All Too Easy

All hail the power of the information age!

'Bout That Time?

Audience participation returns to the Texafornian! Today's question: If you were a racehorse, what would your racehorse name be?

Practical Theology

"[Forgiving and forgetting or ignoring the past are] a travesty, of course, but it is something to beware of. No, we need something more positive to say about forgiveness. We need to recognize both the reality of the past and the hope of a future of forgiveness. Because real forgiveness is something that changes things and so gives hope. The occasions when we feel genuinely forgiven are the moments when we feel, not that someone doesn’t care what we do, but that someone does care what we do because he or she loves us and that love is strong enough to cope with and survive the hurt we have done. Forgiveness of that sort iscreative because it reveals new dimensions to a relationship, new depths, new possibilities. We can find a love richer and more challenging than before. If someone says to me, “Yes, you have hurt me, but that doesn’t mean it’s all over. I forgive you. I still love you,” then that is a moment of enormous liberation. It recognizes that reality of that past, the irreversibility of things, the seriousness of damage done, but then it is all the more joyful and hopeful because of that. Because this kind of love doesn’t have illusions, it is also all the more mature and serious. It can look at and fully feel my weakness, and still say, “I love you.”

- Rowan Williams in Proclaiming the Scandal of the Cross

In the Beginning

Then Illúvatar spoke, and he said: 'Mighty are the Ainur, and mightiest among them is Melkor; but that he may know, and all the Aiunr, that I am Illúvatar, those things that ye have sung, I will show them forth, that ye may see what ye have done. And thou, Melkor, shalt see that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined.'

- From the Ainulindalë¹ creation narrative, Tolkien


^{1. The Ainulindalë is one of the five books contained within The Silmarillion.}

Scene It

I live for the unexpected momments in my life in which reality steps out for a quick cup o’ joe and the fantastic insuperably inserts itself in an all too infrequent cameo. This is probably why I like Scrubs. This morning, having had an appointment cancel on me, I thought I would swing by Barnes and Noble to see if they had in stock a certain book I might be interested in purchasing. As I swung my gallant Honda down the parking aisle feeding directly into the main entrance to my place of previous employment, it happened: The Momment.

“Double-non-fat-three-splenda-extra-hot-half-caf-vanilla-laté for Reality? . . .”

I became acutely aware of the radio, which had been previously blathering some rather innocuous music or another, but now was playing something very similar to Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries¹. My point of view shot up 25 feet and I saw my car lurch forward, hammer both sets of front doors from their hinges and spray parchment in every direction with impunity, spin 5 brodies in the cheap carpeting and finally streak off down Blackstone leaving a wake of dangling modifiers and mangled diphthongs.

I didn’t much care for the time I spent employed by Barnes and Noble, nor did they have the book I was hoping for.

^{1. Scroll down to track 6 for a sample if you're unfamiliar . . .}

Diggin' Dogtown

My Junior High really only had two factions growing up. There were some ethnic minorities along the fringes that clashed from time to time, but in my North Clovis school the battle for campus hegemony was between the Skaters and Jocks. I wasn’t really part of either camp, weighing 115lbs soaking wet, sporting glasses, and yet not owning a single pair of Vans or cords. As chance would have it, however, I became friends with one of the Skater Barons, Anthony, and we remained friends throughout high school. There was a brief halcyon period between the two factions in the spring of ‘97 when a political marriage was hammered out between Skater Queen Amanda and Ronnie the Jock, but peace was brittle and the tenuous truce followed the unfortunate fate of its initiating liaison. The jocks were just too mainstream. Too clean-cut, too button-down to mix with the skaters. Both smoked pot, drank heavily, drove recklessly and despised authority but found themselves in the ironic position of the Nazis and Communists during the 1940’s; the two ideologically opposed factions found themselves pursuing similar goals through similar means with differing aesthetics and despised each other for it.

Dogtown and Z-Boys was my Silmarillion of skating culture. Providing a richly textured examination of skate boarding’s nativity from the economically depressed 1970’s Venice surf scene into a fully developed and independent sport as well as character sketching skate legends Tony Alva and Jay Adams, all the drama I saw unfold in my adolescent years suddenly made so much more sense when informed by this film. Set to a mishmash of 70’s rock, raw footage of long-haired bedraggled street hooligans bumming around on homemade decks and contemporary contemplations on the birth of the other true American art form, Dogtown and Z-Boys traces the roots of the Zephyr Skate Team from rag-tag surf rats to international icons. Exploring the urban-guerrilla mindset of pool riding, the fiercely territorial mindset of the sport’s first superstars and reckless pursuit of perfecting a craft, Stacey Petralta’s work behind camera draws the honesty and authenticity only a lifelong friend could from his subject. Whether you wore battered cut-offs cords or Tommy Hilfiger plaid button-downs in high school, Dogtown and Z-Boys is worth a watch to gain an appreciation for what has emerged to be a significant subset of youth culture today. A labour of love which easily held my attention through an enjoyable 90 min.

Grade: B+

God Bless America

If they ever digitially remaster The Goonies, they should totally put one of these things in.

Talladega Naps

Disclaimer: I don’t much care for Will Ferrell.

I didn’t have many expectations coming into Talladega Nights, mostly because of the disclaimer above. I’ve seen Anchor Man, Old School, Zoolander the BOSNL disks and found very little that wasn’t passé by 5^th grade in Ferrell’s arsenal. If this makes me sound like I have a stick up my ass and I don’t really know how to have a good time then so be it. I know a few people who thoroughly enjoy Ferrell’s antics, I even think some of them are reasonably intelligent people, I just don’t happen to be one of them. Besides a good laugh at Eleanor Roosevelt’s spurious quote to open the film and a few of the PSA’s, I had to remind myself that this was a comedy consistenty throughout the movie. The plot was as fresh as a driver’s jock after lap 700 and the vast majority of the jokes laboured harder than a wound-out big block V-8 trying to pass to the outside. Sacha Baron Cohen’s Jean Girard managed to finagle a smile from time to time solely on the tenacity of his ridiculous French accent and TR reminded me of my second cousin from Greensboro, but in general I found very little to salvage from this wreck of a movie. If you are a die-hard Ferrellite you’ll probably love the flick, but I found myself glad to start cleaning my apartment ¾ through it. The Ballad of Ricky Bobby was more a dirge for me.

Grade: C

Staind

“I ruined my witness to those guys,” divulged our Pastor one Sunday evening service as he was recounting his life as a former MTV cut-out Fratboy. I slipped on the comfortable phrase as I have countless times before, but this time I’d had my hair cut in it. It itched and itched for almost two full days until Tuesday night when I had to rip it back over my head and check out the damage.

What does ‘our witness’ mean in front of people who do not share faith in God the Father, Christ His Redeemer and the mysterious Spirit? What carries a better witness and a more authentic picture of discipleship and the Christian life: The perfection persona or being honest about the change which is taking time to be perfected in us? Should we flee our previous crowd upon conversion lest they tempt us or ‘bring us down?’ Where is the line between the two, because I don’t pretend that the answer hangs cut and dried on one side of the smoke shed or the other.

I’m still brushing the barbs out of it all, but the question is one that I’ve been wrangling with for a while in several different iterations. To what extent do we really believe that the light will shine in the darkness and that the darkness will not overcome it? Also, does that light come from us being behaviourally perfect or from letting others see the darkness fall off of us as we follow Christ?