As noted in the bulletin this morning, we are providing a forum on the Riverblog to discuss our current Movie Night movie, The Painted Veil. The suggestions below are just that, suggestions, and everyone is free to discuss any ideas as comments. Please join in with your thoughts on the important issues raised by this movie.
• Given the circumstances, do you feel that Kitty’s acceptance of Walter’s proposal was appropriate? Should she have foreseen what would eventually happen to her in a marriage in which she admittedly did not love her husband?
• Following that line of thought, Kitty states that “If a man doesn’t have what it takes to make a woman love him, that’s his fault.” Is this simply self-justification or is there a sense in which this idea is a staple of western culture? Do we go into marriage thinking that it is our partner’s responsibility to make us happy?
• Characterize Walter’s response to the affair. Is the trip to the village simply revenge, or does he have some idea of redemption for her and perhaps for himself in work and self-sacrifice?
• Waddington(Toby Jones) is developed in depth after seeming to be the quintessential “gone native” type. How do you feel that he has come to have peace with himself and his circumstances? Does he truly love his Chinese mistress and his life or do you feel that he has “settled” for something less than hoped for? How important to Kitty is his interaction with her?
• The Mother Superior (Diana Rigg) is from a higher social class than Kitty and had her own “tainted affair” before taking Catholic orders. Do you feel this was out of religious conviction or was her reason redemption through service, and through suffering? She speaks of love and duty as a response to grace. Do you agree? Do you feel that she understands Kitty or does she make erroneous assumptions about her? Is her attitude and life helpful to Kitty in her dilemma?
• Kitty asks in the movie, “Does anyone really fall in love with virtue?” Did Walter’s self sacrificing work in the cholera epidemic cause her to fall in love with him or did it change her attitude about life so that she could fall in love with her husband? Also, is Kitty’s redemption through service, love or both? Why do you think so?
• The title is from a poem by Percy Bysche Shelley. The stanza goes as follows:
Lift not the painted veil which those who live
Call Life: though unreal shapes be pictured there,
And it but mimic all we would believe
With colors idly spread,—behind lurk Fear
And Hope, twin Desinies; who ever weave
Their shadows, o’er the chasm, sightless and drear.
Does the overall effect of the movie state this idea? Is Shelley’s poem more nihilistic than the conclusion you got or is the ending of the movie more upbeat?
Vancouver, BC, is apparently in the process of banning smoking on city sidewalks, bus shelters, and taxis. Now, I could write about how ridiculous that is, and I’d be right. However, that ridiculousness pales in comparison to the ridiculousness of the exception they’re granting. Get ready: Muslim hookah pipe smokers are exempt. You can read all about it here.
Now, if Christians came forward and requested an exemption to any civil law, the ACLU types would be in complete uproar. The Christians would be accused of trying to foist their beliefs on all of society. Yet, somehow, where Muslims are concerned, their needs and wants trump civil society’s.
Ostensibly, cigarette smoke is so intolerable, so unhealthy that nary a whiff can be inhaled on the city streets. Unless, of course, the smoker is Muslim, at which point, I suppose, all the non-Muslims’ health needs suddenly become of secondary concern. Quote:
Hookah lounges are essential for immigrants from hookah-smoking cultures, because it helps them deal with the depression common for newcomers and gives them places like they have at home.
How non-Muslims are to deal with depression is left unclear (though, personally, I’d advise the depressed non-Muslim denizens of Vancouver to consider moving).
I mean, what else is one to conclude? To put in Orwellian terms (apropos), some religions are more equal than others.
I’ve written before about the disturbing inability of our culture - especially our supposed elites - to make even the most basic moral judgments. That inability is on display again for the world to see at Columbia University.
The president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, will be in NYC this week to address the United Nations General Assembly (who, I suppose, must tolerate his appearance). Yet, inexplicably, Columbia University has extended an invitation to him to speak at a forum.
This probably isn’t necessary, but for the benefit of the morally dense at Columbia, this man is evil, and represents an evil regime that is bent on the destruction of the US and our allies. He’s not even shy about it. He has repeatedly denied the holocaust, threatened the annihilation of Israel, is working feverishly for nuclear weapons, and holds to a very radical, apocalyptic view of his role in ushering in the return of the “hidden imam,” (their equivalent of the final judgment) by starting war with us infidels in the West. These statements are made in public, and frequently in English (though our press just as frequently ignores them). Ahmadinejad is also accused of having been one of the student captors of the US hostages in Tehran in 1980. The Iranian regime he represents is listed by the US State Department as a state sponsor of terrorism, is widely credited with the bombing of the US Marine Corps barracks in Lebanon in the 80s, and, just last week, US commanders in Iraq testified to Congress that Iranian munitions are being supplied to insurgents by Iranian special forces and are used frequently in attacks that kill and wound US soldiers. Finally, the litany of executions, floggings, torture, political repression, and enforcement of barbaric sharia law is too gruesome to detail here. Google it if you can stomach it.
