Use the Dust, Luke" "The Golden Compass" Strikes Out

In spite of all the furor and the threatened boycotts, The Golden Compass is here and in theaters and not doing terrible. Nor is it shaking the silver out of people's pockets on a Potteresque scale. After the first full weekend of release, it has garnered a respectable $41 million and has done far better in Europe ($90 million).

However, the Philip Pullman adaptation written and directed by Chris Wietz (whose credits include American Pie, About a Boy and The Nutty Professor II) is not only harmless, it's not even all that good.

One can make the judgment without any smugness. The official reviews have been mixed, with a few people raving about the film, but the rest scratching their heads at what appears to have been a keenly wasted opportunity. Whatever possessed the film producers to succumb to a two-hour cut when so many fantasy films have been logging closer to three is just the beginning of the problem.

"The whole thing was like a trailer for a bigger movie," said my 11-year-old son, Nicholas. "It was like all this action without a real story."

Maybe he should be writing this.

The film seems to have so much going for it--an extraordinary cast, including British heavyweights Derek Jacoby, Christopher Lee and Ian McKellan. Younger lights Nicole Kidman, Bond girl Eva Green and the new Bond guy Daniel Craig add glitz and glamour. The incomparable Sam Elliot plays Scoresby. The role of Lyra is handled competently by the newcomer Dakota Blue Richards (I must have missed the memo that said Dakota was a cool new name for girls). How could they go wrong with such an ensemble?

But the heart of the film can be wrapped up by one of the more useless scenes. It's one of those chasm cliff hangers with a narrow span of ice across, and Lyra, of course, must get over it. Naturally, there's a lot of chipping and cracking, nearly falling and finally the rickety bridge collapsing. But as the outcome was never in doubt, and as the scene really added nothing to the already slim plot, one wonders why all the effort went into it beyond frightening a few small children.

My son, who has not had a chance to read the book, really could not make sense of what was so important for people to be fighting and dying about. The film has no, "There are some things worth fighting for, Mr. Frodo" speech to tie it all together. All we had was the myserious "dust." Nick leaned over about halfway through the movie and asked me, "what is the dust?" I told him to wait for the explanation, only it didn't come. Later, in the ride home, he said, "Well, I guess the dust was important." And then he added in a deep voice, "Use the dust, Luke."

The film is good spectacle with poorly connected plot points, scarcely developed characters, an inexplicable theme, and a yacht load of very fine actors with very little acting to do. Derek Jacoby and Christopher Lee are almost comical as villains who scowl and pose ominously, using threatening tones and language, but we don't really know what makes them so evil other than that they kidnap children and want to control everything, which doesn't really elevate them above the villains in most Disney productions.

At some points even the vaunted CGI lets the viewer down. The polar bears did look at times like their cousins in the winter Coke ads. And the daemons, characters that play a critical part in the book, come off as animated sidekicks lacking in conviction. The film score of highly reputed Alexandre Desplat (The Queen, The Painted Veil, Girl with a Pearl Earring) reminds one at times of the canned sincerity of The Never Ending Story.



Somewhere the issue of free will comes up, practically the only nod to Pullman's philosophy that manages to sneak into the movie, but it's precious little to hang an adventure on. And it's even less to worry about as a parent concerned that subliminal atheism will snatch away the faith of their fathers.

The good news for the film is that it's nowhere near as bad as Eragon. It retains genuine entertainment value and a lot of great Oxford locations. One hopes the DVD release will make some corrections and that the sequel will be less spectacle and more substance.

The Golden Compass

Is it true?

Can it be?

Would they really do that?

It is, it can, and they would make a children's movie based on a children's book written by an avowed atheist, a book written as the atheist's answer to C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia.

I first heard of Philip Pullman, author of The Golden Compass some years ago when I was listening to the radio in my basement, something I used to do when I worked out down there. We've since moved the exercise equipment--and the radio--out of the basement. So that's as good an excuse as any for not working out at all. Which is why my girth grows greater every day.

But back to the radio. I can't recall whether it was NPR to which I was listening or Christian radio. Check that, by process of elimination, it was most certainly NPR. But there was a report on an award-winning children's series that was gathering a lot of comment for its controversial treatment of Christian traditions. I only half heard the report, and about the time my subconscious told me that I should have listened more closely, the report was ending. I could only remember tidbits--an Oxford professor, a fantasy series for young adults, religious controversy.

