The press and others are making much of the religious or theological character of Terrence Malick’s new film, Tree of Life, a tremendously ambitious work featuring Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, and Sean Penn. It is rare, after all, that a Hollywood film delves into the subject of the numinous… . Continue Reading »
God appeared frequently to saints of the Old Testament. He came as a smoking oven and flaming torch to Abram (Genesis 15:17), and later as three men before Abraham’s tent by the oaks of Mamre (Genesis 18). He showed Himself to Moses at the burning bush (Exodus 3:2), and to Israel in a fiery cloud (Exodus 16:10). When He appeared to Korah, the earth opened and swallowed the rebels, and He appeared to Manoah’s wife with the good news about a son (Judges 13:3) and to Samuel with grim news for the house of Eli (1 Samuel 3:21). Continue Reading »
Human efforts all show their fault lines sooner or later”Rome fell, Communism crumbled, and even the flag on the moon will tip over eventually. But Pentecost is the perpetual reminder that the limits of our strength should lead us to hope, not despair. Strength, and it limits, are the obsessions of Asbury Fox, the main character in Flannery O’Connor’s short story “The Enduring Chill.” … Continue Reading »
I do not trust angels. They are capricious, arbitrary, impulsive, and mercurial. If Gabriel is any example they are also officious and apt to lash out if slighted. I doubt they are instructed very well on how to behave with humans. I don’t like them, the biblical sort anyway. But try reading about angels found at the I Believe in Angels web site, or BeliefNet, or Angels Online. The stories offered are about angels falling into a category best described as “unfailingly helpful,” guardian Boy Scouts out to do a good turn… . Continue Reading »
The Internet brings us relentless cataracts of overwhelming, undesired, and often unwelcome information. But once in a great while the immense swirl of digital 0s and 1s assembles itself into something surprising”and leads to unexpected truths… . Continue Reading »
Over the past few years, Anton LaVey and his book The Satanic Bible has grown increasingly popular, selling thousands of new copies. His impact has been especially pronounced in our nation’s capital. One U.S. senator has publicly confessed to being a fan of the The Satanic Bible while another calls it his “foundation book.” On the other side of Congress, a representative speaks highly of LaVey and recommends that his staffers read the book… . Continue Reading »
In recent centuries, the College of Cardinals has not been noted for its boyishness. Indeed, one of the human fascinations of a conclave is that it’s a rare opportunity to see a deliberation-with-consequences conducted by elderly men. This can have its down-side: According to one story, perhaps apocryphal, a very old cardinal kept writing “Achille Ratti” on his ballot throughout the conclave of 1958; Ratti had died in 1939 as Pius XI… . Continue Reading »
Since moving from the White House beat to the op-ed page of the New York Times, Maureen Dowd has made a career of throwing stones. In general she reserves the heaviest of them for launching toward Rome, but now it appears that her already-cramped reach has gotten the yips, and even her praise misses the plate. In her June 5 piece on Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, a churchman of moderately progressive bent, Dowd discovers a Bishop she can like. … Continue Reading »
Ultra-violence, as A Clockwork Orange’s protagonist reminds us, is an art. Takashi Miike agrees, judging from his new remake of Eiichi Kudo’s Thirteen Assassins (Jusan nin no shikaku). The thirteen warriors slash, spin, and sever their way through hordes of butter-fingered baddies, but the movie is not just a mindless display of butchery; somewhere between the rivers of blood and the piles of bodies, Miike has managed to hide a serious, if perhaps unintentional, discussion of virtue in a virtue-less world… . Continue Reading »
What makes life worth living? For the most part Western society has settled on an individualistic answer: whatever I decide or desire. It’s judgmental”an act of cultural imperialism, as we’re taught to say at fancy colleges”to suggest that there’s a right answer to this question. Rather, we are told, people should be able to organize their lives around what they feel or think best. We’re happiest, the present-day liberal presumes, when we can make up our own minds about what makes life worth living”or even if life is worth living… . Continue Reading »
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