2016 Book Roll

This year I finally got an Audible account for a little while and learned the value of listening to books. Probably half of the books on this list were listened to rather than "read" in the strictest sense of the word. In the case of my first entry, this allowed me to finally "read" something I've been meaning to for some time. That being said, almost my entire book list, minus that first entry, was fiction.

The Guns of August - Barbara Tuchman 👂
A Wanted Man - Lee Child 👂
One Shot - Lee Child
The Maltese Falcon - Dashell Hammett 👂
One for the Money - Janet Evanovich
Killing Floor - Lee Child 👂
The Wrath of the Furies - Steven Saylor
The Patriot Threat - Steve Berry
The Pawn - Steven James
The Lost Symbol - Dan Brown 👂
The Rook - Steven James
Sandstorm - James Rollins 👂
The Knight - Stephen James
Die Trying - Lee Child 👂
Never Go Back - Lee Child 👂

Analyzing my nostalgia

We've been getting old TV shows on Netflix. We've been streaming some and ordering the DVD's for others not available. Specifically we've been watching old cartoons that I grew up on: G.I. Joe and Voltron. A few weeks ago while watching G.I. Joe, I got into a discussion with my oldest boys about how these cartoon were different from the one's that they and their friends watched now. We contrasted G.I. Joe with Star Wars: The Clone Wars. We noted that no one ever died in G.I. Joe, while characters often died in Star Wars: The Clone Wars. We also noted that the lines between good and evil were drawn a lot more carefully in older cartoon than they were today.

However, recently, my wife and I were talking and she pointed out something else. She pointed out that the objective of the older cartoons was problematic, in that they often held as the goal the teenage years, versus the adult years. We began thinking this through and noted a lot of the old stories on video that did this. If not the teenage years, certainly the early adult lifestyle.

It made me remember how subtle these things are. Of course, this can happen in books as well, but in books you spend so much more time with the narrative, that you can catch on more easily and defend yourself. Film often doesn't give you the time to reflect on the issues enough to make the distinctions.

Harry Potter and the Rules

"Yes, but ... they wouldn't do anything against the law to get gold."
"Wouldn't they?" said Ron, looking skeptical. "I dunno .. they don't exactly mind breaking rule, do they?"
"Yes, but this is the law," said Hermione, looking scared. "This isn't some silly school rule .... They'll get a lot more than detention for blackmail! Ron ... maybe you'd better tell Percy...."
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, 568-569.
I find it very interesting that the antithesis being set up here is between rules which count (the law) and rules which don't (silly school rules). Rather than pointing out that rules like school rules and house rules are to prepare children to accept the legitimacy and authority of state rules, we have accepted a dichotomy that says rules at home and school are OK to break, so long as sometime, somewhere, children learn the difference between the ones that matter and the ones that don't. But where are children supposed to learn this difference, as if it existed, if not at home and at school. Why are we surprised when students who break rules at home and school continue their rule breaking after they have left home and school? We have never taught them not to!

Good Vampires, Twilight, and Metaphor Morphing

Can there be such a thing as a good vampire? I am not sure I have an answer to this but Doug Wilson is convinced that there cannot be a good vampire. To him it is a clear example of metaphor morphing "trying to overturn the meaning of symbols that have served our people well for centuries" (Vampires with Self-Control). This is, itself an example of "moving the ancient landmarks" which is warned against in Deuteronomy 19:14. To prove this, Wilson embarked on a commitment to read Twilight and blog his way through the book. His entries can be found at the Credenda/Agenda site, here. I have really enjoyed them. They have been eye-opening in a number of ways. I have decided, partly because of Wilson's decision to read some of the literature my students are reading and that my own kids will soon want to read. I read the Percy Jackson and the Olympians books not long ago and am in year four of Harry Potter. I had watched the movies, but not read the books. I had impressions of the stories and their dangers, but nothing hard to back it up with. I realized that the instant I said "Well I haven't actually read the books, but..." my credibility to critique the books would be gone. I don't think we necessarily have to read to watch everything to critique it (Prov. 24:30-34) but sometimes it can be useful to critique with hard facts. I felt that to be the case here.

Google has gone too far now, perfecting the art of time travel, they have taken their satellites back in time to capture some important moments in history from a Google Earth perspective. Here is one image they have brought us.