Fast forward several months. I was in Paris (yes, Paris, France), on a university-sponsored trip. I was shaving or trying to shave in the postage stamp sized bathroom in a three-star hotel room. And I had the television on the BBC channel (because I had some difficulty with French). And this Oxford professor named Philip Pullman was being interviewed. And he was talking about his books. I made a note of the name, and also about a comment he made then, unless I misunderstood. He said something like, "I really am not attacking Christianity per se, but religious nonsense in general." That, I thought, is something I might like to see.

So, sometime after returning home, I checked out the trilogy (His Dark Materials) from the library and read all three books in about five days.



I was pretty seriously upset after I read them. Two things bothered me. One was that Pullman had not been entirely forthright in the interview, for it was Christianity very specifically that he targeted in his books. Secondly, the fact that the story was quite good--at least until the second half of the last book, bothered me immensely. A story so full of disbelief isn't supposed to be so good. It's supposed to be crap.

But the story is good. It has all the elements of great myth, even though it's ultimate goal is to destroy myth. Pullman even borrows heavily from the same saintly sources of the past, from Milton and Dante and Spencer and Homer. The gradual revelation of what the story is building to is masterfully done.

Then, in the second half of the last book, Pullman pulls away the cloth and behold--there's nothing there.

That's the hardest thing, and I won't deliver any spoilers just to vent my spleen, but I can't recall a more disappointing payoff, unless, of course, you include the third movie of the Matrix trilogy. I actually laughed out loud. Take down all the piles and plies of myth and, well, what's left? That would be a creative crisis for any novelist, so it's hard to fault Pullman if he failed to deliver. At least he tried.

Regardless, some important people who give important awards thought so highly of Pullman's grand effort that they showered him with accolades and rewards. And 15 million or more copies have sold.

And now the movie is upon us and it promises to be a fantastic offering. The casting is dreamy, even inspired, if I may be so bold. The trailer is hypnotic. CGI abounds, and it looks to be magical.



The irony is that a myth cannot be displaced without another myth. Perhaps Pullman didn't count on that.

At any rate, I wouldn't have any qualms about going to see the movie. Christians will succeed in getting a great many more people to see the film than might otherwise have gone, though the billing will be very hard to ignore in any case.

Why see this film? Religious people, Christians especially, need to see how they are seen. I'll wager most people won't get the symbolism, just as they didn't with Chronicles. They'll enjoy the story as terrific narrative, and guess what? Atheism isn't catching, like the common cold. You won't have to take your spiritual vitamins to keep from contracting apostasy. You won't have to sprinkle holy water on yourself to keep from falling into the abyss of unbelief.

How much garbage, on TV and elsewhere, have people consumed without the slightest thought for who made it or what messages they might have been assimilating?

But if, like me, you believe in the sacredness of the earth, then the joke is on Pullman. He might succeed where others have failed and reveal that when you pull the curtain of myth back far enough, the truest of the true is still there.

Harry Potter and the Hallowed Hysteria

"Let me just say something about Harry Potter," yelled the youth camp lady in an ironically unwitting imitation of Dolores Umbridge. "The Bible says, 'Suffer not a witch to live!'" And the children cried, "Hallelujah!"

That's from a snippet of a scene in Jesus Camp, one of the most gut-churning documentaries you'll ever see, especially if you grew up "in the church," as I have. I won't say any more about it except that it's must viewing. The Potter reference is indicative of the saturation in the culture that the magical icon has achieved.

In a Christianity Today opinion piece, Jacqui Komschlies likens the Potter stories to orange soda mixed with rat poison. Why would anyone want to do such a thing? Her argument is reminiscent of the old brownies mixed with manure riposte made against the viewing of R-rated movies, once again by concerned Christian parents. I call either of these "Death by Analogy."

I'm actually a little hoarse. I have spent the last few days reading the final book in the Potter series to my family. I've read each of the books in this fashion. I confess I really get into it, doing the voices as best I can. Before the movies one had to guess at the sound of them, but the films give you something to go on, anyway. We finished last night after a marathon weekend and a few hours each evening for three evenings. That's a lot of reading.

I've spoken with Christian college students who have said, "I don't know about Harry Potter. I just can't get past that witchcraft thing." Many of the objectors have been pastor's kids. That makes sense, I guess. Their concern reflects the stance taken by people like Berit Kjos who takes a strong literalistic approach to scripture and directs much of his ire against celebrated Christians who have come out in support of the Potter series. The fear, presented with exhaustive scriptural quotations regarding witchcraft and some feeble statistical documentation is that children and others are being inspired by these texts to examine Wicca more closely and to be seduced into occult practices.

