to being the master craftsman.” (Thomas S. Hibbs, First Things: On the Square )

Tue 22 Jul 2008 from Mark Meador • Link & Comments

Unplanned Parenthood: “Hall offers a faithful reconception of parenthood that resists notions of the “progressive family” and instead summons the church to lovingly and actively incorporate all children. She uses the doctrines of Creation, salvation, and eschatology—namely, that all children bear the image of God, that adoption is God’s form of salvation, and that God secures the future of the church—to move the church beyond mere biology and more deeply into its baptismal identity.” (Michelle A. Clifton-Soderstrom reviewing Conceiving Parenthood by Amy Laura Hall, Christianity Today )

Mon 21 Jul 2008 from Mark Meador • Link & Comments

What makes a supervillain?: “We’ve exposed all the stories we know as a culture to several peanut-butter-thick layers of ironic reimagining by now, parodying and re-parodying them until there’s nothing left to appreciate with any sincerity, but rather with a smirk and a knowing grin. So how, I wonder, does this culture manufacture more sincerity? How do we create something new that isn’t a parody of something we saw as kids?” (Brian Tiemann, Peeve Farm, on Joss Whedon’s excellent Internet-based musical, Dr. Horrible. )

Sat 19 Jul 2008 from TTF Staff • Link & Comments

Pope’s Speech at Barangaroo: “Dear friends, life is not governed by chance; it is not random. Your very existence has been willed by God, blessed and given a purpose (cf. Gen 1:28)! Life is not just a succession of events or experiences, helpful though many of them are. It is a search for the true, the good and the beautiful. It is to this end that we make our choices; it is for this that we exercise our freedom; it is in this - in truth, in goodness, and in beauty - that we find happiness and joy. Do not be fooled by those who see you as just another consumer in a market of undifferentiated possibilities, where choice itself becomes the good, novelty usurps beauty, and subjective experience displaces truth.” (Pope Benedict XVI, The Catholic Herald )

Thu 17 Jul 2008 from Mark Meador • Link & Comments

Hollywood’s Hero Deficit: “Though the antihero whose flowering we have seen in our own time was there in embryo, it still left open the possibility of goodness and decency, not just on the part of individuals but of a community. That’s what it took for Dan Evans in the 1957 version of “3:10 to Yuma” to be a hero: the idea that his courage was for the sake of a belief that “people should be able to live in peace and decency together.” Without this belief in a community where power is not antithetical to the good and the decent but the means of its advancement, neither the war films nor the Westerns of our own time will ever be able to give us any but a debased sort of heroism.” (James Bowman, The American )

Thu 17 Jul 2008 from Mark Meador • Link & Comments

The Return of Religion: “So who, in this subliminal contest, is the truly reasonable one? The atheists beg the question in their own favour, by assuming that science has all the answers. But science can have all the answers only if it has all the questions; and that assumption is false. There are questions addressed to reason which are not addressed to science, since they are not asking for a causal explanation.” (Senior Fellow Roger Scruton, Axess )

Wed 16 Jul 2008 from Mark Meador • Link & Comments

Food for Thought: “Today’s children, Waters goes on to say, ‘are bombarded with a pop culture which teaches redemption through buying things.’ But schoolyard gardens, like the one she helped create at the middle school a few blocks from my home in Berkeley, ‘turn pop culture upside-down: they teach redemption through a deep appreciation for the real, the authentic, and the lasting—for the things that money can’t buy: the very things that matter most of all if we are going to lead sane, healthy, and sustainable lives. Kids who learn environmental and nutritional lessons through school gardening—and school cooking and eating—learn ethics.’ Good cooking, she writes in the introduction to her 2007 cookbook, The Art of Simple Food, ‘can reconnect our families and communities with the most basic human values, provide the deepest delight for all our senses, and assure our well-being for a lifetime.’” (John Schwenkler, The American Conservative )

Tue 15 Jul 2008 from Mark Meador • Link & Comments

Sir John Templeton: iconic innovator in finance and religion: “John worked very intentionally to live the spiritual qualities he prized. And while he may have valued reason, prosperity, tradition, and spirituality, he gave top priority to love, the connecting force that holds us together despite our differences – even the largest ones.” Worth a read. Rest in peace, Sir John. (Gary Moore, Christian Science Monitor )

