Later tonight we’ll find out if Avatar is selected by the Motion Picture Academy for the award of Best Picture. I had a chance to see Avatar in 3D a few weeks ago and I would love to see it again in the IMAX format (although the IMAX versions still seems to be sold out in my area). So what did I think of the movie and should it be selected as Best Picture? continue reading…
I have had some difficulty classifying The Halcyon Dislocation as Science Fiction or as Fantasy. On the one hand the University of Halcyon, consistent with a Science Fiction story, comes from a time and technological culture that’s slightly in advance of our own, yet when the people of the university are dislocated to a new world, they encounter inhabitants which are much more reminiscent of The Lord of the Rings than they are of Star Trek. Consistent with this ambiguity I characterize The Halcyon Dislocation as SciFi/Fantasy on my Facebook page.
I asked a friend of mine who is an avid reader of both genres “What is the difference between Fantasy and Science Fiction?” He answered: “Science Fiction talks about things that could happen. Fantasy does not. That’s why I like Science Fiction better.” So is this really the essential difference between Science Fiction and Fantasy? continue reading…
Chery and Laurens Van Der Mark and their family are missionaries living and working in Haiti for Mission of Hope: Haiti under the auspices of Feed the Children Canada. Seeing the pictures of the destruction of Port au Prince on television have been heart rending, but reading the first hand account of the earthquake and the devastation through the eyes of a front line participant brought this tragedy home to me more than the television accounts ever could. In the hope that you’ll take the time to read the full blog by Cheryl Van Der Mark, I’ve posted a few quotes here.
First the earthquake itself …
“I remember seeing the concrete walls moving violently in a wave like at a wave pool. One to my right, one to my left and then one in front of me moving in a different direction. I also remember the ceiling was moving in a wave above me. The floor beneath my feet did not feel attached to me.”
The Van Der Marks live on a hill outside of the city. This is what Cheryl saw a few minutes after the quake.
“Then I stood up and turned around……From our rural hill not far from Port au Prince, we have a [view] of the whole city. As I looked out towards the city and the ocean, that is when I realized what had just happened. The entire city went up in dust. One huge even dust cloud arose from the entire massive city. It was like a bomb had gone off and it was the smoke rising.”
Then the injured began arriving to their small clinic.
“That may have been enough to deal with except that we realized that we had a team of 53 Canadian’s visiting on a short term mission trip. We went into leader mode. Laurens went to check on a few things and I gathered the team. Grant went to get the ambulance and I gathered the visiting nurses and doc. We jumped into the ambulance and headed down to the clinic. Grant took the team in and I rushed to the front gate of our mission. By the time I got there, the injured started arriving. They came in tap tap (pick up truck taxi) after tap tap. Children, woman and men.
Their arms and legs were crushed, their bones sticking out of their bodies, their heads gashed open. Some crying in pain, some barely alive. 5, 6, 7, people per truck.
After a few minutes I left the gate and security took over letting them all in and I rushed back to the hospital. For the next 33 hours straight we worked on the traumatic cases that lie before us. It looked like war. We did not know the integrity of the clinic yet so we could not go inside. The aftershocks started to come and were frequent but less in intensity. We had to get supplies in side but ran back out every aftershock we got. The injured were lying all over our outside walk way. Grant, our visiting nurses and myself worked on triaging the worst patients. We are not a full service hospital, we are just a clinic…..we started to get reports that the biggest hospital in PAP, General hospital had crashed down, Doctors without Borders had crashed (the only 2 main ER’s in the entire city!). We got further reports that other hospitals were down. We started to realize, that we were all there was for miles and miles and miles.”
The flow of wounded only stopped when the taxis ran out of diesel.
“We went home and slept 6 hours. Then opened the clinic again. We worked another 10 hours, seeing the same things. Finally it stopped. There were no more tap tap’s running as there was no more diesel for their vehicles.”
What does one say as a Christian as one looks at this tragedy?
“Rachel (missionary here) and I were just saying today that if someone had told us that this is what we would have had to do this week prior to this event, we would have “quit”. We would have said no way God! I can’t do all of that. We would have underestimated our abilities based on what we were comfortable with. We have learned that God knows more than we do, that He knows what we can handle and He has more faith in us than we have in ourselves.”
I hope you have the time to read Cheryl’s full blog. If you would like to donate you can do so on her blogsite or through Feed the Children Canada.
Thanks for reading,
Peter
Note: This review of The Blind Side contains some details about the movie content and plot.
Watching The Blind Side was not really a high priority for me. I had seen no advertising about it and the little I did see did not portray the plot as particularly exciting. Still the recommendations from viewers who had seen it were uniformly encouraging. So on a day after watching the Baltimore Ravens lose to the Pittsburgh Steelers I had a chance to see the movie. Did it live up to the recommendations? continue reading…
I belong to a movie watching group and one of their discussion threads covers the member’s favorite movies of all time. When I read through the lists of the other contributors, I realized how different my tastes were and I thought I ought to generate my own list. Many of my selections are older movies.
So how did I arrive at the order? I generally evaluate a movie (as I do books) by how often I’m willing to watch it. If I watch a movie many times, the movie (or movie series) will make it to the top of my list.