Now, sadly predictably, the powers that be at Columbia, all the way up to its president, Lee Bollinger, when confronted with this outrage hide behind the canard of freely exchanging ideas. The whole concept of a university as a platform for the exchange and debate of ideas is centered around the pursuit of truth. This man represents everything that is antithetical to truth, and every other Western and, especially, Christian value. When one of the most prestigious universities in the US says that it is participating in constructive dialogue, but in fact are allowing a sworn enemy of this country to use them as a platform for his obvious propaganda, what is one to conclude about that university? As if exhibiting pride in their moral obtuseness, one of the deans at Columbia has said that they would have invited Hitler to speak, given the opportunity.
How about adding this to the mix: this same university, Columbia, that warmly welcomes a murderous tyrant, bans the US military’s ROTC programs from its campus. So, the military is banned, but the leader of a nation who is actively working to kill our soldiers is welcomed. We should, then, be very clear. This is NOT about simple relativism, or else the ROTC would be allowed just like Mahmoud. This is what Jeanne Kirkpatrick so accurately referred to as the “blame America first” mentality.
Lest anyone think that this is just another of my GOP-slanted rants, none less than the speaker of the NYC city council has condemned Columbia for this outrage.
These people have no discernment, no wisdom, no moral compass, and no shame.
UPDATE: The folks at the Daily Kos, the leading liberal blog and virtual mouthpiece of the Democrat party, are really jazzed up about Mahmoud’s visit. Check out this post, by a Jewish lesbian who confesses to having a crush on Ahmadinejad, because he’s so right about how evil George Bush is. Money quote:
Monday, when Ahmadinejad speaks at Columbia University in New York, I’ll be listening. Maybe with a bottle of wine and some soft music playing in the background. If I can get past the fact that, as a Jewish lesbian, he’d probably have me killed, I’ll try to listen for some truth.
For about the first time in my life, I have literally no idea what to say.
In an upcoming Salt and Light article, I will be addressing the issue of how we as Reformed and Presbyterian Christians should interact with the wider Christian world. Reformed Christians in America have an upleasant history infighting and sectarianism (see Machen’s Warrior Children). In my view, whatever one thinks about the Federal Vision in all its particulars, a consistent and positive thrust of the movement has been the willingness to interact with those outside the relatively small Reformed world, and even smaller world of the Presbyterian Church in America. Presbyterian minister Doug Wilson made these instructive comments recently:
When C.S. Lewis wrote of mere Christianity, he used the image of the hallways of a great house. He emphasized that it was in the rooms that one slept, took one’s meals, visited with family and friends, and so on. All the action took place in the rooms — and that is where my Reformed identity resides. That’s where I keep my books, and my slippers, and my laptop. But it is possible (and desirable) to go out into the hallway from time to time and fellowship with the other residents of this great house. I can do that without forgetting where my bed is, and without trying to get all the Christians to sleep in the hallways.
When a particular tradition becomes in-grown it is easy to think that “this room” is the only room where anything worthwhile is going on. One of points of FV catholicity is that we don’t think this is true — God is doing wonderful things in other parts of the house. This has been taken (and ought not to have been taken) as us expressing a desire to move out of our Reformed library with its fat books and burnished leather chairs, and tobacco, and Drambuie on the rocks, and carpet you could lose a shoe in. So don’t get me wrong. I like it here and have no intention of moving out — although I still reserve the right to get chased out.
But I can still be grateful for those Campus Crusade guys staffing the mud room, getting new people into the house, and making it possible for them to eventually make their way to the library.
The context may be found here. Healthy ecumenism is not coming together to feel good about coming together. Healthy ecumenism is coming together around the truth of the gospel that has been believed by all Christians everywhere at all times.
Like Wilson, I like our room. When my friends in the room lock the door, however, and tell me I can’t take a stroll down the hall to borrow a book from another room, or perhaps borrow an insight from another room, I think we are dealing with an incredibly historical naivety and ridiculous insularity. Let’s continue to decorate the room and invite others in, but for the love of all that’s good, let’s keep the door open.
Sometimes it’s hard to know if I’ve just become too jaded and cynical, or whether American culture has completely gone down the drain.
