Neumatikos

19June2008

I’ve found a solution

Posted by Puretext under: Reviews; Younguns.

For a long time now, I’ve disparaged families who are so negligent as to “use the TV as a babysitter.” I had my reasons:

• TV are stuupid. Television is designed to pitch to the widest possible audience. In part, this is usually accomplished by also pitching to the lowest common denominator. This means that most television, even movies is noticeably lacking in any kind of content which might require an attention span. But people only mature and become capable of working with more complex information by being regularly exposed to stuff that is beyond what they’re actually used to. You don’t improve in anything unless you have to struggle a bit. Since TV constantly pitches low, a regular diet of television makes you dumb.

• TV are annoying. Young children are geared toward repetition and memorization. Which means that, even if you find a way to expose your kids only to “smart TV,” they’re going to want to be watching it a great deal more than an adult is quite prepared to tolerate. I don’t care how much better than the standard fare Thomas the Tank Engine is. It’s not good enough for me to have to memorize it. And I don’t know that I want my kids memorizing it either. OK. Maybe Veggie Tales songs. But I have limits.

Unfortunately, ideals are all wonderful until you encounter real life, in which a child requires a great deal of stimulation.
Read on, MacDuff!

7April2008

Almost Perfect

Posted by Puretext under: Reviews.

My mom submitted An Ideal Husband for the category of perfect movies with no flaws. One day I may see. I still can’t get myself to watch it, what with the “lying to the spouse” thing. Apparently, except for this basic flaw, the movie is perfect.

More recently, Valerie and I have been getting around to watching a stack of movies that were given to us, but didn’t suit our mood when we received them. So I have a short review for you today of a movie out of season: The Holiday.

I put The Holiday in the category of “almost perfect,” that is, it was a film of impeccable taste and style, with absolutely flawless delivery and nary a misstep – except for one glaring detail which brought up the question of whether we ought to have the movie in the house at all.
Read on, MacDuff!

23March2008

Possibly Perfect Movie

Posted by Puretext under: Reviews.

I have just finished watching Shall We Dance, and I would like to put it on my list of movies which are quite possibly perfect.

Any others?

24April2007

democracy fails because it does what voters want.

Posted by Puretext under: Christian Politics; Reviews.

Greg Mankiw points us toward a new book now available on amazon.com: The Myth of the Rational Voter. There is also an excerpt available at the Princeton University Press.

The book is a critique of democracy on the basis that people are fallen and sinful. Of course, being written by economists for a secular audience, it doesn’t quite put it in those terms, but it makes essentially the same point:

Across-the-board irrationality is not a strike against democracy alone, but all human institutions. A critical premise of this book is that irrationality, like ignorance, is selective. We habitually tune out unwanted information on subjects we don’t care about. In the same vein, I claim that we turn off our rational faculties on subjects where we don’t care about the truth. Economists have long argued that voter ignorance is a predictable response to the fact that one vote doesn’t matter. Why study the issues if you can’t change the outcome? I generalize this insight: Why control your knee-jerk emotional and ideological reactions if you can’t change the outcome?

Of course, being a book by economists written for a secular audience, they go on to look into ways of forming a government that can compensate for fallen human nature. After all, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” I think this is consistent with a Christian understanding of government, regardless of the form it takes. One of those purposes is to at least put a cap on human evil until such time as the Governor comes who can eliminate all sinfulness.

I’m afraid I haven’t time to read the book myself, but it looks a very worthwhile read. I’d love to hear from anybody else who gets a chance to look at it.

14October2005

Corpse Bride

Posted by Puretext under: Reviews; Theology.

Have you ever noticed that in Tim Burton’s world, the macabre is… cuddly?

Since we got our financial situation squared away a few weeks ago, Fridays have been movie day for Valerie and me. We both have Friday off, so we can go into town for lunch and a movie and get matinee prices to boot. Finally we can see all those movies we’ve been missing on the big screen! We’ve done this twice so far; Valerie’s paid for the movie and I”ve paid for lunch, each of us out of our newly alotted allowance. Unfortunately, with matinee priceing, I’m losing out. Each week I’ve been totaled, and this week, Valerie had enough left over to buy a pair of gloves. I think next week, I’m paying for the movie.

Last week we saw Wallace and Grommit, which was excellent, and today we saw Corpse Bride, which was… excellent. What is it with stop animation these days?
Read on, MacDuff!

19September2004

No Place for Truth

Posted by Puretext under: Reviews.

I supose this is really just another plug for a product, but it’s infinitely more important than Firefox.