This is the top of Mount Ararat, just as the ark has settled onto the dry ground.

Seriously though, this image came from a website called the Glue Project and they have done a few interesting images called God's Eye View, essentially photoshopping some images to look like events from the Bible. The Ark one was neat. So it this one from the Red Sea Crossing.












Now more than ever, we cannot believe our eyes and must use the reason God gave us. That reminds me of a great line from "The Blue Cross" the first Father Brown story. When asked how Father Brown was sure that the thief masquerading as a priest was not a priest, Father Brown responds, "'You attacked reason,' said Father Brown. 'It's bad theology.'"

Cute? Not really.

A friend on facebook posted this recently. I watched it, chuckled, and then stopped chuckling. It reminded me that we, too often, think things like this are cute. Our little children do things that are rebellious and we have a hard time holding back the snickers because it looks cute at the time. But cute sin turns into ugly sin when it is not dealt with properly and promptly.
This little girl has obviously been exposed to the language she is using. There is no mystery here. I am beginning to think that exposure is tantamount to approval in our culture. I have learned, even recently, how important it is to shield my own children from certain things. I've sat at the dinner table and had my children say things that I know they picked up from me, and been ashamed that they said it. My pastor often says that our children will take the sins we play with and perfect them. Sin is covenantal.
Don't think it's cute when three year olds do as this little girl does. If it is your three year old, don't approve of it by laughing, getting her to do it again so you can tape it, and don't post it in public.

Hapy Birthday Tetris

Tetris was released today in 1984. I'm not sure how significant the year is. You may consult Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death to determine this. Nevertheless, today marks the day that millions upon millions of people became addicted to the little blocks falling upon each other.

How to Change a Culture

The other night my wife and I were flipping through channels in hopeless attempt to find something to watch. For one thing, we don't have cable, by design. We have decided that we already watch too much television with only the over-the-air broadcast channels we receive. For another thing, we can't justify spending the money. But the first reason is more important.
Nonetheless, we were flipping the channels and lighted upon NBC for a few moments. I could tell it was one of the incarnations of Law and Order. I have enjoyed some of these, especially the way they take a story currently in the news and twist it a little to make a fictional story. However, what I saw that night was nothing to be amused about.
The version I caught was SVU (Special Victims Unit). I rarely like these because of their attention to children and sexual crimes. I didn't like this one either, but for different reasons. I caught the story most of the way through, but I got the gist of it pretty quickly. A child had died and the evidence had led the investigators to a mother whose own child was known to play at the same public park as the victim. What happened next left me dumbfounded. The woman was arrested for murder because she had refused to vaccinate her own child and that child had spread a mild disease to the victim.
I actually didn't even finish the episode. I had seen everything I needed to see in those few moments. The characters provided the commentary that was necessary to change or establish public opinion on the issue at stake.
The people who make Law and Order and most of the other shows like it are at the forefront of culture change in our day. They are the George Eliot's of today, making it seem reasonable to think in ways that are actually quite contrary to biblical attitudes. Eliot, as I've posted here before, used the subtlety of her novel to slowly change attitudes toward aristocracy and wealth. Law and Order and the shows like them do the same thing for sexual preference, socialism, abortion, and the whole host of social actions in the news today.
The longer we watch shows like this without questioning them and their assumptions, the easier we make it to change the very foundations of our culture. The people who make these shows know this. This is the big game now. We are having our attitudes of culture and society changed around us without our even knowing it. These new thoughts are presented as matters of justice and common sense. Only really uptight and bigoted folks would reject the premises presented by the show. Only prudes would maintain sexual purity in the modern world. Only over-protective religious freaks would homeschool their children in the modern world (also seen lambasted in a Law and Order show).
This is the world we inherit if we watch carelessly and without thinking.

