[Christianity Today, March 2006]Selected for Best American Spiritual Writing, 2007
If you hang around with Christians, you find that the same topic keeps coming up in conversation: their worries about “the culture.” Christians talk about sex and violence in popular entertainment. They talk about bias in news reporting. They talk about how their views are ignored or misrepresented. “The culture” appears to be an aggressive challenge to “the church,” and Christians keep worrying over what to do about it.
(National Review Online, March 1, 2006)
1. What is “the Great Canon of St. Andrew” and what’s so great about it?
This complex poem (actually a chanted hymn) was written in the early 700’s, and it picked up the adjective “Great” for two reasons: it’s extra-long (about 250 verses), and it’s majestic. The Great Canon was written by St. Andrew
[National Review Online, February 14, 2006]
For a feature titled “Men We Love”
In a life blessed by many strong and honorable men, worthy of love, the one I'd like to celebrate here is an 80-year-old priest. In 1948, at the age of 22, Father George Calciu was arrested and held
Beliefnet Film Awards, 2006
Cinderella Man
What's so inspirational about James J. Braddock, the “Cinderella Man”? Audiences have already given plenty of love
George, the curious little monkey, had a precarious start: his parents, Margaret and H.A. Rey, bicycled out of Paris just hours before the Germans arrived, with the preliminary watercolors and story text in their backpacks. Margaret, a Bauhaus-trained artist, was a sharp cookie and blazingly direct, capable of blurting to her publisher: “You always wear a hat. Is there something wrong with your head?” (The reply was, “Nothing that a hat can hide.”)
[National Review Online, January 27, 2006]
The best line in “Nanny McPhee” is not actually spoken; it's merely exhaled through Emma Thompson's prodigious nose, a quietly observant “Hmmm.”
You may not remember Thompson's nose being particularly notable in such arched-pinky movies as “Howard's End,” “The Remains of the Day,” and various Shakespeare and Jane Austen productions. But here it is bulbous and red,
[Review of Faith & International Affairs, Winter 2005-2006]
In “Paradise Now,” a new movie from director Hany Abu-Assad, there's a moment when the character Khaled (Ali Suliman) does a good imitation of a Wild West gunslinger. He faces a corner and then spins back out on one foot, turning toward his pals with a “quick draw” gesture and a grin.
The joke is that he has just had a set of explosives strapped to his chest.
[Atonement Anthology, 2006]
Jesus is standing on the broken doors of hell. The massive portals lie crossed under his feet, a reminder of the Cross that won this triumph. He stands braced and striding, like a superhero, using his mighty outstretched arms to lift a great weight. That weight is Adam and Eve themselves, our father and mother in the fallen flesh. Jesus grasps Adam's wrist with his right hand and Eve's with his left, as he pulls them forcibly up, out of the carved marble boxes that are their graves. Eve is shocked and appears almost to recoil in shame, long gray hair streaming. Adam gazes at Christ with a look of stunned awe, face lined with weary age, his long tangled beard awry. Their limp hands lie in Jesus' powerful grip as he hauls them up into the light.
[Beliefnet, January 10, 2005]
An excerpt from “First Fruits of Prayer: A Forty-Day Journey Through the Canon of St. Andrew”
Every day, Christians pray “deliver us from evil,” not knowing that the Greek original reads “the evil,” that is, “the evil one.” The New Testament Scriptures are full of references to the malice of the devil, but we generally overlook them. I think this is because our idea of salvation is that Christ died on the cross to pay His Father the debt for our sins. The whole drama takes place between Him and the Father, and there's no role for the evil one.
[Unpublished; email to a friend, January 7, 2006]There are three things people mean when they talk of childhood innocence: vulnerability, ignorance, and moral purity. (I touched on this in my First Things piece on “Against Eternal Youth,” but didn’t have room to get into it fully.)
A child's (1) vulnerability ought to stir us; we want to protect them physically and emotionally. That's one of our most urgent drives. But (3) moral purity is a chimera; children are born completely selfish, and slowly and painfully learn to make room for others in their lives.