I just finished reading a book for my Theology class by David Wells, a professor at Gordon-Conwell. The book is called No Place for Truth, Or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology? and I there’s a good chance that it ought to be required reading for every True Christian embarking on a path for ministry today. The basic premise of the book is that, in general, evangelical Christians, those of the heritage of the Reformers, the Puritans, the Methodists and the Charismatics, (and I suppose the Baptists too) have essentially lost their first love. Evangelical Christianity is growing by leaps and bounds recently, but they’ve accomplished this growth not by sufficiently challenging the surrounding culture, but by becoming enough like it that people find the evangelical Gospel acceptable to their social mores. For the most part, evangelicals have abandoned the knowledge of God (Theologos) and have replaced it with a kind of knowledge of man. The result has been that the Jesus we present has been dummed down enough that he’s finally acceptable to put on the shelf next to whatever other gods people have.

The first part of the book is a very difficult read, for several reasons. It consists of a scathing critique of modern evangelicalism, and a description of how and why we have abandoned our prior fascination with theology. Part of the difficulty with this part of the book was simply that it was written in 1993, just before the public started really gaining access to the internet. So a lot of his criticisms were just too outdated to make any sense to me. His discussions of how mass marketing and TV had inured our minds to thinking objectively were a bit amusing in light of Ra^therGate and the collapse of interupt marketing. The other thing that made it difficult is that I grew up pretty isolated from “modern culture.” I was in rural Oklahoma, and stupid wasn’t allowed in the house. You have to take that off and leave it on the porch. As a result, I haven’t ever really been aware of the broader evangelical culture, of which I seem inadvertantly to be a part. So some of his scathing criticisms seemed a bit off base. But then it occurred to me that, while we didn’t go to those sorts of churches, most nearly every other Christian we knew did. I had been fortunate, and unaware.

I do, however, have memories of people coming back to school from church and telling me that it had been prophesied: Revival was coming. Next tuesday. Be there.

But the second part of the book was well worth it. He describes the importance of Theology, why we need it, and what may likely happen to the church if we don’t get some of it out of the lofty universities and grounded in the actual church. While I wasn’t raised headlong in modern America’s “cliche culture” (to steal a line from the book), I was raised in a family with a pretty strong bias against formal education. Learning? All for it. But stay away from those schools: they’ll charge you an awful lot of money to give you a piece of paper, and you won’t really have gained much by it in the end. It’s a position I’m still inclined to agree with, much to Valerie’s chagrin. I remember when I got my English degree, the first thought that passed through my head was “now I finally know what it’s like to have a high school diploma.” No Place for Truth largely confirmed these inclinations. He points out that, while the church has lost it’s taste for rock solid truth, the university has lost its focus and understanding that the intended audience for theology (the persuit of the knowledge of God) is the church. If the church has no thorough concept of who God is and what he really wants from us, the church has very little reason for existence. And yet, even those people who point out the most adamantly that you have to know both the power of God and the scriptures, are pitifully ignorant of the scriptures in comparison to say, John Calvin. Incidentally, Wells also mentions that my current degree, the M Div, was a bachelors degree as recently as 50 years ago. It was “upgraded” officially to accord the same prestige to ministers that is given to doctors, lawyers, and MBAs, against the protest of older ministers who were stongly suspicious that there was a financial motive to adding an extra 4 years to the required education to get a theology degree. It was a gut-level sense that something like this was in place that persuaded me to drop out from school for three years, looking for the necessary theology education outside the accredited system. Honestly, it’s only because it didn’t work that I’m now back in school (still). My $30,000 in debt continues to persuade me that there was some financial motive in this “upgrade” to “professional status.”

The final chapter in No Place for Truth is the most impelling. Most of the book is written in academic style, with enough footnotes to choke a goat. But the last chapter is almost free of footnotes, and Wells speaks freely of his diagnosis: The evangelical church, progressing as it is, has become so much like the surrounding worldly culture that it is almost totally ineffective in making a true representation of Christ to the world. The salt has for the most part lost its saltiness. We aren’t changing the world nearly as fast as they are changing us. Even our revivals are pretty much human engineered, and so lacking the key ingredient to actually do what they’re supposed to do. We don’t need a revival: we’re lively enough as it is, and that liveliness has less to do with the actual presence of a holy God than it has to do with an engineered enthusiasm. What we need is a reformation.

I am inclined to agree. Granted, not every church in the world is soaked up by the world. Maybe your church is the church in your town that is preaching the true gospel, complete with a holy and awesome God who is sovereign, and wholly other and above the world. So was Martin Luther’s church, even before he nailed his 95 theses. This doesn’t negate the fact that the church at large has no clue, and it is continuing to persue the path of cluelessness.

David Wells’ prescription involves a renewal of the place of theology in the local church. That can’t be all of it, of course. God is still sovereign and has his own purposes. He also does nothing that he doesn’t first reveal to his servants, the prophets. Nevertheless, if you accept the premise that the knowledge of God is key to a functioning church, then a church that has no place for theology has surely left it’s center.

Restoring theology to its rightful place in church life could be a good start.