Star Trek

I have the feeling that nostalgia is going to get the best of me...again. I am planning on going to see the new Star Trek movie when it comes out. I have hopes for it, but they are mediated by similar situations in recent years. I am a little excited and very concerned to see what J.J. Abrams will do with Star Trek. I liked Alias for a little while, then it got weird and imploded. We didn't even bother watching the last season or two. I am still watching Lost, but know that it has gotten past the possibility of making sense. I want to see what he does with it, not much more.
He has a habit of beginning something on a really clever idea and then letting it roll. I get no indication that he knows where his plots need to end up. I am hoping he can do better with a simple 2 hour timeframe, but we'll see.
The other thing that concerns me is his very postmodern worldview. I have seen it writ large on both Alias and Lost, very Matrix-esque with lots of symbolism borrowed or stolen from other contexts, and am a little concerned about how it will affect something as modernist as Star Trek. I watched Quantum of Solace recently and was amazed at how postmodern Bond has become. Gone are the modernist toys of Q as well as other basic Bond standbys. It was eerie to watch it.
I half-expect the new Star Trek to be this way as well, to some extent. It is sci-fi after all, a typically modernist genre anyway.

Let's End Women's Suffrage

Not really, but this video once again shows the sorry state of our educational machine in America.
Enjoy!

Another video from Requiem for a Dream

OK. The other day I blogged about NarrowGate Studios overlaying Requiem for a Tower on top of The Stupids. Messing around on YouTube can be hilarious at times. While playing around today, I found another guy who has done the same thing with Ferris Beuller's Day Off. This guy has done a fantastic job with this. It is a real joy to watch.
So, without further ado, have a peek at Requiem for a Day Off.

How important is music to movies?

The guys over at NarrowGate Studios (students at Franklin Classical School, Franklin, TN) have done a great job of showing us how important music can be to movies. Neil Postman makes the comment that music in TV (and by extension movies) "helps to tell the audience what emotions are to be called forth." In this case they have taken the main track for Requiem for a Dream, Requiem for a Tower (composed by Clint Mansell and performed with Kronos Quartet) and set it against some odd footage from the 1996 Tom Arnold film, The Stupids. They are attempting to prove that this song can turn any piece of film into an epic. See if they are right.

Dark Knight Review-warning spoilers

A student from last year was kind enough to give me a movie theater gift card at the end of school. My wife and I have held onto it until a movie that would be theater-worthy (you know, lots effects and sound, something that won't be the same on the little screen) came out. There were two such picks out this last weekend when we had the opportunity to go. This will undoubtedly give readers a heads up about the kind of films a guy like me watches, but our choices were the Dark Knight and the new X-Files movie. Because of timing, etc. we ended up seeing the Dark Knight.
It was a great film. The cinematography, lighting, music, etc. were fantastic. And I enjoyed the story as well. But it was a very dark film, as I understand it was supposed to be. Heath Ledger did an amazing job as the Joker. I know people in that audience really believed he was the Joker and just a sadistic as he was acting. He made the character real, which is a hard thing to do in our culture. On to the review aspect of this.
My wife and I were talking it over after the film and trying to figure it out. We always begin by establishing the worldview of the film. Some of my students think that takes away from the enjoyment of the movie, "Just watch it and have fun," they say. I can assure you, I can no more "just watch" a movie (even if I have seen it several times) than I can stop breathing. And it doesn't take away from my enjoyment. I enjoy the film on two levels. At any rate, we begin by asking for the absolutes of the film.
In this case there is an absolute moral or ethical system in place. Murder is wrong, etc. The police force, the District Attorney, and Batman are all agreed that murder and its consorts are wrong. They may have different methods of handling that issue, but they are agreed. Batman, at one point, tells the Joker that murder is the one one rule he will not break.
Honesty and integrity, however, turn into situational issues in the film. By the end of the film, the truth about what Harvey Dent has done is too damaging to "hope" to be known. Batman agrees to assume responsibility for Harvey's crimes so that Harvey's reputation and the hope he brings to Gotham will remain in tact. There is a Christ-figure here folk, we'll come back to this later. With the idea that hope transcends truth there is a Kantian-Humean ideology going on here. Kant, of course, believed in a dualism of thought between the world of sense-perception (the noumenal) and the world that is actually there (the phenomemal). Our knowledge of truth was determined not by the phenomenal realm but by our mind's inherent ability to reconstruct sense-data in the noumenal realm. Combine that with a Humean way of considering habit and you get a world where we must have hope by habit because truth is beyond our mortal grasp. It is more important, in Gotham, to have hope than to have the truth. This is clearly against Paul's argument in 1 Corinthians 15:12-19 that if Christ is not raised our hope is in vain. Hope is only hope if it has an objective basis to hope in. What are the people of Gotham supposed to be hoping in? They are left with an empty hope that Harvey Dent was a good man who never did anything wrong and yet was slain in the line of duty. All the while, Batman becomes a total fugitive, expressing that he can handle being chased.
Batman operates outside the law. He is the man who must step outside the legal and civil approach to justice because civil justice is ineffective and corrupt. This is a classic revolutionary mentality. The only way to fix this situation is to get outside it and impose order without process. This has been the revolutionary way of doing things for eons. Sulla did this in Rome of the 70's BC by marching on city, imposing his own totalitarian rule, rewriting the Roman constitution, and then turning power back over to the people when he was done. In his mind, the only way to save the state was to invade the state and control the state. This is the same method used by Cromwell in the 1640's and by Robespierre in the French Revolution.
Aside: This is one reason I object to calling the American War for Independence a revolution. We did not revolt, we declared independence.
On to Batman as a Christ-figure. I willl keep this short. It is obvious that Batman is a Christ-figure long before he takes Dent's sin into himself and becomes an outcast for the sake of the city. He is the substitute for Dent. Dent represents fallen humanity every bit as much as the Joker does, but the Joker is unredeemable (and not really seems to try either), while Dent can be redeemed. But what is redemption when the rest of Gotham (the universe) is shown a picture of a flawless man rather than the two-faced monster we all really are? What does it mean that Dent it redeemed? It really only means that our sins are not worthy of real justice, they are easily removed. Just photoshop a picture of our soul and it will look all pretty rather than ugly and debased.
I really enjoyed the movie and will likely own it when it comes out on DVD. It is a great picture of fallen humanity. Gary Demar's review is excellent as well. It reminds us that ideas have consequences, which is one of the best lessons we can really learn.

