Monday, August 27, 2007

From the Mouths of Babes

So my spousal unit is reading The Peace Book by Todd Parr to our four year-old son, and I hear this exchange:
Spousal Unit: Peace is having enough pizza in the world for everyone.
Offspring: Even the bad people?
Spoual Unit: Yes, even the bad people.
Offspring: So they will learn to be nice?
Spousal Unit: Yes, so that they will learn to be nice.
...
Spousal Unit: Peace is being free.
Offspring: I like being free.
...

And then there’s this one from yesterday:
We are in the car, and the windshield wipers are going - just enough - to make a high-pitched whine that drives me crazy. I’ve teased the Spousal Unit about the fact that I’m more annoyed by audio clutter, and she’s more annoyed by visual clutter. So as the windshield wipers go screek, screek, screek, I’m clutching the arm rest and wincing. Eventually I start laughing and I tell her the windshield wipers are making me insane, and from the seat in the back the Offspring rolls his eyes and says:
“Daddy, take a deep breath.”

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

All I Really Needed to Know I Learned at Hogwarts

I really enjoyed preaching my first sermon of this series. The podcast can be found here.

This is the kind of stuff that finally motivated me to preach on Harry Potter. The writer is obviously annoyed by comparisons between Rowling and C.S. Leiws and J.R.R. Tolkien. But I can easily imagine some obtuse editorialist saying, “but God isn’t in Tolkien - his universe is polytheistic. And Lewis doesn’t have God either - just an emporer across the sea.”

I hope the writer ate some crow after reading the last book. I can’t imagine how much more explicit Rowling could be without mentioning Jesus by name and having her books published by Zondervan. 

I haven’t seen many comparisons of Rowling’s work with Roald Dahl, but I see a much closer connection there than with Lewis or Tolkien. The whole range of absurd magical bureaucracy and technologies is part of what makes the series engaging. I think it’s the juxtaposition of cutesy house-elves and Bertie Bots Every-Flavored Beans with boarding-school bullying and painful death that make the books so appealing to children and disturbing to many adults. I keep hearing adults describe the last few books as “dark” - but it’s only by contrast. We take the darkness of other books for granted.

Tuesday, August 07, 2007

The Road to Peace…

While we visited with the former Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem, he told us a story about meeting with Tony Blair. He had expressed concern over the U.S. and Britain invading Iraq. Blair said, “the road to peace in the Middle East is through Baghdad.” Bishop Kafeeti replied, “No. The road to peace is through Jerusalem.”

So when I saw the headline for this article, I had to read it.

Thursday, August 02, 2007

Rock’s Speech from Alien 3

Why?
Why are the innocent punished?
Why the sacrifice? Why the pain?
There aren’t any promises.
Nothing’s certain.
Only that some get called. Some get saved.
She won’t ever know the hardship and grief for those of us left behind.
We commit these bodies to the void with a glad heart.
For within each seed there is the promise of a flower,
And within each death, no matter how small,
There’s always a new life.
A new beginning.

In some ways, this is my favorite Aliens movie.