So, I’m doing a little lecturing, here and there, over the next month or so. If you’re in the neighborhood, why not drop by?

(1) The first is on Tuesday, March 4, at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois, at the spring conference of the Center for Applied Christian Ethics. The talk is called “The Political Disaster of the Protestant Mainline,” and it’s at 3:30 in the afternoon, in Blanchard Hall, room 339. That will be followed at 7:00 pm by a roundtable in the Coray Auditorium, at which Jim Skillen, Floyd Flake, D. Stephen Long, and I will discuss “Christian Politics and Public Life.” The events are open to the public, and no RSVP seems to be needed.

(2) The second is on Monday, March 17, at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Called “Living with the Dead: Why Cities Need Cemeteries and Nations Need Memorials,” it’s at 7:00 pm in the ICC auditorium. Cosponsored by the Tocqueville Forum at Georgetown and National Civic Art Society, the lecture is a specific application to civil architecture and urban design of the work I did in “Death & Politics,” the long essay on the centrality of grief to political theory that appeared this summer in First Things. The respondents will be National Endowment for the Arts chairman Dana Gioia, the New Criterion’s Roger Kimball, and the architectural historian Denis McNamara. A reception will follow the lecture, I’m told. The event is open to the public, and no RSVP is needed, although you might drop them an email to say you’re coming, so they can get a rough count for the reception.

(3) The third lecture is on Friday, April 4, at the Radisson Hotel, in Plymouth Harbor, Massachusetts. A luncheon talk from 12:00 to 2:00 pm, a plenary address for the annual conference of the Association for Core Texts and Courses, it’s called “Finding Himself: David Copperfield’s Quest for His True Name”—an account of the way Charles Dickens uses naming in David Copperfield. (Have you ever noticed, for instance, that nearly every character in the book calls young David by a different name?) I understand that only limited space for guests is available, and you must arrange to attend by emailing or calling the telephone number on the association’s website.

As I say, if you’re in one of these necks of the wood and have nothing better to do on the day, why not drop by?

There was a just down-right bizarre op/ed in Sunday’s New York Times. Here’s the penultimate paragraph:

Unfortunately, humans seem to forget this fact when we find ourselves turning to nature to guide us through difficult choices, such as arguments about whether life begins at conception, or over the proper structure of the family. Or, more recently, regarding the morality of cloning. Whether we’re talking about raising bigger cattle or growing life-saving organs or trying to “live forever,” both sides like to stress their abilities to judge what is “natural.” Judging from Komodo dragons, lizards and sharks, the answer seems to be that for reproduction, almost anything goes.

Who, exactly, makes the type of argument coming in for criticism here? I don’t know any natural law thinker who does anything remotely similar to this. Caricaturing natural law arguments, of course, is always easier than wrestling with the real thing.

Or so says this report.

There’s something fishy here. First of all, it was conducted by the United Nations. Did they offer respondents food for an “N/A” response? And why is Asma Jahangir, a UN “special rapporteur” (is that anything like a really good “raconteur”?), calling for the disestablishment of the Church of England? Does the C of E now constitute a violation of international human rights by its mere existence?

Here’s why: The C of E “no longer reflected ‘the religious demography of the country and the rising proportion of other Christian denominations.’ Jahangir contends the role and privileges of the Church of England should be challenged given the new statistics on the state of religion in the United Kingdom.”

In other words, according to this report, there aren’t enough Christians in Britain to justify a state-sponsored Christian church, and privileging a minority is unfair to a growing plurality (majority?).

I wonder about those stats, first of all. Two-thirds? Is Britain that far gone? Who was asked what questions about their “affiliation”? And I wonder if all these creedless Brits would continue to remain unaffiliated if they knew that their Christian heritage was one good international screed away from becoming an exhibit in the British Museum. (The “Portable Antiquities and Treasures” department, perhaps?)

I don’t believe in established churches—but whether it is time for the Church of England to fend for itself is an issue for British citizens to decide, not the United Nations or its correspondents. And even if it proves true that communicant Christians are, in fact, a minority in Britain today, there is such a thing as the democracy of the dead. Let those votes be cast as well.

From the New York Times Magazine article: “Did You Hear the One About the Christian Comedian?”

Renfroe is also a devout Christian and for about eight years has been slowly building a career as a comedian on the Christian women’s circuit. Like Mike Huckabee’s easy humor, Renfroe’s wit comes as a surprise to nonevangelicals. She performs what she calls “estrogen-flavored musical comedy” in large halls and arenas, often with an inspirational group called Women of Faith. At those performances she sells her DVDs and humorous books with religious undertones: “If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Your Mother,” “If You Can’t Lose It, Decorate It” and “Purse-onality.” “I love the way God lets you use everything in your life,” she says about her chosen career as a comic. “It’s cool how it all comes together.”

A few weeks ago, William Saletan reviewed the new book Embryo in the New York Times Book Review. Robert George and Chris Tollefsen (the co-authors of Embryo) replied the next day in an article for National Review Online. Saletan replied later that week with an article on Slate. Now George and Tollefsen have replied again.

The exchange is quite civil, and while the specific arguments aren’t all that new, the back-and-forth is illustrative of where the (biological) debate over embryonic life stands today. Saletan is a super-bright bioethics journalist, an honorable liberal, and a somewhat reluctant supporter of embryo destruction and abortion rights. But his arguments here are surprisingly weak. (Of course, I would say that, given my association with the bioethics program at the Witherspoon Institute, where George and Tollefsen are fellows.) Still, check it out for yourself.

