Last night, my wife and I had a chance to see a screening of the Acton Institute's movie "The Call of the Entrepreneur" at the Atlanta History Center. I didn't know much of what to expect and so was pleasantly surprised. The production quality was great, especially since they apparently didn't have a huge budget for it. And they made the overall point effectively: that entrepreneurs do, in fact, accomplish many inherently good things.

I grew up in Reformed circles, which at least openly disavowed the sacred/secular dichotomy. Still, I've been surprised lately at how little respect I have given to the world of business as potentially instrumental in "kingdom work." At best, business has been a necessary tool so that other people can accomplish "real work", such as ministry, counseling, missions, etc.

But what "The Call of the Entrepreneur" points out is that business activity by itself can do inherently good things. New businesses can provide for families, create wealth, and increase the standard of living. Yes, greed is often a part of that process, but, as the folks from the Acton Institute pointed out (either in the movie or in the Q&A session last night afterwards), greed is part of everything. A socialist can be just as greedy as a capitalist.

Technorati Tags: Christianity, culture, movies, Acton Institute, The Call of the Entrepreneur

I could never vote for her, but I (and others of my ideological ilk) could live with her -- precisely because she is so liberated from principle. Her liberalism, like her husband's -- flexible, disciplined, calculated, triangulated -- always leaves open the possibility that she would do the right thing for the blessedly wrong (i.e., self-interested, ambition-serving, politically expedient) reason.

Clinton is likewise definitely not my first choice. But I suspect she would be a better candidate than the others. If forced to choose between her, Edwards, and Obama as best candidate to stand up to an Iranian psycho with nukes, she seems to stand the best chance of inadvertently doing the right thing.

Technorati Tags: charles krauthammer, presidential election, hillary clinton

Americans watched by the millions and, in this watching, saw something that would change the country fundamentally. Every day for weeks they saw white people so consumed with racial hatred that they looked bestial and subhuman. When white racism was a confident power, it could look like propriety itself, like good manners. But here, in its insecurity, it was grotesque and shocking. Worse, it was there for the entire world to see, and so it broke through the national denial. The Little Rock crisis revealed the evil at the core of segregation, and it launched the stigmatization of white Americans as racists that persists to this day. After Little Rock whites stood permanently accused. They would have to prove a negative--that they were not racist--in order to claim decency. And this need to forever beg one's innocence is the very essence of white guilt.

Technorati Tags: culture, racism, shelby steele

For all its showy stabs at remorse, its ostentatious moral handwringing, this is a film that unambiguously endorses vigilante killings--at least, as long as you're Jodie Foster, and you feel really bad about it, and you're doing it all for the kids. Foster, and everyone else involved in making this disgraceful film, should be ashamed.

I'm guessing he didn't like the movie much.

Technorati Tags: chistopher orr, movies, The Brave One

He's a little late, but we think we'll keep him anyway.

Technorati Tags: Christianity, culture, humor, satire

Peter Leithart draws this out further, arguing that Christians need to realize that "for all our pretense of sophistication, the West has never entirely escaped the impulses and habits of primitive culture, or that, by escaping Christianity, we are reverting to it." And, later on:

Part of the trick, too, is recognizing the continuities between pagan and modern habits and learning to call them by their traditional names. If a rock concert looks, smells, and sounds like a bacchanal, why not call it that, with all the religious overtones that go with the name? If the rock star elicits frenzy, why not call him a shaman?

Technorati Tags: culture, mythology, Peter Liethart

I also generally agree with the more recent push within evangelicalism towards a broader interaction with American culture, whether popular or otherwise. Yah, cultural engagement!

But something about this article makes me uneasy. Baker and Downing draw out one parallel after another between Crick and Jesus, arguing that the movie is making a "profoundly theological" point:

In The Mind of the Maker, [Dorothy] Sayers suggests that the relationship between the writer's idea and its fulfillment in the written word parallels the relationship between Creator God and the incarnated Christ. A quick read through the Stranger Than Fiction screenplay reveals that the writer, Zach Helm, may have intended just such a connection. Perturbed over being misunderstood, a flustered Harold says to a woman at a bus stop, "I … No. I'm … [Christ]" (the brackets indicate that the word is to be said under his breath). Reminiscent of Jesus' prayer of angst in the garden of Gethsemane, Harold pleads with Kay to spare his life. But Professor Hilbert, having read Kay's first draft, tells Harold that the story "is a masterpiece. You have to die." With agony, Harold responds, "You're asking me to knowingly face my death?" The answer, of course, is yes.

Not only is Crick an in-depth Christ figure, but the movie teaches us a great moral truth:

[T]hough we cannot know for certain how or when we will die, we can live our lives embedded in time, making the most out of the time embedded in us. As exhorted by the one who is himself the fulfillment of all time, we can love our neighbors as ourselves.

Like I said, I agree there are a few references to Christ - the willing near-death/semi-resurrection theme being the most obvious one. I'm not sure that it is as well thought out as Baker and Downing make it to be. Was Zach Helm consciously thinking of Crick as "a representative of divine life"? Maybe, maybe not. I suppose the apple could be a reference to Christ as the Second Adam, but it could also be a reference to The Beatles or (more probably) to René Magritte's The Son of Man.

