Beautiful Television

I watched Special Report with Brit Hume on Fox News this evening. At the end of each program, Brit usually offers a short comedy bit via David Letterman or Jimmy Kimmel. Tonight was a little different. Brit offered video via YouTube from Got Talent, the British program that inspired American Idol.

In the clip, Paul Potts, a mobile phone salesman from South Wales, sings opera. On first glace, Potts does not strike an inspiring pose. He looks just like everyone else. Then, he sings. He brings you to tears. Shows like American Idol usually bring people down to bring ratings up. What a beautiful moment on television.

It reminded me of that scene in Shawshank Redemption where Tim Robbin’s character, Andy, plays an record of opera over the loudspeaker of the prison. Morgan Freeman’s character, Red, another prisoner, comments…

"I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don't want to know. Some things are best left unsaid. I'd like to think they were singing about something so beautiful, it can't be expressed in words, and makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you, those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free."

For just a brief moment, the ironic, sarcastic, and crass world in which we live dissolved away.

UPDATE: Paul Potts sings "Con te partirò" in the Semi-Final.

FINAL UPDATE: Paul Potts wins!

Socially Redeeming

I had the opportunity last week to hear an interesting exchange between Dennis Prager and Christopher Hitchens. Dennis Prager is a conservative radio commentator who has taught and written on Judaism, Russia and law. Christopher Hitchens is an author, journalist and literary critic. He is also an avowed atheist having recently published, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

During this exchange, Prager is trying to get Hitchens to avoid a blanket condemnation of everything religious.

PRAGER: If you were in an American city that you were not familiar with, alone, late at night, and you couldn’t find your car in a bad neighborhood. You saw ten men walking toward you would or would you not be relieved to know that they just attended a Bible class?

HITCHENS: Not relieved. Not alarmed either necessarily, but not relieved. It’s irrelevant to me in other words. If they had just come from studying Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, then I would feel positively cheered up. Or if they were members of the local Thomas Jefferson Society.

I have heard Prager’s question before, and until now, I thought that it was clever. Hitchens impresses me here. He handles the question deftly. Although I, unlike Hitchens, would be relieved to find out the men had attended a Bible study, I also would be relieved if they were members of the Thomas Jefferson Society. Frankly, I would even be relieved to find out that they had just attended a concert of Bach concertos, or a class on oil painting, or a lecture on thermodynamics.

Prager’s point is a modest one. Let’s allow for the tolerance of religion because it has socially redeeming value. He succeeds in making his point. However, this defense of religion on the basis of social value is ultimately a weak one. Hitchens and I can provide a multitude of other socially redeeming activities. Moreover, we can find religious activity that is not socially redeeming. What if the Bible study in question was sponsored by the Aryan Nation?

I have listened to many of the church gurus who preach that the church must meet the needs of people. We want well-adjusted, self-actualized folks who stay in school and don’t do drugs. That’s okay. The church should strive to be socially redeeming. However, we exist for deeper reasons. We confess that Jesus Christ is “the way, the truth, and the life.” If we forget that, we may have a hard time justifying our existence.

A Few Thoughts At Arlington National Cemetery

This last week, our family was on vacation in Washington D.C. On our last day, we visited Arlington National Cemetery. I’ve been to the nation’s capitol twice. Surprisingly, this was my first extended visit of the cemetery. The place was beautiful, somber and serious. My family watched the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown. The ceremony was rehearsed. Every motion was planned. There was nothing spontaneous here. Nonetheless, every moment suggested respect and honor. Echoing Abraham Lincoln‘s words about another military cemetery, the dead laid here have consecrated this ground, “far above our poor power to add or detract.”

In the recent issue of First Things, Joseph Bottum has a fascinating article entitled, “Death & Politics.” It deserves reading and rereading. The topics range widely and subtly. Bottum is trying to grasp at something deep and mysterious. He concludes…

These are dangerous waters to stir to life, but without them we lack thickness, seriousness, and purpose in our political endeavors. We create true communities only when we have shared dead. Everything else is artificial, and adventitious, and temporary, and incomplete. This is a frightening truth, for the dead we share may be those we kill instead of those for whom we grieve. But dangerous or not, it remains the human condition.

Death may hold clues to our search for meaning. Unfortunately, we don’t see it. Our modern world tries to avoid death by cheating it or hiding it away. We idolize youth and youth culture, and we are unsure how to deal with the elderly. There is even now a movement in Europe called “anonymous death” where the dead are buried in unmarked graves without ceremony. In a world where madmen try to create meaning by spilling blood, we ignore the metaphysical role of death at our peril.

It’s interesting. I accept the notion of “substitutionary atonement.” Jesus Christ died on the cross for my sins, taking my punishment. Our congregation will even sing, “There is a Fountain Filled with Blood.” Still, I can understand those who are uncomfortable with the imagery. The whole thing sounds a bit gory. Nonetheless, if death and fear of death lie at the root of the human condition, the spilled blood of Christ makes even more sense. Jesus Christ experiences what is quintessentially human (at least in its fallen state), death. His sacrifice consecrates his life. By dying on the cross and rising again, Jesus destroys death’s grip on who we are.

Star Wars and Pretension

Yes, the thirtieth anniversary of Star Wars is a big deal. Before I knew Aristotle, Nietzsche, or Wittgenstein, I knew Yoda. Before I knew Athanasius, John Calvin, or David Bosch, I knew Obi Wan Kenobi. For better or worse, the movies helped define me. I understand the heroic partly thanks to Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia and Han Solo. Yes, I am a geek.

