Christ-characters

When I was in my first year of seminary our Intro to New Testament course focused on questions of Christology.  And so one of the assignments was to look at Christology in a piece of popular culture.  I remember that one of my classmates did that paper on Jesus Chris Superstar and one of the points she raised was whether Herod had a swimming pool and did a soft shoe dance.  I did my paper on Christology within The Lord of the Rings (which was really just an excuse to buy a copy and read the book again that year as well as a bit of low-hanging fruit for me since I know the book so well).

Christ-figures are really quite popular in literature.  I have this vision of some day doing a study group of Christ figures in books and movies.  I would in fact argue than most great quest-epics have at least one Christ-figure in them.

Jut think of them.  Aslan in the Narnia series (arguably the least subtle Christ figure in anything I have read). Harry Potter in, well, Harry Potter.  In the paper I mentioned above I argued that Gandalf, Aragorn and Frodo are all Christ figures in one way or another.  Obi-Wan Kenobi for sure in Star Wars and I believe you could argue that Luke is also a Christ-figure, and (possibly Yoda?).  Jean Valjean in the musical (haven't read the novel) Les Miserables.  Simba in The Lion King (does that mean that Hamlet is also a potential Christ-figure???).  These are all fairly easy to pick up.  But recently I came up with a new one....

On Good Friday morning, while I was in the shower, I was thinking through my meditation for the service that morning.  The meditation was titled "The End" and was going to focus on how the followers of Jesus must have felt as they watched him die. [In an  admittedly self-promoting move I will now point out that you can hear that meditation here]  And a scene came into my mind.  From The Princess Bride.  Now that is not exactly a movie one would either think of in relation to Good Friday or in a discussion of Christ-figures.

But as I worked with the scene [the scene I was using was when Inigo and Fezzik find Westley in the Pit of Despair and Inigo says "He's dead" and then we switch to the grandson objecting that grandpa is reading the story wrong because someone has to "get" Humperdinck and Westley is not supposed to die] I realized that it did in fact tie in well to where I was going with the meditation.  And moreso I realized that an argument can be made that Westley is in fact a Christ figure, albeit on a relatively smaller scale than Frodo saving Middle Earth or Harry walking into the Forbidden Forest so Voldemort can kill him.

One of the ways we need to do theology is to make connections with the culture around us.  This is not new.   This is how successful popular (as in "of the people" not as in well-liked or critically acclaimed) theology has always worked.  And so we mine novels and movies and TV shows for images that will help us tell and explore the story of God at work in the world.  And sometimes that mining has surprising, out of the blue, results.

Glee-ful Theology

ANd I miss this show :(

Hey! GUess what!

THere is more than one Christian voice!

THat is the "discovery" made in this article.

What might be surprising to many Americans is the existence of a large number of Christian clergy who are liberal-minded, politically engaged, and eager to be more involved in public debates on social justice issues.

Surprising to whom? Those who think the only religious voices are the strident voices of the extreme? THose who think the media covers all religion and not the loudest, most spectacular voices?

Most of us in the mainline churches knew this already. Nice to see that someone agrees with us.

Hat Tip to Tripp who posted the link on FB

THis Is Priceless

WOrds fail to describe this:
The Passion Narrative According to Facebook

Grease 2

FOr some reason I found this (wonderfully tacky) movie on my mind today. SO here are a couple videos:




ANd my memory of sex ed was never like this:

They Will be Missed

Tonigth was the final episode of the Royal Canadian Air Farce (sort of, they do have a New Year's Eve Special planned). Air Farce has long (35 years) been a -or even the- gem of political comedy in Canada.

I first became a fan in my teens and often made sure to listen to them on Saturday mornings while still on radio. Once they made the move to TV the show became a constant of my Friday evenings (such an exciting life I lead/led).

Now that they are wrapping it up they will be missed. Truth be known, they haven't been quite as good the last few years (I really miss John Morgan). ANd probably it is about time to go down gracefully. Still, political comedy is something this country has done really well. ANd in my memory the Farce is always going to hold the crown.

Funniest TV Thanksgiving EVER

Happy THanksgiving week to all our USan friends!

Test the NAtion, Eh

The latest edition of the Test the Nation set of tv quizzes was televised to night. IT was Canadian trivia, titled Canada Eh?

In the end I got 43 out of 50. Some of them involved terms I had never heard of.

The test is online right now. How might you do?

Half-Blood Coming

Ever wonder what the orphanage Dumbledore visits to "recruit" the young Tom Riddle looked like?

Well you can find out here while you watch the trailer for HArry Potter and the Half Blood Prince

Movie comes out in November, I likely won't see it until mid 2009

Yahoo!