I don't intend to ridicule these folks, really. Some of them are actually highly educated. Any one of them would be highly offended if you were to ask them if they knew what a metaphor was. They could doubtless provide a pristine dictionary definition, describe the highly technical differences between a metaphor and a simile and perhaps a dozen other figures of speech. And in doing so they would make the point very nicely that they neither know what a metaphor is nor the function it serves in our understanding of things in general.

C.S. Lewis understood metaphor extraordinarily well as a vital function of language itself, having discussed this sort of thing with the likes of Owen Barfield, Charles Williams and JRR Tolkien, to name a few. "For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition." (From "Bluspels and Flalanspheres: A Semantic Nightmare")

Lewis' circle (the famed Inklings) consisted of people who took something as apparently mundane as metaphor very seriously. They knew it was the lifeblood of discourse. And they wanted nothing more than to be part of infusing their discourse with truth-laden metaphors that would serve as little gift-wrapped parcels that, once you opened them, would contain beautifully and lovingly crafted traces of Divine Revelation. That, to me, is the highest aspiration of Art, all of which serves as metaphoric discourse of one kind or another.

This concept of hidden revelation, gift-wrapped in a compelling artistic design, is one of the ideas that compels author John Granger (no relation to Hermione) to argue that JK Rowling, Potter's creator, is a closet Inkling who practices what Lewis and his friends preached. In two recent books, Looking for God in Harry Potter and Unlocking Harry Potter, Granger reveals not only Rowling's personal Christianity (a long-standing member of the Church of Scotland) but some of the alleged secrets of her symbolism, figures throughout her books taken directly, Granger says, from Medieval Christian imagery. He also does an analysis of many of the key names that Rowling uses, all with Christian undertones. He also has a webpage entitled "Hogwarts Professor" for discussion of all these things.

I have not had the chance to read these books just yet, so I am reluctant to embrace all Granger's assertions. I know in one instance he gets Ginny Weasley's name wrong, assuming her first name is actually Virginia, when in fact it isn't (her real first name is in the final book). The little I've seen induces me to think that Granger, like a lot of other well-meaning Christians who also dig Harry Potter, reads a little more into the stories than may actually be there.

I wrote a column in 2001 about the Potter stories in which I said there was nothing to fear: "Around the stories is a vague moral world in which good and evil exist and the highest, redeeming power is that of sacrificial love. Rowling is not a Christian and she makes no attempt to preach the gospel. She may have no terribly clear moral compass herself. But she has a remarkable talent for creativity, imagination and story crafting and nothing she does in these stories is apt to proselytize for the devil."

I want to apologize for those disparaging remarks. I couldn't have been more wrong. After reading the final book in the series, I have to agree with Granger on one major point. Jo Rowling is a Christian. The last book is as straightforward, in your face, retelling of the Gospel as you could ask for.

I'm not one for spoilers, so I won't reveal anything major, but when I encountered, along with millions of other readers, the words on the tombstone of Harry's parents, "where your treasure is, there will your heart be also," I almost leaped out of my rocker. "There!" I cried. "Proof! She IS a witch! Burn her!"

JK Rowling is an exceptionally clever woman. Like Philip Pullman, the atheist author of the Dark Materials trilogy, she keeps us guessing and wondering until the very end, when she takes off the cloth, like Harry's invisibility cloak, and says, "OK. There it is. Make the most of it."



I could see where things were headed toward the end of the sixth book with the open homage to Dante. I was curious whether Rowling was going to take it further. The progression of the symbolism, about which I was now much more conscious, unfolds relentlessly in the final book. And while I can't go as far as Granger's evangelical, Inkling fervor, there is no denying--no denying at all--that Rowling's work is firmly grounded in the Christological metamyth, the larger story of expiation and redemption, the piety of ultimate love. The witch-hunters will just have to go find another victim.

Many people do not recall, or perhaps choose not to recall, the fact that Tolkien was viewed (and may still be, I don't know) as the devil's cousin by many conservative Christians not so terribly long ago. And when I was a teenager, I was confronted by several people who thought CS Lewis was highly suspect. "Too much paganism, tobacco and alcohol," one person told me. Others were concerned by the young boys and girls who spent so much time alone together in Lewis' Chronicles. I now know these were just repressed libidinous hyper-moralists (translation: they felt guilty that they had genitals).



