[Christianity Today Movies; October 26, 2007]
The energy in the kitchen of an elegant Mexican restaurant in Manhattan is cranking up steadily, as the staff braces for the noon rush. One waitress, Nina, is running late, which is becoming a habit. She dashes in at the last minute, but Manny, the owner, tells her this is one time too many, and fires her on the spot.
As Nina storms out, the head chef, Manny’s brother Jose (a mysteriously tragic guy, peeking out through a forest of beard and hair), follows her outside to make sure she’s OK. When he learns that she is pregnant,
[Ancient Faith Radio; October 24, 2007]
I’m in the car today driving down I-95, going south (as usual) toward Washington, this time toward northern Virginia, where I’m going to a reunion of my seminary class at Virginia Episcopal Theological Seminary. It’s our 30th anniversary so I’m going back on campus to hear some speakers today and to attempt to give the seminary library a stack of my books; we’ll see if they will accept these, we’ll see what happens. I expect so; they’re actually very gracious people at Virginia Seminary.
I’m thinking about a conversation I’ve been having, an email conversation, with a lot of people in the last couple of weeks, that has led up to an article just published on Beliefnet.com. Beliefnet was doing an interview with John Eldridge. Now if you don’t know that name,
[Ancient Faith Radio; October 17, 2007]
Last year, for Christmas, I gave each of my children a copy of a big, fat, almost 550-page book by Bill Bryson, titled A Short History of Nearly Everything. I had begun reading this book and was so fascinated that I wanted each of my children to have a copy so we could talk about it. Bill Bryson talks about in childhood being so interested in science, and disappointed to find out how boring it was in the classroom. He described looking at the cover of his science text, that showed a quarter of the Earth cut away so that you cold see the layers. And he thought, ‘How do they know that? How do they discover things like that?’ And not finding that answer in the book.
[National Review Online, October 12, 2007]
“We’re drowning in quirk,” wrote Michael Hirschorn in the September Atlantic Monthly. A few decades ago, humor was one thing (a Bob Hope pun, for example) and drama was another (say, “North by Northwest”). Now there’s all this in-between, poignant and sprightly in uneven doses. Here’s Napoleon Dynamite, dancing his friend Pedro’s way into high Student Government office; there’s David Cross on Fox’s “Arrested Development,” a would-be member of the Blue Man Group, self-blued except for the spot on his back he doesn’t know he couldn’t reach. Quirkiness is everywhere, even journalism. “This American Life” presents lives and topics, American and otherwise, that have been burnished to quiet strangeness. I got hooked with the episode about the man who discovered one of his cable channels was showing security-camera footage from a lobby somewhere. He went from thinking this hilarious, to tuning in out of occasional curiosity, to obsessing, taping it while at work so he could catch up when he came home. You know, stuff like that. Quirky.
The King of Quirk is surely Wes Anderson, director of “The Darjeeling Limited” and four previous films, all of them acclaimed and odd:
[Ancient Faith Radio; October 10, 2007]
I’m a big fan of thrift shops. I started going decades ago when somebody told me you can get books there; you can get hardback books for just a couple of dollars. So I went in, I checked it out and it was true. And I found that there were books that I could only afford in paperback, but here were these nice hardback copies with dust jackets, and so I started going regularly. And then my eye wandered a bit and I saw, well, there’s some interesting furniture and even some semi-antique pieces. I discovered in a bin of drapes there was something sticking out and it looked like embroidery. And in fact, it was. It was this giant three-foot by four-foot embroidered piece of folk art that I’ve got framed right here in my office.
[Ancient Faith Radio; October 4, 2007]
Frederica: There goes the bell on the door of the Virginia Barbeque, I guess that’s the name, the simple name of this place. We’re sitting here, my friend Doug LeBlanc and I, on the main street leading into Ashland, Virginia where Randolph-Macon College is, really a gorgeous little town. And Virginia Barbeque is set in a house that looks to me like from about 1900; it’s a charming little house with a front porch and an American flag waving out there, and what’s unusual is they don’t do just one kind of barbeque. You can get Texas, North Carolina, or Virginia style. They did not have South Carolina style, which I was deeply disappointed about, because that’s the best. I’m sitting here talking to my friend Doug, whom I’ve known since, I think it was 1991 when we met for the first time, wasn’t it?
[Beliefnet; September 30, 2007]
In a time when churches of every description are faced with Vanishing Male Syndrome, men are showing up at Eastern Orthodox churches in numbers that, if not numerically impressive, are proportionately intriguing. This may be the only church which attracts and holds men in numbers equal to women. As Leon Podles wrote in his 1999 book, The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity, “The Orthodox are the only Christians who write basso profundo church music, or need to.”
Rather than guess why this is, I emailed a hundred Orthodox men, most of whom joined the Church as adults.
[Christianity Today Movies, Sept 28, 2007]
I keep thinking I saw this movie before, except that then it starred Shirley Temple. A lovely young person appears and touches the lives of people from all walks of life, bringing them a little bit of sunshine, and guilelessly showing the way to a better life. But in the other movie there wasn’t a close-up of maggots crawling through a moose carcass. Not that I remember, anyway.
“Into the Wild” is a pretty infuriating movie, because it insists on treating the central character as an escapee from “Godspell.”
[Ancient Faith Radio, September 27, 2007]
Last May, Father Thomas Hopko gave the commencement speech
at St. Vladimir’s Seminary. Somebody forwarded me the text of this, and
it’s so terrific. I sent it on to the
members of my family, and the subject line I used was, ‘A Hopko scorcher!’
because he can really be pretty scorching, when he gets going.
One thing that particularly interested me toward the end of
this speech was he started talking about a book by CS Lewis. He says, ‘I think all thinking Christians,
surely all seminary students and graduates, should be required to read it, the
most incisive analysis of what has happened to humanity in the last fifty
years.’ CS Lewis’ book, The Abolition of
Man, 1944. It is rather a short book; I think
it’s a series of three or four lectures that Lewis gave.
[Ancient Faith Radio; September 19, 2007]
It’s a hot Tuesday afternoon. I’m here at – I’m embarrassed to say where I
am – I’m in the parking lot at Taco Bell; I’m just about to go through the
drive through and get some lunch. But I
just pulled over for a minute to look around this corner. You have this corner where *you* live. At this stoplight I can see there’s Panera
Bread, Office Depot, Lowes Home Supply, Walgreens, Kmart, Target, Toys R Us,
Best Buy. That just scratches the
surface, you know? It’s everything that
clusters together, like birds of a feather: these big box stores and these very
big standard franchise outlets, all over the country. It doesn’t matter where I go, you know, if
I’m east coast, west coast, north or south, this same stuff, this is the
landscape everywhere you go.