In the news recently was the story of this college student at the University of Florida who went to a forum where Sen. Kerry was speaking. He overstayed his time at the microphone per the events rules, and the police came to remove him. He resisted the officers, which is completely illegal, so they attempted to arrest him, which he then further refused. After a warning that they were going to use the taser on him, when he still failed to follow their instructions, they used the taser on him.
Here’s the video. (I think there’s a profanity beeped out, but you may want the kiddos out of the room just in case.)
Now here’s my question. Should I feel sorry for him? I really don’t. A hit from a taser is painful, but does no long or short term damage. He was resisting an entire group of officers. What are they to do? They’d be sued if they broke his arm trying to force it behind his back and into the cuffs.
The reaction in the blogosphere to this has been surprising. Most seem to feel that the force was excessive, and that the campus cops were trigger happy. Here’s a roundup of comments.
Have I gotten too hard-hearted? Is this brutality? Or, is it simply acceptable now to refuse arrest, and suffer no consequence for it? Aren’t the police in a no-win situation here?
I’m interested to hear anyone’s thoughts about this.
There was a very significant musical event in Tuscaloosa Sunday night when the Music Department of Riverwood presented the Fall Concert under the overall direction of our Director of Music, Jeff Miller. It is now 48 hours later and when I think of the beauty, emotion and delight of the music, I am again filled with wonder and thoughts of worship.
There were four parts to the concert. Our Children’s Choir had obviously spent much time and practice and were wonderful (and cute as always.) The Riverwood Korean Worship Choir had three pieces that they did with their usual competence, beauty and obvious joy in the Lord. And it was a joy for the audience to hear Jesus Loves Me in Korean and understand in a new way how the message of Christ has reached all peoples and languages.
Then we had our supremely talented instrumentalists: Linda Graham on piano, Nancy Hopper on violin, Sarah Vander Wal on cello, and Bill Hopper on oboe. They played alone and as accompaniment to several choir pieces. They are spectactularly talented. There is nothing better in Tuscaloosa.
Finally we had our wonderful adult choir bring us a worship service in song; from the Call to Worship to the Benediction. Our choir is unpaid and all that they do is to worship and glorify God. I’m no expert but I do enjoy music and have heard many concerts. They are good; very, very good.
I could say something about every piece because it was all concert-hall quality but I’ll just mention two things. The Riverwood Trio, Linda, Nancy, and Sarah played a new composition by Gwyneth Walker, A Vision of Hills, based on the Irish hymn, Be Thou My Vision. Jeff said that it had never been performed before in Tuscaloosa. It will never be performed better. It’s simply not possible for it to be performed better than these ladies played and you have to hear it to understand how beautiful the piece is.
The other one I want to mention was the beautiful and haunting spiritual, He Never Said a Mumbalin’ Word sung by the Adult Choir. Someone who had suffered composing music about the suffering of our Lord. If you were there and heard it, I doubt that you will ever forget it. In fact, I’m going to have to talk Jeff into doing it on a Sunday morning sometime, maybe around Easter.
By this post, I want to personally thank everyone who participated for an unforgettable evening. Jeff Miller does an absolutely wondrous job and the Music Department adds so very much to Riverwood worship. If you missed it, you really missed something special. The next concert will be on December 16 and will be A Service of Lessons and Carols. Take the advice of a guy whose been around a little bit and be there. You won’t be sorry and you’ll never miss another one.
The Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece earlier this week that caught my attention. It was an argument for the restoration of a standard liberal education curriculum in the nation’s universities. The writer, Peter Berkowitz, who taught at Harvard, witnessed there the ill effects of the failure to teach the works that form the core of a liberal arts eduction. Bear with me; I’m going to reproduce a couple of paragraphs in their entirety:
About the problem:
Indeed, many professors in the humanities and social sciences proudly promulgate doctrines that mock the very idea of a standard or measure defining an educated person, and so legitimate the compassless curriculum over which they preside… . Many American colleges do adopt general distribution requirements. Usually this means that students must take a course or two of their choosing in the natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities, decorated perhaps with a dollop of fine arts, rudimentary foreign-language exposure, and the acquisition of basic writing and quantitative skills. And all students must choose a major. But this veneer of structure provides students only superficial guidance. Or, rather, it reinforces the lesson that our universities have little of substance to say about the essential knowledge possessed by an educated person.