The Death of the Grown-Up

I just came across a fascinating title by Diana West: The Death of the Grown-Up: How America's Arrested Development is Bringing Down Western Civilization. Admittedly I came across it while perusing the Reformation 21 website and reading through some recent blog posts there.They always have stimulating reading. I missed wishing John Calvin happy birthday on my blog recently, but I'm sure he won't really mind.
At any rate, this new book is definitely going to find its way onto my reading list. Until I give my own opinion of it, check out this excellent review from the Ref21 team.

Diet is Important

It never fails. About two or three weeks into the school year a parent (or hopefully pair of parents) give me a call or stop me in the hallway to ask about the content of the books we read in Humanities. They have usually just realized that the subject of sexuality has been mentioned or that the book may contain “bad words.” Sometimes they have come with true inquisitiveness, “Is this appropriate to read and discuss?” Other times it is less congenial, “I can’t believe my child is reading this at a Christian school!” Rather than focus on an apologetic for our reading here – which has merit – I want to discuss a different, related issue in this article.
Our diet is important. In our materialistic, botox-injected, fashion model, American Idol culture, you would think we get that. Sadly we only get the physical implications of this. We totally miss the broader worldview-centered applications of this concept. If our lives are meant to be a reflection of the glory of God (and they are, 1 Cor. 10:31) and if we are to cultivate this by attending to truth, goodness, and beauty (and we should, Phil. 4:8) then we must have a diet consistent with these ideals.
The reason I began with the example I did is because this question is really a dietary question. In both cases the answer is that there is no better place to read about pagan (or biblical) sexuality than a Christian school where the sexual activity can be analyzed and given a critique from a biblical standard. And by the way, there are no “bad” words. Words may be poorly used in order to revolt against propriety (in which case “friggin” or “that sucks” may fit the same bill as many four-letter words) but words themselves are not intrinsically bad.
How is the context of a literature class an issue of diet? Because for many families it is such a stark contrast to the diet their children get outside of school. Our entertainment diet has the same effect on our mind and character as our food diet does on our mid-section and gluteal muscles. Think of MTV as McDonald’s for your mind.
In my own experience I recently came to this understanding myself. Raised in Middle Tennessee, my entertainment diet grew from playing outside with action figures to watching television and then finally to video game consoles, walkman tape players, trips to the movie theater and an unhealthy obsession with popular culture. Not that I had an educational environment working against the entertainment mentality, but it would have made no difference if I had. It is a simple case of immediate gratification versus delayed gratification. Neil Postman has argued that our modern world has demanded that learning be a form of entertainment. As a college student, after my conversion to classical pedagogy I began to lament the time spent in entertainment, recognizing an antithesis between entertainment and the cultivation of wisdom and virtue. Entertainment is self-centered, even if it is done in a group. Wisdom and virtue are kingdom centered and desire to be taught, learned and discovered (cf. Prov. 9:3-6).
But as I began to have a family a sense of nostalgia gripped me. I did, after all, have two boys. I wanted them to develop a sense of dominion over creation but I wanted to share my boyhood joys with them as well. I unintentionally, and foolishly, set a paradox in front of them. I read C.S. Lewis, A.A. Milne, and J.R.R. Tolkien to them and set them in front of Star Wars and Robotech. Guess which had more of an influence?