As pretentious as that last paragraph, I was overwhelmed tonight by the History Channel’s special, Star Wars Revealed. They trudged out religious scholars, classicists, film critics, journalists, and the rest. Everyone spoke such grandiose and intellectual cheese that I needed a good reality check.

The story of Luke Skywalker and the redemption of Darth Vader is more based on westerns, war movies, and pulp science fiction than heroic myths and biblical motifs. If the movies connect on larger themes found in classical literature, that only acknowledges that our culture is saturated with those themes. George Lucas, when he is at his best, is simply a good story-teller. When he is at his worst, Howard the Duck.

He also grabs and borrows from everywhere. Tatooine, The desert homeworld of Anakin and Luke Skywalker, bares a striking resemblance to the planet Dune in the books by Frank Herbert. Coruscant, the political center of the Star Wars universe, is cribbed from Trantor, a planet in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy.

Unfortunately, Joseph Campbell came along and claimed that Star Wars fit his broad generalizations of the world’s mythologies. Although interesting, many of the connections seemed forced. Steven Hart does a pretty good job deflating much of the myth of Campbell’s analysis. At one point, Hart writes,

If this is the level of analysis at work, then why should this myth-mongering stop with Lucas? The original "Rocky," released the year before "Star Wars," follows Campbell's mythic template much more closely than "Star Wars": just imagine Burgess Meredith as the wise old sage, Burt Young as the guardian of the threshold and Carl Weathers as Darth Vader. (Pop quiz: Where do the pet turtles fit in?) Campbell's approach can give any adventure story, from "Bulldog Drummond" to "The Perils of Pauline," a place in the pantheon. In fact, his acolytes are hard at work doing just that with such movies as “The Matrix” and “The Wizard of Oz.” It adds up to little more than a party game for drunken grad students, or a smoke screen for filmmakers covering their tracks.

Star Wars helped define my generation, but it isn’t profound. It’s a Rorschach test on celluloid. For many, Darth Vader and his Storm Troopers stand in for Hitler and his Storm Troopers. One black film critic from the History Channel special noted that Darth Vader reminded him of pimps from inner-city Detroit. As viewers in Prague saw Star Wars for the first time in 1991, there was no doubt that the evil Empire was the Soviet Union. The Emperor Palpatine is George W. Bush, Clifton Kirkpatrick or Dean Wormer depending on your perspective.

Unfortunately, as George Lucas added the prequels and modified the originals, he has actually muddied the waters. The Force which was never very coherent, now makes little sense. “Trust your feelings,” we are told, yet a Jedi must set aside his emotions. The midi-chlorians turns the Jedi from a order of space Jesuit/Ninjas, who have received the proper training and discipline, to a group of supermen with the right blood.

Still, I love the movies. I enjoy sharing them with my son. Perhaps, the best advice is Han Solo’s to Luke Skywalker as the Millenium Falcon makes its escape from the Death Star, “Don’t get cocky, kid.”

This I Believe

Since I received an Ipod in March of 2007, I’ve been a regular listener to “This I Believe.” National Public Radio recently revived a radio series started by Edward R. Murrow in 1951. Back then, Murrow described the series in this way:

This I Believe. By that name, we present the personal philosophies of thoughtful men and women in all walks of life. In this brief space, a banker or a butcher, a painter or a social worker, people of all kinds who need have nothing more in common than integrity, a real honesty, will write about the rules they live by, the things they have found to be the basic values in their lives.

In it’s current manifestation, NPR airs essays weekly from ordinary and extraordinary people about what matters to them. Some of the essays, I find touching. Others, I find disheartening. I’m still waiting for someone to quote the Nicene Creed a la Stephen Colbert, but you can’t have everything. It’s a good window on American culture.

Tomorrow: A look at Albert Einstein's essay.

Christian vs Christ Follower

This video is part of a series made by Christ Community Church. I found the series after reading about it on a discussion board at allelon.org. I know nothing about the church except from their website, and any criticism of the videos is not directed toward the church or its members.

The video borrows the format of those PC vs. Mac advertisements. These commercials basically suggest that PCs are fuddy-duddy and Macs are cool. In this version, the fuddy-duddy is the “Christian” and the hipster is the “Christ follower”. Throughout the series of videos, there are slams on Christian bumper stickers, WWJD bracelets, the contemporary Christian music genre, dressing up for church, self-righteousness, and having faith for show. The “Christian” is a cartoon character who garners no sympathy. Frankly, I want to be the “Christ follower” who dresses casually for church, listens to U2, and has a Christian walk which requires no accoutrements. Still, the whole thing smacks of “I’m better than you.”

By calling the dweeb, “Christian,” the video is attempting to be controversial. The world is full of self-professed Christians who represent the faith sometimes better and sometimes worse. All these Christians are lumped together and labeled less than faithful. We look over at the “Christian,” and say, “Thank you, God, that I am not like this dork over here.” These are Pharisees who sat at the cool kids table in middle school.

The real lesson for each of us is that the sin of self-righteousness is always near. We think debates about Christ, the church, and the Scriptures are important ones. We hold positions that we believe are correct. Otherwise we wouldn’t hold them. Nonetheless, our rightness does not forgive our arrogance or blindness to our own sins.