But what about the witchcraft? I can hear the question asked in all sincerity from people who still don't get it. The best way to answer that may be to remind people that CS Lewis wrote what was once the best-selling book in his arsenal from the point of view of a demon. And in that book, he made an interesting observation, that people can fall into two errors regarding the devil. They can take him too seriously or not seriously enough. I believe that in the case of the Potter stories, those obsessed about the magical metaphor in which Rowling has chosen to cast her story have committed the first error. They have taken the devil far too seriously. They have, in Rowling's terms, become mortally terrified of Lord Voldemort and forgotten he is only Tom Riddle.

The Idol Autopsy

"American Idol" was not part of my regular TV viewing fare until this season. This wasn't so much because I had contempt for the show, as many of my friends assumed, but because, until recently, our reception of network TV was very poor. Even so, after we got reception, I was so used to not watching network TV that I forgot all about it. And then there was the issue of time--I just don't watch much TV, even though we have satellite. I like the access and am willing to pay for it in case I need to watch something, but my own personal viewing is pretty much limited to a few minutes of Headline News, a few minutes of whatever is on ESPN and a couple of shows on the SciFi Channel, though I miss more episodes than I catch. And then I generally join my son Nicholas (11 years old today) for whatever he happens to watch, which consists of Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network material, like "Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends," "Jimmy Neutron" and "Naruto." I draw the line at "Pokemon" and "The Suite Life of Jake and Cody" (Disney). Bleggggkk!!

And then there was this massive buzz on campus. Phil Stacey, a Lee alum, was competing in "Idol." His lovely wife Kendra, another Lee alum who had been in several of my classes, came by one afternoon and we chatted about it briefly before she was off, zoom! to LA to join her idol man.


Phil Stacey (left)

I regret to say that I did not know Phil while he was at Lee and I have been trying to recall if we ever actually met, which suggests that if we did, the fact did not stick to my memory. Kendra, however, I recall as a warm and intelligent person. I concluded long ago that most men (including me) marry up. No offense to Phil, but I don't doubt he did, too.

So I watched a whole season of "Idol," more for Kendra's sake than for Phil's, surviving the barrage of emails and messages from people encouraging me to be a "power voter" like the drooling teen girls who were obviously using their text messaging prowess to vote endlessly for Sanjaya. But I confess I didn't. No offense to Phil, again, but I was more interested in the show as a phenomenon than as an interactive part of my life.

I wish I could remember who it was that told me that "American Idol" is the perfect made-for-TV event. It has all the elements one desires in TV viewing. It has common people striving for a lofty goal. It has suspense. It has raw entertainment value. It has consequences. It's the perfect edge-of-the-seat combo that drives the viewers into frenzies of partisanship, anger and euphoria. It has created an Internet subculture, a part of which engages in parody, some of it vicious, as in the "Vote For the Worst" website that claims to have kept Sanjaya in it for so long.

The show is not really about the vocals, despite "judge" Simon Cowell's protestations to the contrary. It is very much about performance and demographic identification. Those candidates with a halfway decent voice who were able to plug into a strong voting demographic tended to last longer than some who actually had more talent.

And, ultimately, the show is about advertising and making money for a very few people, such as Simon Cowell himself, a high-school drop out with enough business savvy and chest hair to survive and prosper in the recording business for a couple of decades.

It's easy to mock or parody the "American Idol" concept. They mocked themselves to a fair degree, which was refreshing, but they were also foolish where they tried to be serious--as in the clips showing the show's celebrities going to Africa or to depressed areas of the U.S. They could have done the fund raising without the awkward, forced clips of Simon's snug t-shirts being shocked by world poverty. As Neil Postman noted, TV is at its most worthless when it tries to be substantive.

But what about Phil Stacey? Arguably, he had one of the better male voices in the competition, possibly the best, but he had difficulty playing the camera. In fact, I'm not sure he ever quite figured it out. He just didn't seem to know how to make the camera his friend and so did not pick up the larger demographic that even Sanjaya, the butt of the show, was able to find. If Phil had discovered a little bit of Sanjaya in himself, he might have lasted longer, though winning it all was probably never a possibility, given the better female pool of talent.

It goes without saying that Melinda Doolittle was cheated by the process. There was no doubt that she was far and away the best performer and singer on the stage, but it was obvious from the finale that giggling adolescents were the primary voting bloc this season--and probably for future seasons.