After analyzing Harvard’s recent efforts to reform its core liberal arts curriculum and finding it to be wanting, Berkowitz proposes his own:
Crafting a core consistent with the imperatives of a liberal education will involve both a substantial break with today’s university curriculum and a long overdue alignment of higher education with common sense. Such a core would, for example, require all students to take semester courses surveying Greek and Roman history, European history, and American history. It would require all students to take a semester course in classic works of European literature, and one in classic works of American literature. It would require all students to take a semester course in biology and one in physics. It would require all students to take a semester course in the principles of American government; one in economics; and one in the history of political philosophy. It would require all students to take a semester course comparing Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It would require all students to take a semester course of their choice in the history, literature or religion of a non-Western civilization. And it would require all students to demonstrate proficiency in a foreign language of their choice by carrying on a casual conversation and accurately reading a newspaper in the language, a level of proficiency usually obtainable after two years of college study, or four semester courses.
I commend the entire article to everyone. It’s a fascinating read. Find it here.
Now, I’d like to offer two comments about this. First, I heartily support what Professor Berkowitz suggests. I agree with his assessment that modern university education tends to convey the notion that “there is nothing in particular that an educated person need know.” I can support this with my own experience. I graduated with a liberal arts degree (majoring in English) without ever being required to take a course in European history or Western Civ (nor had I been required to do so in high school). The implicit message there is that there’s really nothing particularly important about the history of the West that I needed to know. Today, I find that utterly appalling. How can one possibly hope to understand literature without the background of the history in which the works are written?
The simple fact, reviled by relativists (and, I think, many liberal arts professors), is that “knowledge is cumulative and that some books and ideas are more essential than others,” to use Prof. Berkowitz’s formulation. As Christians, we should understand and support this concept most of all because we know that there is objective truth, and we know the source.
My second reaction to the article is to take it a step further: why wait until university to teach these fundamentals? Two hundred years ago, the idea of waiting until university to expose the learner to the fundamentals of history, literature, religion, etc., would have been thought foolishness. Because, at that time, under the classical education structure, by the time the student made it to the university, those fundamentals has LONG been mastered. The classical structure taught the basic facts of history, religion, art, language, and mathematics by what we know as the 6th grade. This was known as the “grammar” phase. From there, the student was then taught the rules of logic during the next few years. Then, during what we call high school but they called the “rhetoric” phase, the student was taught to take the basic facts he or she had learned already, apply logic to them, and to express their critiques of ideas and arguments in writing and oral speech. This three phase sequence was referred to as the trivium, and it’s the very pattern we follow today at Riverwood Classical School.
Classically, because the student had already been taught in grade school what Prof. Berkowitz advocates for college freshmen and sophomores, the university was reserved for four areas that required scientific and relational reasoning to evaluate: higher arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Only after these subjects were mastered, did the student proceed to study what were considered the ultimate intellectual inquiries in graduate school: philosophy and theology.
Compared to what classical education accomplished, Prof. Berkowitz’s suggestion seems timid at best. I’d like to think that Riverwood has started making small steps to restoring what western educators seem to have willingly lost.
Christopher Dawson is a renowned historian who is not much read in academic circles because, though his specialty is European history, his focus is not so much on materialistic issues but on spiritual issues. The quote below comes from his very scholarly book, Dynamics of World History. The thought came to me through Elder Bob Prince’s devotional in last night’s Session meeting of the unstable nature of life as he spoke of the immutability, the unchanging nature and character of God as opposed to the “unintelligable chaos” of life. Dawson addresses this in History. Read and consider this quote and give us your thoughts and comments on how being a Christian brings us, if it does, to this viewpoint regarding history and even how we are impacted in our day to day lives.
It seems to me that the Christian is bound to believe that there is a spiritual purpose in history—that it is subject to the designs of Providence and that somehow or other God’s will is done. History is not a mere unintelligible chaos of disconnected events.
The Puritans (and modern day political conservatives too) have been accused of being deathly afraid that someone, somewhere was having fun. Today, undoubtedly, that distinction belongs to the political left.
I ran across a couple of stories today about food. PETA is unhappy with Al Gore for eating meat. Why pick on poor Al Gore, you might ask? Well, you see, PETA claims that the animal husbandry industry produces more greenhouse gases than all forms of transportation combined. So, in their view, Gore is an eco-hypocrite because he’s not a vegetarian. They even plan to protest his next appearance in Denver.
Couple that with the LA city fathers, who want to place a moratorium on any new fast food restaurants opening in south central LA because there are just too darn many and it’s making the locals fat. Now, this could be fodder for lots of different rants - nanny-state bureaucrats, loss of economic freedom, etc. But I want to go in a different direction.
The PETA activists and liberal LA politicians would absolutely have a conniption fit if someone suggested that the government regulate any personal sexual conduct whatsoever. They are quite emphatic that in the sexual sphere, anything must go, and no one has any right whatsoever to say differently. So why would they care what anyone ate?