So what are my top 20 movies or movie series in reverse order? continue reading…
I recently had an opportunity to visit a friend of mine to listen with him to a lecture on the provocative topic of whether or not the Bible is beneficial and therefore should be kept or deleted. Having listened to the lecture and wishing to write about it, I find myself in a quandary. On the one hand I owe the speaker good language since she traveled a fair distance to present her talk and she delivered her presentation with an amiable demeanor. Still I will have little good to say about the lecture, so taking a cue from C. S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man, I propose to simply call the talk “The Lecture,” and I will call the speaker Docilla so that I can confine my comments to the content. So what was my reaction to the talk?
First let me deal with the provocative topic: should the Bible be kept or deleted? I suppose this statement may be provocative hyperbole for “is the Bible still relevant or is it irrelevant?” However I received no clear indication that the title was not meant literally so let me talk to the title from point of view that “delete” really means delete. There are many book ancient and modern which I do not think either edifying or helpful, but that does not mean I would like to see them deleted. Even a badly written book can serve as an example on how not to write. Books that I believe wrong-headed or advocate destructive behavior can still raise important questions. My love of books, my desire for freedom, and my personal commitment to try to find the truth about important questions make me hesitant to destroy any book. Given my perspective, it was a surprise to me that several in the audience (perhaps 3-4 out of 25) had voted for deletion of the Bible. It was a surprise because I had great difficulty reconciling their view that the Bible was such an extraordinarily dangerous book that it ought to be deleted with my own investigation of the contents.
So what about the lecture itself? Had I given the lecture, I would have discussed the history of the Biblical texts and the scholarship surrounding the early manuscripts, the use of the texts by the early Christians and the eventual collection of the sacred Christian writings into the New Testament canon. I would have then gone on to compare and contrast good and bad behaviors that have come out of the application of the principles in these writings from the earliest days to the present.
Docilla did very little of this. It was impossible for me to understand where she stood on these basic questions or even to glean the key facts about the archeological and textual evidence for the historicity of the Bible from her lecture. Furthermore she spent a disproportionate amount of time on extra-biblical writings such as the gospel of Thomas.
Much of the talk centered on the theme that one cannot interpret the Biblical text (or any text I suppose) unless one has the right metaphor to unlock the meaning. I don’t deny that metaphors can be useful in gaining understanding. A metaphor is useful because we can take something concrete and use it to help understand something that is abstract. Yet much of what she described extracted arcane conclusions out of New Testament writings while ignoring what seems plain and straight forward.
On reflection, The Lecture was not a lecture at all, but rather one long story. I’m not completely sure if the story was a work of fiction or non-fiction and perhaps in the mind of Docilla that distinction is not very clear. I suppose there are many benefits to Postmodern thinking that treats everything as a story. But if our passion for story makes us lose sight of what is true and false, I think we have lost a great deal.
Thanks for reading,
Peter
With the advent of the deep recession we have just experienced, there has been a resurgence of the theme that capitalism has failed and is dead or at least. The discussion around this topic has caused me to re-think Capitalism and in particular to wonder what makes Capitalism work.
One explanation both for the success of Capitalism and it’s failures is that Capitalism is founded on greed, the most predictable of human shortcomings. But is this really true? continue reading…
A friend of mine pointed out to me an amazing video on Youtube that demonstrated the remarkable memory ability of trained chimpanzees to replicate a sequence of numbers that they have seen only for a very short time. Apparently even humans who are gifted with an excellent memory cannot match the speed that these trained chimps display in remembering and keying in a sequence of numbers on a monitor.
So how human are chimps? continue reading…
At the first lecture of Get Over Yourself by Bruxy Cavey an interesting book by J. M. Twenge and W. K. Campbell entitled The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in an Age of Entitlement was discussed.
In summary, Cavey, while he acknowledged there were people who had self-destructive perceptions of themselves, argued that “self-love” and “self-affirmation” have become a panacea of our generation for almost all psychological ailments. Instead promoting this, in his words we should:
“…renounce the pop-culture pursuit of self-love. Forget trying to love yourself more. In fact, most of us would benefit from thinking about ourselves less, period. Start focusing on the needs and desires of others, especially those people who are on the margins of social circles.”
In response to this, I would ask:
- Is it true that our generation is overly focused on ourselves?
- If we are, is it a bad thing?
In our culture where we receive so much advice about building self-confidence and self-esteem, it is refreshing to hear about a series of lectures that challenges this paradigm. If you are interested, I’ve attached the information on the lectures below.
In one sense to me, building self-esteem and self-confidence by imagining that I am able to do things that are beyond me is a bit like a placebo – I am relying on a psychological lift to improve my behavior. Although, like a placebo this may have some positive effect, ultimately I’m relying on a cheat. I am a finite human being and I do have limitations.
It will be interesting to see how Bruxy Cavey deals with this question. If you’d like to learn more, listen to the free podcasts or attend the lectures, check out the link to The Meeting House to get more information. It is my hope that Bruxy Cavey will teach how to take the “self” out of self-confidence and self-esteem.
Thanks for reading,
Peter