I heard a variety of radio hosts bemoaning the fact that the show was ruined this season. But how can you ruin something as blatantly low-brow as this concept? The producers have tapped into democracy at its most raw, its most preoccupied and its most vulnerable. There is almost a compulsion to sit through the drivel and watch with fascinated awe the fashioning of nobodies into somebodies, unknowns into stars. As many of the contestants themselves remarked, it's an amazing, transformational process, "the dream," as they called it, the fairy tale of Zero to Hero. We don't have to worry about all the other nagging details, like Lakisha with her child, because all things truly unpleasant, the things that don't sell Ford cars and Coca Colas, are nicely edited out.

In the aftermath of "American Idol," I am now stuck watching "The Lot," a show I feel compelled to watch because of my personal interest in film.

And I absolutely love every awkward, ego-driven, conflict-crowded, salacious minute of it. Somehow knowing it appeals to the baser part of my nature only makes it more interesting.

300: Cheese, Beefcake and Pulp Propaganda

As a confirmed history buff, film aficionado and occasional graphic novel reader, could I afford not to see a movie that purported to combine all three. The online trailers and promos only served to heighten my natural interest, tossing out lines straight from Herodotus' wonderful ancient history text. I had not (and still haven't) seen the graphic novel of the same name, but as I lined up at the ticket counter on opening day, I thought to myself, "You can't ruin this story."

And you really can't. While the film doesn't exactly do that, it does fail to measure up to its historic roots, and for me that is one of the greatest crimes so many films based on historical events commonly commit. One always hopes that the next film incarnation will have "learned from the past" and correct the mistakes of others. But they never do. More's the pity.

The counter-argument is, of course, that the film is not actually based on historic events, it's based on a graphic novel that's...you get the picture.

Most of the reviews I have read agree on one thing--the film is visually stunning. No argument there. From the digitally dropped backgrounds (this is mostly blue-screen artwork) to the graded coloration to the creative camera work to the fine pectoral specimens prancing with wicked helmets and long red capes, the combined effect is breath-taking.

Speaking of pecs and abs. Most of the Spartan characters in the film were fine imitations of Greek art in sculpture. I did respect and appreciate that aspect of this homage to physical perfection with which the Greeks were obsessed and which still dominates a lot of American advertising. Historically accurate Cheesecake, perhaps? One can trace a direct line from these Spartans to the super-heroes that adorn comic book shelves, grace our Saturday mornings and increasingly find their way into the film canon.

Sadly, however, all the best lines in the movie are straight from Herodotus. The other lines, the layers and layers of cheese used to pad the spartanly spare script, were laughable at the least and wildly inaccurate as representations of ancient Greek, much less Spartan, values.

The cheesy lines represent only one aspect in which I found the film, and possibly therefore the graphic novel, to be negligent and even bad.

I was fascinated by Thermopylae as a young teenager. I read Herodotus then (don't ask) and quite a few other versions of the story. I always imagined that this particular tale would make an incredible film someday. The script practically wrote itself, I thought.



Well, it didn't. The running B-plot of the king's wife trying to start a grass-roots campaign of support back home was a transparent and ridiculously shallow attempt to do two things: give a woman a part in the story and provide some sort of narrative relief from the relentless carnage at the pass. Because it is so historically improbable, it does violence to history and therefore had to be completely made-up. So it flops as a theme. Badly. And that just didn't have to happen. The conflict at home--which was real--could have followed historical lines and been more effective. The fact was that all the "free" Greek cities had agreed to the deal to send the Spartan forelorn hope out there. Everyone knew they weren't going to get any help. It was a delaying action at best and probably a suicide mission from the start. That could have been played up better, but wasn't.

The characters, as most reviewers have noted, are cardboard. This is not a problem for the Spartans because their more endearing qualities historically were that they were uncomplicated, brutal, supremely religious, dogged and unimaginative. They were, in fact, the most efficient fascist state there has ever been. They weren't known for nice. Miller and crew actually have to make them look a little more palatable by tossing some Athenian ideas into their heads and mouths, ideas the real Spartans would have found contemptible.



The morph of Xerxes into a giant androgynous being with an echoing cavern of a voice and an infinity of piercings is one of the more unfortunate creative choices of the work. Even as a grand metaphor for absolutism it falls flat. Sparta was a near absolutist state itself. Spartans, and most other Greeks including the Athenians, did not object to tyrants in principle, only to the foreign variety.

I hate to say that I even found the battle scenes tiresome after a while. The first flush of combat, ending with driving the baddies (exotic dark-skinned people all) over the cliff was pretty cool. After that, even I came to welcome the brief respites of the lame B-plot, if only to get a rest from the stylishly grisly, slo-mo slaughter.