Personally, I lay all of this at the feet of relativism. The answer to my question is that, purely in the world of the hard political left, sex is not taboo, but a quarter pounder with cheese at Mickey D’s is just tacky. So, since they don’t like fast food, it should be banned. But wait, you may object, what about all the bad health consequences of those burgers and fries (or whatever carnivorous delicacy the Gores enjoy)? Well, what about the fact that STDs are virtually eliminated if everyone has only one sexual partner? I guess some public health problems are more equal than others, huh?
Really, if you think about it, moral relativism is doomed by its own self-contradiction. If all viewpoints are equally valid, and some think that private sexual conduct should be regulated, and some think that food consumption should be regulated, what, if anything, do we actually regulate?
Take another example: some cultures think honor killings are acceptable. Others don’t. So how is the moral relativist to reconcile this when it actually comes to either outlawing or allowing honor killing? There is a real world (much as relativism may want to deny this) and a given activity will either be legal or illegal, and there isn’t much gray to it. Relativism can’t cope with this reality.
Relativism is very much in vogue now intellectually, but, eventually, I think, it will fall of its own weight. And, who knows, maybe the thing that will get that started is when they come for your Whopper.
So I guess everyone has heard about the brouhaha on the beach in San Diego over the holiday weekend. In case you missed it, a fight on the beach escalated to the point where the police had to be called in. Read all about it here.
And guess what’s to blame? That’s right, Carrie, it’s demon rum. Nevermind asking anyone to take responsibility for their own actions, even if they have been drinking. People aren’t to blame. Booze is.
So, because alcohol is so clearly to blame, what’s the natural course of action if you’re a craven politician? You propose a total ban on alcohol on all public beaches, natch. Thus has SD City Councilman Kevin Faulconer stepped up to the plate and done just that. Surely this will make the beaches family-friendly again, right? If we just ban the alcohol, it’ll be a swell place - a place where Ward and June could take Wally and the Beav without fear of them being exposed to that most wicked of substances, corrupting their immortal souls.
What garbage. And, not only to I have my own opinion to back me up, I have that most coveted of things in our postmodern American culture - a study! According to a 2004 study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, kids whose parents allowed them to attend unchaperoned parties where drinking took place were twice as likely to binge drink as other kids. No shocker there. However, the study also found that kids who drank at home with their parents were one-third as likely to binge drink as other kids. Who could have foreseen this? I mean, alcohol is so evil - how can this be? When children are taught to drink responsibly by their parents, they become responsible drinkers as adults. It’s craziness, I tell you.
An excellent piece citing this study appeared on the Wall Street Journal ’s opinion website on Monday. I recommend all of you read it here.
Now, the oh-so-cocky Councilman Faulconer laid down this challenge regarding his proposed ban:
For those who believe an all-out ban is too extreme, I invite you to convince me otherwise.
Well, I submit this scientific study in response to Mr. Faulconer’s challenge. It’s good public policy to encourage families to drink together to reduce binge drinking. Pour up a beer for Wally! It’s good for him!
Somehow, I still don’t expect Mr. Faulconer to be convinced.
I recently attended a fairly large gathering of predominately Armenian-oriented evangelical Christians. Musing as I mingled, I tried to come up with one word that would describe the group “personality” as I perceived it. Of course, the first word to pop to mind was “nice.” That one’s obvious. In the south we have that one down to a tee…especially Christian nice. But there was something beyond that that I had a hard time putting my finger on. Eventually I found the word “smug” to be the closest descriptive of what I sensed. Smug. Not blatant pride, (that wouldn’t be nice!), not exactly arrogance…just a quiet sense of self-certainty and self-satisfaction, both as individuals and as a group. Part of me, the really insecure part, envies that, I confess. But as I reflected yesterday on Tim’s powerful and honest sermon about man’s total depravity, and God’s totally sovereign election of men unto salvation, I realized that if I thought I had one iota of input into my salvation…that I, out of all the millions and milllions
of people who lived and died and went to hell…that I, among all my fellow humans who “had a choice,” was among the comparatively small minority (of which even Adam and Eve were not a part), that had the wisdom and insight, or tenderheartedness, or whatever you might attribute it to, to make the right choice, the choice for God….I would probably be more than smug, and justly so. I REALLY would have something to boast about. Why, if that were the case, I would be god-like.
I do not wish to slam the people I observed. I know many of them, and they really are, well…very, very nice and sincere Christian people. And I know that if I went up to any one of them and asked if they thought it was due to their own superior wisdom that they chose God as opposed to all the lost people in the world, or if they thought God would commend them for their brilliance in making the right choice, every single one of them would most certainly say no. They would speak of grace. I think it was Dr. Packer who said, “When we are on our knees, every Christian is a Calvinist.”
