Blog
These stories have been around a long time. Some of them I have updated. Many of them I haven’t. This started out when blogs were like, new!
It Ain’t About Jazz: The Film, “Blue Like Jazz”
Steve Taylor's Blue Like Jazz (2012) is based on a memoir by Donald Miller. In it, an evangelical kid---Miller---is so stunned by his Christian mother's having an affair with a youth pastor that he flees to the Portland, Oregon liberal-arts college his pagan father...
The Genial “Cafe Metropole”
Boy, do the people in Cafe Metropole (1937) need---and want---money! And how careless and devious they can be in trying to acquire it! Even Tyrone Power's Alexis, so young and callow-looking, is a needy louse; he just doesn't seem like one. The whole movie doesn't...
Master Of The Nations
"And there was given him dominion [or authority], and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages [i.e., men of all languages] should serve him: his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom shall not be...
From The Catholic Writer, Mauriac: “A Woman of the Pharisees”
The spiritually proud, over-rigorous follower of Christ is a figure too familiar in literature, but her appearance in the 1941 novel, A Woman of the Pharisees, by Francois Mauriac, does the book no harm whatsoever. The Christ follower in question, Brigitte...
Beyond The Banks Of Frustration: The Novel, “Affliction”
A teacher named Rolfe narrates his older brother's story in the Russell Banks novel, Affliction (1989), and even if he is not likely to be a wholly reliable narrator, he can surely be trusted in pointing out his brother's deepening affliction. Wade Whitehouse, the...
What Came On That Midnight Clear
The angel of God said to the shepherds, "I bring you good news of a great joy which will come to all the people" (Luke 2, RSV). A great joy for all the people of the earth? All the people who have ever lived and will live? The angel could have been adverting to...
Resistance To Liberal Directions
"Conservatism, as a distinguishable social philosophy," wrote Robert Nisbet, "arose in direct response to the French Revolution." Almost as an afterthought, Irving Kristol averred that liberalism inevitably "makes a mess of things" before people vote it out. Vote it...
Claudia Has Something To Say, Girlfriends
Its nebulous ending is not much of a flaw. Claudia Weill's Girlfriends (1978) is still a pretty good film about a young Jewish woman (Melanie Mayron) who loses her live-in friendship with BFF Anne (Anita Skinner) when the latter moves out to get married. The...
“If Anyone Gives A Cup Of Cold Water. . .”
"And if anyone gives a cup of cold water to one of these little ones because he is my disciple, I tell you the truth, he will certainly not lose his reward." This is from Matthew's Gospel (NIV), and I do not believe that by "little ones" Jesus meant believing children...
