Critic Cal

But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they went to the tomb, taking the spices they had prepared. And they found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. While they were perplexed about this, behold, two men stood by them in dazzling apparel. And as they were frightened and bowed their faces to the ground, the men said to them, “Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men and be crucified and on the third day rise.” And they remembered his words, and returning from the tomb they told all these things to the eleven and to all the rest. Now it was Mary Magdalene and Joanna and Mary the mother of James and the other women with them who told these things to the apostles, but these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them. But Peter rose and...

"Christians are like Revels " was the postprandial proposition up for debate. I'm not sure if we were discussing denominational diversity, or the fact that some of us make other people want to vomit. Sadly, there was a parting of ways long before the topic had been fully explored; the metaphorical significance of re-sealable pouches barely even got a mention. By Evan-Amos (Own work) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons Well, now that my dinner's gone down I've decided that Christians are not supposed to be like Revels: superficially similar but fundamentally different. In the interests of seasonality, I am going to suggest that we should be more like Mini Eggs : superficially different but fundamentally the same. By William Warby (originally posted to Flickr as Mini Eggs) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons Not "the same" in a boring, uniform, restrictive way. I am most definitely up for celebrating diversi...

World is crazier and more of it than we think, Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion A tangerine and spit the pips and feel The drunkenness of things being various.   (From  Snow  by Louis MacNeice)  Some people seem to find everything so straightforward. And that is why I must make everything extra-specially complicated, to compensate. At my university Christian Union, they got you to sign the UCCF doctrinal basis if you were nominated to serve on committee. (Cue horrified gasps from political idealists at student's unions everywhere…but our CU wasn't in the student's union and besides, there is a certain logic to the idea that the people running a 'religious society' be in some sense 'adherents'…) I signed it myself back in the day, and, although some of points a) through k) touch on things that I've still much to learn about, I reckon I'd sign it again in an instant. It is, after all, a pretty good summary of what I understand and believ...

[NB: On several occasions, lovely, generous-hearted people have informed me with a blend of enthusiasm and compassion that they "like my blog but don't understand it". The following was written to address the issue. Only, it became indulgently self-illustrative (i.e., makes even less sense than usual).  It is a shameful thing to plead 'irony'; let's hope I've at least "got it out of my system" for now... Time will tell. Meanwhile, apologies :-/ ] I recently read  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man  --  Joyce's prequel to Ulysses , charting the childhood and coming-of-age of Stephen Dedalus as he awakens to religious uncertainty, political dissatisfaction and literary aspiration. The character of Stephen is widely acknowledged to be a bit of a fictional alter-ego to Joyce himself, so it's sorta semi-autobiographical. There's a big 'religious anxiety' theme going on with it, which I was thinking about thinking about writi...

It has been brought to my attention that the comment facility on this blog is not functioning correctly, so that on multiple occasions comments have been posted -- apparently successfully -- and have promptly disappeared, without me ever getting to see them, and possibly giving the impression that I had deleted them myself! I cannot say emphatically enough how very sad it makes me to think that any would-be comment-maker might be thinking that I had deleted and/or ignored their thoughts. Especially if they were trying to disagree with me -- I have never had cause to delete a comment but, if I did, I am pretty confident it would not be for that type of reason. I love hearing what people think and how they feel about stuff. I hope I would try to respond thoughtfully and graciously given the opportunity. I think it would take a lot to upset or anger me, at least in the sort of conversation I'd like for this blog to potentially become a part of (ok, so maybe in life generally I'm...

I would've been happier if Vue had sorted out their sound levels. The insipid, underwhelming aural impression aggravated me so much that, 45 minutes in, I actually ventured out to the corridor to consult a man with a walkie-talkie who looked like he might be in a position to do something about something. He told me the flat sound was an intentional part of the way it was filmed -- all of it coming from the front so that you would feel more like you were in a theatre. I have been unable to verify this claim (though I haven't tried all that hard) but I do hope he was mistaken because the actual effect was of being in my living room watching telly, and I'm pretty sure that's not what Tom Hooper was going for. Anyway, the man with the walkie-talkie assured me he'd get them to 'turn it up a bit', and, eager for my excursion from my seat not to have been a wasted effort, I managed to convince myself that it was a bit better after that. Still, I wanted to be imme...

Having so far avoided seeing Argo , Lincoln , or Zero Dark Thirty  does not seem to have prevented me from waxing vitriolic about my disdain for film adaptations of real events. [1] Perhaps if I can get it out of my system in the quiet of my own blog then I can stop inflicting my opinions uninvited on others. [2] My reasons for disliking true story films are many and varied. For one thing, I find a lot of them distasteful: they strike me as 'cashing in' -- financially, and/or in terms of recognition for those inclined to court award success -- on tragedy (e.g. Elephant ), or public sentiment (e.g. The Queen ), or other people's nobility and achievements (e.g. Schindler's List ). Secondly, I dislike the fact that they inevitably present fictionalised accounts and biased analysis as historical actuality (e.g. Braveheart , A Beautiful Mind , Pearl Harbor ). It is hard to escape the conclusion that we can never *really* get to *the* objective underlying reality of any his...