It eventually struck me as I tried to cultivate discretion and gentleness and my children injured themselves in sword fights that I had fed them a diet of violence and action and expected to harvest reflection, simplicity, and virtue. How dumb was that?
Many families have this same tension. They want their children to have entertainment experiences they had (or sometimes ones denied to them in their youth). They also want the ideals of a classical child (meekness, self-control, etc.). It is very difficult (if not impossible) to have both of these together. They are antithetical to the tune of having cake and eating said cake.
This is what I have found to be the problem with families from the example at the beginning of this article. This past year I had a parent who was indignant about her son reading the sexually explicit portions of the Epic of Gilgamesh but had been fine with him watching an unedited version of the movie 300. There are simply no words for this contradiction.
Too often we assume that Disney and Nick Jr. or whatever is fine because it is aimed at kids. I have had to take a step back and drastically curb the shows my children watch or what they read because the content was not something the cultivated biblical attitudes. Attitudes like sarcasm and self-indulgence, mean-spiritedness and arguing are prevalent in modern cartoons and young-reader books. I’m not just talking about Harry Potter or The Golden Compass. This affects such shows as Arthur and new versions of Looney Toons.
We cannot feed our children an entertainment diet full of sensationalized pop culture and unbiblical attitudes and expect our children to be content with poetry or even deep study of the Scriptures. If our children have no patience or are averse to contemplation or reflection we must consider what has helped them be that way. This is no different from an obesity crisis. The prescription for obesity is to change your diet (to healthy foods) and exercise. The prescription for lazy minds and poor behavior is the same thing. Change their entertainment diet and make them exercise their mind.

Sad/Funny Look at the state of Modern Education

Nostalgia Stinks

I was a victim of nostalgia Sunday evening. I was raised in a slightly more innocent time regarding televisiol (which is to say the writers of TV and film wanted to say things but were prevented at that time, so they used more innuendo than I remember) and remember the TV show Knight Rider with David Hasselhoff. Well, somebody decided to recreate that episode of Americana and emotionally ensnare many people like myself. I saw commercials for the show and thought, "Wow, I wonder what new techniques they will use to make it even better." Boy was I a sucker!
In the first few moments of the show, a female FBI agent (who becomes crucial to the show a little later on) is seen leaving an overnight encounter with another woman (the lesbianism does not become crucial to the plot in any way) and the new driver of KITT (the car) is seen waking up to multiple female partners in his bed (also not incredibly crucial to the plot of the show). Why was this necessary? It wasn't. Why was it done? Because it can be.
I won't even get started on how we can't come up with our own shows anymore, we have to rob from the seventies, eightes, and even some fo the nineties to cme up with deent sitcoms or television dramas. Sure we pump it up with effects and sex and violence, but that doesn't make it any better.
Nostalgia is an emotion that ties us to a past event. It is stronger than mere memory. I think it is memory with excessive good feelings. All this is very technical, I know. I think we are getting to the point where nostalgia is under regular attack by advetisers and media groups. They want us to feel the way we felt when we were 14 or 21 so we will take this vacation or buy this toy for our kids. It has worked on me to some extent. I buy transformers for my kids even though they aren't as well made as when I got the (there are even some of mine from childhood stilla round and they still outlast the new ones). And, of course, I wasted time Sunday evening watching the new and improved Knight Rider.
We have to fight against this kind of attack and it is hard. I think I'll pick up a Chesterton book next Sunday evening instead.