In the news today:

Canadians will be able to give telemarketers the slip as of Sept. 30 when the national do-not-call-list officially begins operating.
Under the new rules, announced Wednesday by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, telemarketers will not be allowed to call anyone who registers either by phone with Bell Canada Inc., which is administering the list on behalf of the CRTC, or online.

Really my main problem with the industry is that they make their callers say stupid things. Like assuming I don't know what I am talking about when I say "no thank you" and launchinhg into the sales pitch again. Now to go sign up for the no call list.

Almost MAkes me Wish I knew Greek

The Codex Sinaiticus, which contains the oldest complete copy of the New Testament, is now online. Here is some more about it:

Codex Sinaiticus is one of the most important books in the world. Handwritten well over 1600 years ago, the manuscript contains the Christian Bible in Greek, including the oldest complete copy of the New Testament. Its heavily corrected text is of outstanding importance for the history of the Bible and the manuscript – the oldest substantial book to survive Antiquity – is of supreme importance for the history of the book.

Granted, it is little more than a neat thing to look at for those of us who can't read ancient Greek. But still it is really intriguing.You can find it here

What Have you read...?

As seen at I Am Chorus
Ok now, let's see how we do. The bolded titles are those that I've read, in case you haven't seen this on some other blog already! ANd to add my own twist, italic means I have never heard of it...
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (well much of it anyway...)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (but I have read another one by Heller. Can't remember the name but it was about King David)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (all five parts of the trilogy)
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (Through the Lookning Glass too)
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (wait, isn't this redundant what with #33 being the whole series?)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Now some of the others I have read abridged or children's versions of. ANd several of them I have seen movie or theatrical adaptations of...)

Development Options

One of the challenges faced by small resource-based communities is that their economies are incredibly fragile. All it takes is the resource (or the industry around it) to collapse and the community economy is put under severe strain. This is what is happening in much of this area.

One of the possibilities for another economic engine around here is a TV project currently in development. I have been asked, an hve agreed, to serve on a local committee working on the project.

Check it out here!

Relgion & Politics

was it really a given? Should it have been?

Found here

Great song, silly commercial

I have always loved Paradise by the Dashboard Light by Meatloaf. Is there a better song to act out? But I never would have believed it would make a commerical for cell phones...

Although it is nice to see Meatloaf and Tiffany getting some work.

Read This!

Until I read this post I had never heard of the Day of Silence. A good cause, unfortunately one that is being protested.

In the same line, MAy 17 is the International Day against Homophobia. The FAcebook event page for this day is here

WOW!

THese pictures are amazing!

This is from the e-mail that I got the URL in:

chris jordan is an artist who takes everyday items in numerically significant quantities and turns them into (very large) art.
eg. his Cans Seurat, 2007 60x92" Depicts 106,000 aluminum cans, the number used in the US every thirty seconds, arranged to resemble a seurat...his Denali one, using the logos of the car, with the word denial forming the background, is also amazing!

Resource for Photos

A colleague from BC set up a Flickr group of pictures to share for church use. All the pictures in the group are covered by a Creative Commons license and so are available for use without fear of piracy/stealing accusations.

I first looked at the site this week while choosing pictures for our Easter service. There is also a link to search all of Flickr for Creative Commons pictures

Lights Out!

Dear Friends and Neighbours;

I write to invite and encourage all of you to join in an exciting initiative happening at the end of this month.

In late February I was at a gathering of churches throughout Northwestern Ontario. At that meeting we heard about an initiative called "Earth Hour". The focus of Earth Hour is for people to turn off all their lights for one hour at 8:00 pm (local time) on Saturday March 29.

Why? What would this solve? Well this is a global movement. Imagine if even half the people of the world turned off their lights for an extra hour. The total energy savings would add up quickly. But it is also a way of making a statement. In order for real change to happen in the world we, the people, must be willing to play a part. By committing to turn lights off for an hour (and remember that the TV is a light source) we say that we are ready to give serious consideration to how we can be part of the eco-solution.

I encourage everyone to take part in Earth Hour this year. This idea began in Sydney Australia last year and has already spread around the globe. Will you help it grow? What are you willing to do to play a part in defeating climate change?

For more information about Earth Hour you can go to http://www.earthhour.org

This is Troubling

This story hit the news this week:

Bill C-10, an omnibus bill now before the Senate, includes provisions in the Income Tax Act that would allow the federal government to deny tax credits for films that are offensive or not in the public interest.

Now I will admit that questionable content choices can (are) made by film-makers. ANd I will agree that there can be a legitimate debate about whether or not tax credits to the film industry are a good idea. But this proposal has strong overtones of censorship.

Who decides what is offensive? Who determines what constitutes the public interest? And why should the film industry have to support Judeo-Christian moral principles to recieve public support?

This is a bill that deserves some more "sober second thought".