essays

[Unpublished] 

I don’t know when I’ve felt so ambivalent about a film. Let me first warn that it’s relentlessly foul and vulgar, so don’t think I’m encouraging you to run out and rent it. The DVD has been extended 17 min, so it’s even more raw than the film shown in theaters. But at the time of the Oscar nominations a couple of critics said that, if the Academy didn’t have indie-itis, and if comedies in general were not regarded as lesser films, this should have been considered for best film. If you could somehow filter out the crudity, it would indeed be very funny. And it actually has some interesting and appealing characters. Yeah, if it wasn’t so raunchy, it would be a very likeable movie.

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[Beliefnet, August 6, 2005]

Summer days in the Holy Land are hot and still; the relentless sun beats down on green-gray shrubs and dusty rubble. It was on one such day - on August 6, as the church remembers - that Jesus took his closest disciples, Peter, James, and John, and led them up the side of "a high mountain." It is Mt. Tabor that claims this honor.

Perhaps the three were used to being taken aside for private conferences. But they weren't prepared for what happened next.

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[Morning Meditations, CSLewis Oxbridge Conference, Summer 2005]

"We Will Be Like Him" (I John 3:2)

England can be delightful in early August, when the mornings are cool and the afternoons bright. At home, on America's mid-Atlantic coast, it's so hot and gummy that the dogs are sticking to the sidewalks. This is one of those rare patches of year when Americans might like to come to England for the weather.

Yet in the Holy Land it's hotter still, as any pilgrim can tell you. This year's Oxbridge conference concludes on the feast of the Transfiguration, that event which arises from the most somnolent point of summer, when August is a still lake of heat.

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