Don later pointed out to the neighbors, who over the years annually thanked him for the spectacle, that this event had accomplished something quite significant in the annals of his family history. Perhaps the lesson learned is too obvious to mention. To this day, not one of his three children—now sensible and judicious adults—has ever tried to set a Christmas tree on fire, indoors or out.
A Hidden Life is flat-out arresting in multiple ways, a film that clarifies our own daunting time and the toll all manner of life perennially takes on everyone, from migrant poor to besotted privileged. Here, a “real life” peasant couple, devout and resolute, suffer an arduous journey that is at once exhilarating and formidable, ending in the darkest (or perhaps the brightest) of all places.
Through a disarming vulnerability, Dark helps us see the things that are normalized in our culture (peer pressure, power, shame, fear, dehumanization) and reminds us that we aren’t actually supposed to be this way.
A week after last November’s mid-term elections in the United States, magazines like Time had cover stories about the Republican “breeze.” Some of these covers showed prominent Republicans beaming broadly over their historically unusual success. This motivated many writers to project what may happen as a result of this ostensible “mandate” for the party presently in power. Chief among the items flagged are issues relating to the environment. As it stands, despite an early defeat on the push for oil…
About twelve years ago, Glenn Tinder asked in a landmark Atlantic Monthly article the vitally important question, “Can We Be Good without God”? He said we could not. The crucial question that John Schneider addresses in his new book is “Can We Have God and Our Goods”? That is, can we have God and our bulging financial portfolios, our Mercedes Benzes, our mega-houses, our summer cottages, our luxury vacations, our electronic toys, our closets full of clothing, our storage garages…
The life of Jonathan Edwards, born 300 years ago this month, is a tale of a singular but complex vision crossed by paradoxical outcomes under sometimes extreme conditions. The boy was reared in a nearly all-female family under the close watch of a rigorous father. Absorbed from the start with the demands of a fearsome deity, he broke through in his late teens to a vision of that same God being, literally, sweetness and light. Plagued by a brittle personality…
The film provided new, more concise language about my experiences as a modern woman.
The Bible is a historical book, thus requiring historical tools of analysis, the most basic of which is establishing the context for what is going on in the text. The Bible is also a literary book, thus requiring literary tools of analysis, like asking the genre of a text: a chronicle is not a poem, nor a first-person account, nor a letter of a specific church, nor an apocalypse. There is, in fact, no such thing as “quoting Scripture” with integrity without an awareness of context and genre. The whole discussion stops when someone confronts me with “What do you with the verse that says?” Every time I am presented with that question, my answer begins, “Sure, I believe the Bible is our guide for faithful living, but what kind of book is the Bible?”.
My father served in the US Army during the Second World War and spent a good portion of his time in the desert area of North Africa. As a boy, growing up during the early 1950s, I learned about war and soldiering much the same way every other American boy did: by watching John Wayne and Audie Murphy movies in the theaters and on television. My father rarely, if ever, talked about his experiences as a soldier. He had a…
