• 8Jun 09

  Summer Reading?

  So are any television junkies out there reading anything interesting this summer? My high school English teacher would be so proud - I have been on a Victorian literature kick the last several weeks, having just re-read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, published by the youngest and perhaps least known of the three Brontë sisters, Anne, one year before her untimely death from influenza. Great novel, and of the three literary sisters, second only to her sister Emily's equally dark and controversial Wuthering Heights in my opinion. I just checked out Charlotte Brontë's Shirley from the library, and plan to read that next. Right now, per my sister's recommendation, I'm halfway through Thackeray's Vanity Fair (which I bought in Germany ten years ago and never read). I've heard college kids forced to read it as part of their syllabus decry it as "stupid," not understanding its sarcastic and satirical tone, but I find it hilarious. With its richly comical insights on society, it just goes to show that people - and human nature - do not change, and are the same today as they were 150 years ago in Victorian England. (The difference is, back then they had the grace to hide it better!)

  

  Normally I read a lot more non-fiction and usually am in the middle of something somewhat educational or spiritually invigorating at the same time as I'm reading a piece of fiction. A friend gave me a stack of political hardbounds from a variety of pundits, but I've had no appetite for that lately. Last week I finished The Other Side of Death by Scottish Theologian J. Sidlow Baxter. The youth pastor I work with gave me Francis Chan's Crazy Love: Overwhelmed by a Relentless God which I'm about to delve into next. Chan is a youth pastor in Simi Valley, California, and I enjoyed hearing him speak at a national conference for youth leaders in Pittsburgh last year. (The guy's a bestselling author and all, and I recently discovered he chooses to live in a humble apartment with his family despite his means...which always leaves me with a faint feeling of self-reproach over my own desire for nice digs! [sigh])

  

  For the beach I'm checking out one of Irish authoress Maeve Binchy's novels, best known perhaps for her made-into-feature-film Circle of Friends. That's as close to "light reading" as I'll probably get, nerd that I am

  

  Anybody else?

  • Posted Jun 8, 2009 5:21 am PT
  • Category: Other
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• 14May 09

  Expelled!

  A friend of mine from college who lives in Vermont inadvertently drew a firestorm on Facebook when she simply posted a link to an article about the University of Vermont not permitting Ben Stein's documentary Expelled to be shown on its campus. The mere posting of the link brought on derision and insults from many of her so-called friends, many of whom openly scorned the documentary and also the very notion of Intelligent Design.

  

  Having previewed the documentary myself, it is clear that those posters did not watch the film or they would have known that they were flaunting the very ignorance highlighted in it, especially since Intelligent Design is not synonymous with Creationism. Additionally, many of the claims that these Facebookers made were - as addressed in the documentary - not science-based, but of the metaphysical realm.

  I watched Expelled a second time recently and continue to be amazed not only at the frightening intolerance for free thought and speech in Big Science (at the Smithsonian Institute, universities across America, and in journalism) but also the fact that our tax money is propping up so much junk science. All this when modern scientists can not agree on where life originated, but insist that Intelligent Deisgn - in other words, a guided process - can not even be so much as mentioned in the debate. It further floored me, as a German major, to discover the glaring link between Darwinism and the horrors the Nazis committed on human beings, and realize that for the six years I studied German language and culture - both in the United States and abroad - not one of my instructors ever felt it important to mention the tie.

  Of course, all that has been happening in the last century with real science being diluted and victimized by a select group, then paraded in our schools as gospel truth, was predicted long ago as being a sign of the last days (2 Peter 3:3-5). It is interesting, too, that scientists such as Newton and Boyle and Pasteur were men of faith, and that their knowledge of science simply reinforced what they already believed, and vice versa. As the Irish scientist Kelvin stated, "Do not be afraid of being free thinkers! If you think strongly enough you will be forced by science to the belief in God. You will find science not only atagnostic but helpful to religion." Of course, one can assume that Kelvin was addressing the religious establishment with that statement. His assertion, however, is the very thing that those who made Expelled possible are trying to avoid.

  If you've seen the documentary, I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts, and if you haven't, it's an eye-opener and worthy of watching. I leave you with two quotes

  "Surely God would not have created such a being as man, with an ability to grasp the infinite, to exist only for a day! No, no, man was made for immortality." -Abraham Lincoln

  

  And this from an unknown source - On Creationism, Naturalism, and Pantheism: "Every thing has to have come from something else, therefore something has to be eternal!"

  • Posted May 14, 2009 5:22 am PT
  • Category: Movies
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• 24Apr 09

  Television and Film Moments That Made You Look Away

  I was thinking back to being a kid and those scenes that scared me or otherwise disturbed me and I had to look away from the television set. I am a big chicken and my imagination always messed with me more than actually seeing graphic gore, so Hitchcock and Serling were the best ones to freak me out. Wondering what scenes made you glance away from the television or movie screen (and maybe still do)?

  As an adult, I admit that I still get creeped out by some of the same stuff that haunted me as a kid and find myself covering my eyes! Here's my top ten list (I am sure that there are plenty of others but just can't think of them - maybe I've suppressed them!):

  10. The clown's face in the two-part Little House on the Prairie episode called "Sylvia" (I didn't understand it as a child except that it scared me, but later learned that the masked face belonged to a rapist)

  9. Each time the witch appeared outside Dorothy's window, cackling and flying on her broomstick, in The Wizard of Oz

  8. Any time that there is a childbirth scene - real or simulated. (I fainted during "The Miracle of Life" video in high school )

  7. When the man pulls back the curtain by his window on the airplane and there's a gremlin right outside on the wing, staring back at him in The Twilight Zone's "Nightmare at 10,000 Feet."

  6. In Star Trek's "The Mark of Gideon" when Kirk is on board the "fake" Enterprise with Odona and suddenly all the faces of these people appear outside, watching them.

  5. Any time there was a make-out session and my parents were watching with me, it made me squirm!

  4. When the boy swims out to the sunken airplane in the movie Hatchet and the dead pilot's body is still trapped in the cockpit - and the fishies have gotten to him.

  3. The war hospital scene in Gone with the Wind when Scarlett comes searching for Dr. Meade.

  2. The baby found dead in its crib in the movie Trainspotting

  1. The entire scourge scene in The Passion of the Christ

  

  • Posted Apr 24, 2009 7:12 am PT
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