“I’m thinkin’ cardboard,” says Jerry, one of the strange creatures that frequent Be Kind Rewind, a ramshackle mom-and-pop videostore in Passaic, New Jersey. And the film Be Kind Rewind is loaded with cardboard, as in the cheap casings of those relics of the 1980s—VHS tapes. Yes, before DVDs, Netflix, and the HD–Blue Ray wars, there was VHS. But time and technology waits for no worn-out copy of The Karate Kid, and so Be Kind Rewind is on the verge of succumbing to urban renewal unless its owner, Mr. Fletcher (Danny Glover), can come up with the $60K to perform much needed repairs.

Jerry, played by Jack Black and his trademark “Wanna make something of it?” frenetic, fanatic, there-are-men-in-my-head delirium, is convinced that the power planet just yards from the videostore is taking control of his life, care of the FBI, the CIA—name your government agency. But an attempt to sabotage the plant results only in Jerry becoming completely magnetized. And when Mr. Fletcher goes away, leaving the store in the feeble hands of his adopted son, Mike (played with an engaging earnestness by Mos Def), Jerry accidentally erases every last video in the place.

How do Jerry and Mike save the shop, and their feeble way of life, when customers come in asking for their favorite movies, all of which are as blank as the income column of the store’s ledger? They decide to shoot knock-off versions starring themselves and pawn them off as the Hollywood originals.

Their first production? Ghostbusters. It was just about here that I began to think of all the ways I could have spent $8.50 without having to watch Jack Black dressed up in aluminum foil running around a library to the tune of “Who ya gonna call?” In other words, the premise of Be Kind Rewind seemed to be nothing more than that—a premise, a goofy idea that a film-school sophomore would come up with but that someone actually bankrolled. Implausible to the point of being ludicrous—but then … I realized there was more going on here.

Yes, Be Kind Rewind is about cardboard—not just the ratty VHS boxes but also the cardboard cutouts that the film’s director, Michel Gondry, often employs in his own films, a throwback to the early days of make-shift special effects and the films of George Méiliès. It’s Gondry’s poke in the eye at how digitalization and CGI have ruined the charms of moviemaking, robbing it of its human connection, making it little more than a product of big business and big science.

Among the many charms that slowly reveal themselves in this film are the inventive, low-rent means by which these Jersey-ites reproduce iconic scenes from classic (and not so classic) films—everything from junkyard refuse to sports and fishing gear to xeroxes of their own faces to produce the right skin tone for “night-vision” shooting. Even their own bodies become instruments of the surreal re-imagining of cinematic fantasy. This community of working-class stragglers enter into their own favorite films and for a few brief hours become stars, artists, and moguls.

Well, Jerry and Mike not only manage to foist these cheapie replicas of action-adventure films like RoboCop and Rush Hour II on their initially unsuspecting customers, they manage actually to create a brand new market. Lines circle the block for the latest dumbed-down but personal vision of these two accidental artists.

Just as it looks as if a return to the early days of cinema will save Be Kind Rewind from demolition by raising the money needed to fix its decrepit frame, Hollywood intervenes—in the person of Ghostbuster star Sigourney Weaver. Playing a big-studio legal eagle, she informs the crew at Be Kind Rewind that they have violated copyright laws by using the studios’ own tapes to remake their home-spun tales, and therefore owe about $60 billion in fines. Weaver is determined to stamp out the great evil that is video piracy, which supposedly threatens to destroy the motion-picture business.

What are our heroes to do? Mr. Fletcher had hoped to save his store by learning from the chain-store West Coast Video, a rival that has managed to keep up with the market. But when he sees the life that Jerry and Mike’s creativity has pumped back into the community, he has second thoughts. Even if the crew at Be Kind can’t legally rip off other people’s ideas, they can certainly come up with their own. One of the prevailing myths of the store—and what Mr. Fletcher hoped would invest his it with an aura that would transcend the depredations of market forces and government interventions—is that it was once home to jazz great Fats Waller. The problem is, this is more myth than fact. Well, if they can’t preserve their own history, if “progress” is determined to literally steamroller them into oblivion, if myth is all they have left, then they will shape it to their own ends. They will counter the harsh reality of technocratic society with play.

By film’s end, I was completely beguiled by this goofy love story to old-fashioned movie making, Gondry own apologetic for his surreal style. In such wild productions as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep, he refuses to be constrained by the authoritarian dictates of Hollywood narrative—as well as the tyranny of overblown special effects. His vision is a return to the days of the zoetrope and the child’s playhouse. (Even the love story, between Mike and one of his “stars,” discovered in a local dry cleaners, never advances beyond the adolescent crush stage.)

Which is not to say that the film doesn’t have problems. It’s too often silly when it’s trying to be funny, the strain on one’s suspension of disbelief are occasionally painful, and there is a subplot about the owner of that local West Coast Video, presumably fallen on hard times himself, that is never fully explicated, leaving a large hole in the story.

But when all is said and done, add Be Kind Rewind to that lovable subgenre of movie-loving movies (along with Singin’ in the Rain and Cinema Paradiso). I don’t imagine it will make much money in release, and many who do give it a chance may never make it past the eye-rolling stage. But it will most definitely have a long life on VHS—er, DVD, that is, HD-DVD. Oh, what am I saying, excuse me: Blue-Ray disc. (God help us all . . .)

P.S. As for the Oscars . . .

Utterly predictable, right down to Tilda Swinton over Amy Ryan (they had to give Michael Clayton something) and Marion Cotillard over Julie Christie. (Christie simply had too much going for her: long time Academy favorite playing an Alzheimer’s victim . . . it simply wasn’t fair. So they went the other way, and picked the truly astounding performance.)