The larger problem of this piece of art, however, is that it cannot simply be taken as a visual masterpiece, for all art is rhetorical. All art has something to say. And once you peel back the pasted on veneer of "freedom" (the same pasted on ideal for Braveheart and Gladiator), what you get is an ambivalent story open to abusive appropriation. It's not hard to imagine, for instance, that Hitler would have loved this movie.

Before you recoil in shock, think it through. Who gets kicked into the Spartan well? Who gets rejected from the Spartan ranks? Who gets mocked? Who gets sliced and diced in every conceivable way? Strong, heterosexual white men? Hmmm. As I said before, Sparta was really the first fascist state. What we have here, with the sole exception of the obligatory anachronistic disrespect for religion, is as right-wing a statement as you could ask for, if a right-winger was interested in adopting it.

I doubt that Frank Miller is such a person. He would probably be horrified by the suggestion. But the real Spartans were not defenders of much more than a distinct culture (a couple of wonderful throwaway lines nonetheless) that none of us currently would envy. So Miller dresses their values up to look more like Roman Republicans. That works, I guess.

Ultimately, it's a comic-book movie with comic-book values, comic-book heroes and comic-book lines. Was it bad for me to look for something more? I guess. In the final analysis this film begs to be parodied on so many levels. I'm eager to see who take the first crack.

Response to "Apocalyptic for the People"

On March 8, culture critic David Dark , author of The Gospel According to America and Everyday Apocalypse, visited Lee University and delivered a talk entitled, "Apocalyptic for the People." He lives in Nashville and is married to singer/songwriter Sarah Masen. Follwing is my response to his address.

I met David Dark in Los Angeles a few months ago. It was the second time I had heard him speak, and each time he was in the company of other speakers, all of whom were talking about Christians and pop culture, primarily TV and film. I have to say that my view of David at the time was colored by the company he was keeping, good people with whom I did not entirely agree. But I felt, and feel, that these people were leading Christians into a discussion about media that we have not generally been engaged in. So when I introduced myself to David and found out he was living in Nashville, I thought what better person would there be to come down and talk about this important topic. Only then, though, did I stop to read his book, Everyday Apocalypse. And I got very excited. Here was my kind of guy! David Dark’s heresies are my heresies, for what it’s worth. He is saying stuff I’ve been trying to say for years, though perhaps not so well as David. So I was thrilled that we were able to get him down here.

But, after listening to David’s presentation, I have a confession to make. The terrible fact is that I don’t watch “The Simpsons.” I never have. I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen more than one or two full episodes and a clip or two. And even though David said he was not giving an altar call, I will say that I feel deeply convicted now and am ready to come on down and receive Bart Simpson into my heart.

In all seriousness, I have two areas of response to David’s remarks. The first is directed more toward Christian artists, the second toward his idea of a Community of Discerners.

I love the concept of Apocalyptic Discourse, this notion of communicating or sharing something that creates a pain that is only relieved by thinking, something that colonizes your brain, as David so aptly puts it, and demands some sort of change in you, whether you want it to or not, something that turns our comfortable world upside down.

I love this concept because I believe that David may be helping us to rediscover our birthright as Christians, the one that was supposed to come with the new birth. It seems appropriate, whether Divinely so or not, that we are having this session during the opening of the Society for Pentecostal Studies here on campus. For what was Pentecost? What happened at Pentecost in the second chapter of Acts? Do you remember the story? When I was a kid I had one of those big picture Bibles and it showed the disciples gathered together in the upper room, and what do you see? Yes, the little tongues of fire over their heads.

Actually, what Acts 2 says is that God gave the apostles New Utterance. And when you exegete this term, New Utterance, you find that this is a rarely used expression that means, “wise sayings,” as in the sayings of sages or philosophers. In other words, the birthright of the new Church was an ability to express important ideas in a new way, a gift of expression, a power to help people make connections with the transcendant in ways that had not occurred to them before.

This is precisely what Jesus did. As David Dark said, Jesus said many Objectionable Things. I remember when I wanted to sit down and read the Gospels through, I made the monumental mistake of doing what I had heard people say to do and that was to read the Gospel of John. I thought to myself, “I’m going to set aside all I have heard or thought about the Gospel and just let the words speak for themselves.” And I was stunned. This man Jesus was not a terribly nice guy. He prodded people. He got in their face. He drew lines in the sand and dared them to step over. He used the kind of Apocalyptic Discourse that David Dark alluded to.