Sat 12 Jul 2008 from TTF Staff • Link & Comments

Running on Faith: A new report from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, and its sister project, the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, quantifies and analyzes the media’s coverage of religion in the U.S. presidential primary campaign from January 2007 through April 2008. Among its major findings, the report reveals that media coverage of religion rivaled coverage of race and gender combined. Among the summary statements: “These findings suggest a continuing discomfort among news organizations in tackling deep questions of how candidates’ personal faith may influence their public leadership. When the press does cover such stories, it tends to focus on discrete events – such as a speech, video or TV appearance – rather than the underlying connections, and often the coverage is fairly short-lived.” (Pew Forum )

Fri 11 Jul 2008 from TTF Staff • Link & Comments

Survival of the Sudsiest: “Benjamin Franklin was, as usual, on to something when he said, ‘Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.’ Or, less judgmentally, and for secular people who favor a wall of separation between church and tavern, beer is evidence that nature wants us to be.” (George Will, The Washington Post )

Thu 10 Jul 2008 from TTF Staff • Link & Comments

David Cameron: Fixing our Broken Society: “We as a society have been far too sensitive. In order to avoid injury to people’s feelings, in order to avoid appearing judgemental, we have failed to say what needs to be said. We have seen a decades-long erosion of responsibility, of social virtue, of self-discipline, respect for others, deferring gratification instead of instant gratification. Instead we prefer moral neutrality, a refusal to make judgments about what is good and bad behaviour, right and wrong behaviour. Bad. Good. Right. Wrong. These are words that our political system and our public sector scarcely dare use any more.” (David Cameron, Glasgow )

Tue 08 Jul 2008 from Mark Meador • Link & Comments

The Burden of the Humanities: “Lamentations about the sad state of the humanities in modern America have a familiar, indeed almost ritualistic, quality about them. The humanities are among those unquestionably nice endeavors, like animal shelters and ­tree-­planting projects, about which nice people invariably say nice things. But there gets to be something vaguely annoying about all this cloying uplift. One longs for the moral clarity of a swift kick in the ­rear.” (Trinity Forum Senior Fellow Wilfred M. McClay, The Wilson Quarterly )

Mon 07 Jul 2008 from Mark Meador • Link & Comments

Age of Riches: Challenges of $600-a-Session Patients: “Dr. Stone said those two kinds of patients tended to have different problems: ‘In my experience, there was a high incidence of depression in the people who were born rich. And by contrast, the people today who are making a fortune are so often narcissistic in a way that excludes depression.’” HT: Rod Dreher at Crunchy Con This article is part of a series by the NYT “examining the effects of the growing concentration of wealth.” (Eric Konigsberg, The New York Times )

Mon 07 Jul 2008 from Mark Meador • Link & Comments

The Long Road to Forgiveness: “On June 8, 1972, I ran out from Cao Dai temple in my village, Trang Bang, South Vietnam; I saw an airplane getting lower and then four bombs falling down. I saw fire everywhere around me. Then I saw the fire over my body, especially on my left arm. My clothes had been burned off by fire. I was 9 years old but I still remember my thoughts at that moment: I would be ugly and people would treat me in a different way.” (Kim Phuc, NPR )

Tue 01 Jul 2008 from Mark Meador • Link & Comments

The Little Robot That Could: “Stanton: No, it always works backward. It’s more like, Wow, look what this sort of feels like. So you run with those things, because they’re very primal. In my mind they’re very much in the core of our storytelling. So much of the Old Testament is sort of built into our DNA. I’ve read other stories where you’ve talked about your Christian faith a bit. Can you tell me how your faith informs your creativity and your work? Stanton: They tell you that as a storyteller, it’s vital to just stick with and be honest with your values system. The last thing I want to do is go to a movie and feel like I’m being preached to or being told how to be, and I think it’s more honest—and you’re going to have more effect—to be truthful with the values of your characters, working off of your own values. That was the case with WALL•E. The greatest commandment is to love one another, and to me, that’s the ultimate purpose of living. So that was the perfect goal for the loneliest robot on earth, to learn the greatest commandment, to learn to love.” (Mark Moring interviewing Andrew Stanton, director of Pixar’s WALL-E, for Christianity Today )

Tue 01 Jul 2008 from Mark Meador • Link & Comments