Critic Cal

This is a post for white friends who, like me, are experiencing an increased awareness of our responsibility to educate ourselves about race, racism, and white supremacy, and to submit ourselves to be changed by – and to act on – what we learn. There's some great resources out there explicitly created to help us do this: Reni Eddo-Lodge's Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race , Akala's Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire  and Nikesh Shukla et al.'s The Good Immigrant  are among those I've read myself and benefited from. And Ben Lindsay's We Need to Talk About Race: Understanding the Black Experience in White Majority Churches  addresses some of the particular issues arising in a Christian context. If all this learning feels like 'effort', it is effort that is due. Overdue. Let's keep on humbly at it, yes? But everyone needs downtime ... and (to state what should be obvious) we don't need to pause becoming anti-...

Unusually for a Christian book, William P. Young's  The Shack   (Now A Major Motion Picture ) caused quite a stir in the wider publishing world. For those unfamiliar, it is a story about a man in the wake of life-wrecking tragedy, who finds himself the invited guest of the triune God in a shape-shifting cabin in the middle of a forest. All sorts of healing and self-understanding and provocative conversational exchanges ensue, as you might imagine. The book was unexpectedly popular (topping the New York Times Best Seller list for fiction between 2008 and 2010) and predictably controversial. Among the several charges laid against it by 'concerned evangelicals' was the 'idolatrous' depiction of the first and third Persons of the Trinity – as an African-American woman, in the case of God the Father, and as an Asian woman, in the case of God the Holy Spirit. Now, actually, old habits die hard and I am still 'concerned evangelical' enough to be rather uncom...

Mr. W and I had the privilege of reading bedtime stories to the children of some friends the other day. The three books we were presented with were quite charming – beautiful illustrations, gently wholesome messaging (friendship, courage, the joy of reading, and the importance of keeping libraries open) and, best of all, one of them rhymed. Only, no joke, of the twelve or so characters across the books none were female, with the passing exception of somebody's unnamed mother. *Sigh*. In conversation about the new Star Wars (which I haven't seen yet), I heard it suggested that there were 'too many women'. So, I went and, with the help of IMDB and key stage 3 level maths, I found out that, of the entire cast, 25% were female, while of the top 12 characters, 40% were. Granted, headcount may or may not be a good proxy for screentime, but still: 'too many', as too often (see, e.g., research about perceived and actual speaker ratios), meant 'a larger mino...

The main thing I knew about the film  Finding Dory  before I belatedly got round to watching it was that it featured (dun dun daaaa...) a lesbian couple . The reason I knew this was that some Christians got very vocally very upset about it in the run-up to its release. I say 'featured' ... Given the strength and volume of the outcry (none of which I cared to read in any detail [1]) I was on the lookout from the start for Pixar's controversially courageous nod to diversity. Would it be that Dory falls in love with another lady-fish? or that the parents she's looking for turn out to be two moms? And then, about halfway through, there was this bit with two women walking along next to each other. And one of the women happened to have (to quote a disgruntled  Ellen DeGeneres ) "a very bad short haircut". And my heart sank, watching it, with the horrified suspicion that this was it . This was the controversial edge of 'representation'. This was what got ...

The last thing  I wrote on here was about Kingdom life being contagious, stronger than death, more aggressive than corruption and decay. Nowhere do I see this more joyously evidenced than in the book of Acts – the sequel to Luke's account of Jesus' life, about the church in its earliest days. Jesus' followers are rapidly growing in number ; some of their most fervent opponents are joining them ; they are finding new ways of living in loving community ; they are witnessing miracles of healing and resurrection and they are catching themselves doing things they 'shouldn't' be able to do, like walking out of locked prisons and communicating in languages they have never learned. It's as exciting a read as any adventure novel, and it provides a (for me) really helpful bridge between the events of the gospels and the theology of the letters. But there's a handful of episodes in there which are a bit 'gulp'. One in particular stands out; it...

I used to watch a lot of films. We married in a liminal age; a time when people still rented DVDs, but selected them online and had them home-delivered like a very slow and ultimately inedible pizza. As frugal students we made meticulous use of our LoveFilm account, steaming through as many acknowledged must-sees of the cinema world as the speed of Royal Mail allowed. But I got old; fidgety; conscious of the finity of hours and more greedy to create than to consume. I'd like to say that I preserve my sapped appetite for screen time for the cream of the cinema crop. That I ponder over the Watershed program in careful search of a foreign language arthouse opus worthy of my next quarterly big screen pilgrimage. That I attend in solemn state supplied with fine red wine and an elegant Moleskine notebook in which to neatly print my cannily-observed remarks for later contemplation. But the sad truth is that my selection criteria has descended to "whatever's free on Amazon ...

So, I let vent the other day about the way that cinemas sanitise death for a family audience. This got me thinking -- though I just about managed to restrain myself from throwing it all in to one particularly extended and rambling discourse -- about the other aspects of human existence you do and don't expect to see in a 12A. One obvious no-no is, understandably, graphic sex -- cue lots of suggestive cut-aways just at the moment of hand-buttock contact, or of one foot leaving the floor, or of a directional transition towards the horizontal... (Basically, any of the various happenings they warn you about in those start-of-term Christian Union pep talks). But, as with death, sex can be cheapened even while it is not being explicitly depicted -- and that's what I think happens when it's treated as 'no big deal'. Of course it alienates me terribly to say so, because 'no big deal' is, in most cases, the widely agreed-upon standard of healthy sexuality that w...