This is our birthright as Christians, the New Utterance, a gift handed directly to us, to create the very kind of Apocalyptic Discourse that can bring change to the world. But we surrendered our birthright a long time ago, back when the institutional church became a corrupt part of the world itself. There have been attempts to restore the birthright, but they haven’t seen a lot of success. And today most of us are drowning in the same sea of mediated communication as everybody else. And very few of us are saying anything that makes much of a difference. We have become insular and isolated in our conversations. We talk only to ourselves with our own secret Christian vocabulary. Our young people who grow up in the church have a nice little set of shared symbols that mean nothing to the rest of the world. And we have the Christian market where those secret symbols can be bought and sold. Have you seen a Christian who grew up in the church try to talk to someone who hasn't? It's like watching a train wreck, an ugly collision of unshared values and vocabulary.

When it comes to the popular culture, as David Dark says, we are all saturated with it., and we have not really been discussing it. Sure, we talk about it. It forms the very heart of what we tend to talk about, whether it be the hottest news items involving celebrities, or the plot twists of our favorite shows, or the movies or music we enjoy. But the discussions are only the talk of consumers who have been injected with this culture and spread it to each other like a virus. We haven’t stopped to have the harder discussion about the culture we have created and in which we are such willing partners. That’s the discussion we desperately need to have and I’m so glad that it has begun.

And so I would say to the Christian artist, let’s reclaim the birthright. How do we do that? We start saying the Objectionable Things. We start using Apocalyptic language. There’s lots of stuff out there that’s making these sorts of statements already, but Christians need to be doing it, too, not with “Left Behind” garbage, but with real, genuinely Incarnational stuff that colonizes people’s minds and makes them go out and think, think until they have to do something with what they have witnessed. Let’s create stories and poems and songs and movies and music and visual art that break out of the market’s death grip. Screw the market. Let’s start saying what needs to be said. Let’s get out of the abstract spiritual clichés and the “why me?” imitations and be original and forceful. Let’s talk about reality, about mercy in a fallen world, about the love that overcomes betrayal, about abuse and addiction and war and about loving your neighbor when you’d rather not. Let’s tell stories the way Jesus did and make people stop and realize that something important is going on here.

Secondly, I’d like to address the Community of Discerners that David talks about. I think this is the best approach to Christians and the popular culture I have heard articulated. There are those who say we should try to find God in whatever piece of art comes our way, but something David noted leads me to believe there is a problem inherent in that idea. The problem is that God, as David notes, can be found anywhere because it is his world, after all. You can’t excise him at will. Even a depraved story is recognizable as depraved because of the good (God) things being violated. So I don’t’ find that notion either terribly useful or functional.

A Community of Discerners that’s willing to bring diverse gifts to the conversation about popular culture is a wonderful concept. If we can bring our diverse gifts and opinions to the table, if we know from the outset that we may not agree and probably don’t need to, if we are therefore willing to have those conversations that are not final or deal breakers, as David says, then we may achieve something truly wonderful here.

But I think perhaps it’s easy to underestimate how difficult it is to get to that community. As David notes, we are all wallowing in the culture, not even aware that we are being shaped by its very dictates, by its wants and desires, its likes and dislikes. A Community of Discerners isn’t built from that kind of indiscriminate consumer. The one thing I learned about all of the people who have started and are having this larger conversation about the culture is that all of these people are very well read and often highly educated. Sometimes it seems to me that they are suggesting that just anyone can readily approach the culture the way they do. But they can’t. They haven’t got the equipment yet.

I’m reminded of the instance in the Dumas’ novel, The Count of Monte Cristo, when the protagonist Edmund Dantes is thrown into prison. The author says that the young man has no recourse but to fall into utter despair because he doesn’t have enough education to have an imagination. His mind lacks the building material with which to create hope. In the case of the Community of Discerners, the Christian who wishes to be a part of that community has to be a critical thinker, and he or she who wants to achieve that has got to have education. More importantly, they have to read.

I know this sounds like an elitist sort of thing, but it isn’t, really. But reading is vital to this enterprise because reading trains the mind and builds the vocabulary of words and ideas. If you don’t like to read, then start slow. I tell people who aren’t great readers to go ahead and start with pulp fiction. Read Grisham. Read Mary Higgins Clark or Stephen King or Clive Cussler. And then move on from there. Don’t get stuck in a rut. The important thing, if you want to be either a part of the Community of Discerners or someone who can create Apocalyptic art, is that you’ve got to learn the language either way. It doesn’t just come to you of its own accord. You’ve got to work at it.

There’s a whole lot more I’d love to say here, but I better stop so we can have more discussion. Thanks to David Dark for coming and thanks for your attention.