Most of my unease is probably not so much from the Books & Culture article as it is frustration with a general overeagerness I keep seeing to find redemption themes underneath every cultural pebble. Pastors in churches with a special emphasis on staying relevant and ministering to a youth culture seem particularly prone to this. Yes, America is some sort of post-Christian culture and thus various forms of the creation/fall/redemption story will be found all over the place. But that doesn't mean you can or should pull the gospel out of SpongeBob or the Transformers. Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader is an inverted Christ-figure (virgin birth, death, descent into hell, resurrection), but that doesn't mean he should be the point of your sermon. Christ should.

Christians should interact with culture. They should highlight cultural themes, like those found in Stranger than Fiction, that echo an underlying desire for redemption. At a certain point, though, that interaction should be at least a little critical. The Church is to be a prophet to culture, not a fan-boy of it.

Technorati Tags: Books & Culture, movies, Stranger than Fiction, transforming culture

[A]nother and different set of critics has emerged here at the end of the series, for whom the evident traditionalism of the books is their greatest flaw. One of the participants in Slate.com's Book Club thinks that the novel, and its epilogue in particular, "feels awfully bourgeois in its concern with little other than our heroes' marriages and children." (I did not know that concern for marriage and children was the exclusive province of the bourgeoisie; but that's why I read Slate, to learn stuff like that.) And as I scanned the blogs I lost track of the number of people who complained that the epilogue, and indeed the whole series, is defaced by "heteronormativity." Not a gay or lesbian couple in sight—though, if it makes anyone feel better, I have seen that a few readers of the previous book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, think that Harry's obsession with finding out what Draco Malfoy is up to marks a welcome homoerotic interlude.

Overall, Jacobs praises the series, arguing that the underlying meaning and imaginative scope transcends the (many) limitations of Rowling's literary skill. His final conclusion:

What do we choose to imagine, when we choose? The answer is always revelatory, which is one of the reasons Chesterton was right to say that "the simple need for some kind of ideal world in which fictitious persons play an unhampered part is infinitely deeper and older than the rules of good art, and much more important." The Harry Potter books remind us of this, and they can be, if we read them rightly, both a delight in themselves and a school for our own imaginings. They have many flaws, but I have not dwelt on them here because I forgive J. K. Rowling for every one. Her seven books are, and thank God for it, always on the side of life.

But you really should read the entire article, not just the two paragraphs excerpted here.

Technorati Tags: books, chesterton, harry potter, alan jacobs

Our kids have learned a few things from Baby and Little Einsteins. Inevitably, though, that is because my wife is sitting there watching the show with them, talking about what is happening, and making the experience active rather than passive. So, of course, in the end, the only way for toddlers to really learn is for parents to interact with them. Any situation where the parent(s) have given up on that and turned over the entire job of parenting to PBS, Cartoon Network, the Disney Channel, and Nickelodeon is a bad situation.

At the same time, the APA pronouncement that children under 2 should never watch TV sounds either like an effort to swing the pendulum in the other direction, or a pronouncement from detached academics and researchers who have never had the pleasure of attempting to put a meal together with an 18-month old screaming bloody murder for no good reason.

Anyway, in other links:

Arthur Miller's Missing Act. Much like "Intellectuals" by Paul Johnson

Google Apps no match for MS Office, report says. Say what you will about Microsoft, there simply are not that many other solutions suitable for enterprise-level needs.

On the other side of the ideological spectrum: Apple Laptops Transforming PC Sales?. The trend away from low prices as the determining mark and towards customer service and reliability also seems to be a good thing.

Wednesday night I saw the Giants play the Braves at Turner Field. Bonds did hit a home run, but what was more interesting was the amount of booing he received every time he even approached the plate. Although he beat Babe Ruth and Hank Aarons, it seems like it would have been more rewarding to see one of them play.

here’s what I learned from months of testing this across the country: when we make the ½ star options possible, we get fewer ratings. Significantly fewer ratings. We have argued these results internally for some time, and our best guess is that the complexity of doubling the number of choices from 5 to 10 deters many people from rating, so they just give up. (“3 stars? No, 3 ½ stars.. no… 3 stars… no… oh forget it…”)

In other words, more options sometimes equals less usability. A lesson that is hard to grasp in software development, with the notable exception of Apple.

Also noteworthy is the remark that Netflix treats 3 stars as a neutral rating in their recommendations. Which means I should probably bump some of my movies up to 4.

... Arcade Fire had me at Hello. The music felt somehow medieval and fresh and urgent all at once, with strings and electric guitar, marching band, minstrel/gypsy/ troubadour fare coming out of a tavern full of clear-eyed, optimistic, coed worker priests. It felt wise and young and in unself-conscious continuity with some long forgotten, undeniably authoritative, ancient broadcast, a dusty, old, strong-as-an-oak culture.

Extra bonus points for using lots of business cliches, such as "we really need to think outside the box"

Not that I'm complaining or anything