Of Sickness and War

So I've been sicker than a flea that fell into someone's coke stash. Only today, after more than two weeks, have I begun to feel somewhat human again, though sinus issues plague me still. It started at a conference in Orlando--me with all my department chairs supposed to be going to sessions and learning how to do our jobs better and I end up spending most of the time confined in the hotel room, trying to get some work done in spite of the raging pain in my throat and the blur in my brain.

That's the problem for me when I get really sick. Because I rely so heavily on my thinking apparatus--my body just sort of tags along--when my brain goes out of commission, I am essentially a useless mass of twitching, groaning flesh. And fever--with sinus pain--takes my brain offline in a serious way.

So I had about five days of high fever altogether. My body seemed to have a Gumby-like consistency. My teeth ached, an exotic new experience. My throat constricted with a fiery, knifelike pain deep down around the esophagus that made it impossible to talk. That's how I felt on the drive back from Orlando, sitting in the rear of the van like roadkill scooped off the asphalt and deposited there for the nine and a half hour ride.

As soon as we drove up to Lee University, I stumbled to my truck and drove right over to the walk-in clinic nearest my house. Get this--on that very day they had changed their hours from 8 am- 8pm to 8 am - 6 pm. It was 5:38 pm. And they would take no more patients that evening. I stood looking mournful at the admitting window, which was closed, but the attendant at her desk glanced at me and looked away. I thought of staging a death pantomime of some sort, since I couldn't talk, much less yell, but there was every chance she wouldn't see it, so I shuffled back out to the truck and headed over to the other Doc in a Box in town.

They were open, and they cheerfully took me in, gasped when they looked down my throat, gave me a butt shot and the cherished antibiotic prescription. I managed to get home by 7 pm, by which time I had the shivers so bad it was hard to keep my glasses on.

My dear wife Leslie got me some Nyquil and I tried that ghastly green stuff, but it did not live up to its billing. My nose still ran and I still coughed--the Nyquil just tried to fool my brain into thinking it wasn't really happening. I remember coming out of my stupor with a wracking cough, but taking twice as long to realize that I was in fact choking because the friggin Nyquil had short-circuited my synaptic responses.

And I dreamed strange dreams of black 3-D rectangles--kind of like the monoliths from Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey , except the monoliths just changed length and height occasionally and there was no dramatic soundtrack to go with the action. I realize it's just possible I was gaining exclusive insight into the fundamental nature of the universe and if I had not wakened I might have been on the verge of something truly amazing, but all is now lost, like the ending to Coleridge's "Kubla Kahn."

I did see two movies, like book-ends to my fevered state, Letters from Iwo Jima and Downfall. I have to say that my view of them is probably colored by the fact that each of my coughs felt as if it were about to dislodge my left eyeball. But these films are essentially the same script. The POV is from a young, naive person who steps into the maelstrom near the end of a corrupt, insular, insanely hierarchical and deluded world. Lines common to both movies go something like: "So where is General Fill-in-the-blank? Why hasn't he started his counter-attack?" "Sir, General FITB is cut off. He cannot help us." "So why haven't we heard from General Never Say Die?" "We've sent messages, sir, but nothing gets through." "Well, I guess it's all over now, isn't it? Let everyone die with honor. Let no one be taken alive by the enemy." Then there are a lot of self-inflicted shots to the head with graphic spurts of exploding blood coming out the other side. Lovely.

Both films are exercises in depression, calculated to serve as morality tales. In that last aspect, I think they are successful. But they are dreary and disturbing. In Iwo, the scene of American GIs wasting Japanese prisoners is gut-wrenching. But even worse, in Downfall, is the scene of Frau Goebbels, poisoning her five beautiful children so they won't have to live in a world without Naziism. It brought tears to my eyes watching the oldest daughter, who knew what was happening, resist her mother's attempt to kill her.

I don't think Eastwood's film deserves the buzz it has received. Normally a fan of the old cowboy's work, I don't see anything exceptional about Letters from Iwo Jima. I haven't seen the American counterpart yet, but as a stand-alone film, it's an unrelenting tragedy in the genre of Schindler's List, but not nearly as well done. But, as I say, sickness may have dampened my appreciation.

Thanks to everyone for your prayers and kind comments during my convalescence. I have now started watching "American Idol" because of Phil Stacey. His wife Kendra was one of our finest comm majors. I'd never seen the show before. Now I'm having fun predicting what Simon is going to say. There will be a blog on that strange phenomenon in the near future.