Reblog: ‘Holy Saturday: “A Great Silence Over the Earth”’

Holy Saturday: ‘A Great Silence Over the Earth’

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The Need for Simplicity — My Last Words on Season One of ‘Severance’ (NO SPOILERS)

Note: This is the third and final post in a series. For parts one and two (featured in reverse order), please click here.

I promise this is the last one. One of these days I hope to get back to one-and-done commentaries. Recent years have found me having too much to say.

So we’ve talked about Severance in terms of how it showcases the complexity of the human mind and the limits of informed consent. Now let’s deal with the question of why people choose the severance procedure in the first place.

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Thoughts on ‘Beast’ and ‘Cocaine Bear’ — Part One (No Spoilers)

Well it’s been quite some time — over ten years, in fact — since I did a “combo piece” covering multiple movies at once; readers who care to read the other one can check out my five-part commentary Wolves and Whales.

In the past nine months we’ve seen two films about apex predators going rogue: Baltasar Kormákur’s Beast and Elizabeth Banks’ Cocaine Bear. The first is a drama, the second a dark comedy; the first features a lion, the second (obviously) a bear; the animal is the antagonist in the first film, and the protagonist in the second (Banks said she felt strongly about making the bear the film’s hero); the first involves a small, tight-knit cast, the second an ensemble; the first is a work of fiction, the second inspired by true events (though it takes many and obvious creative liberties).

Yet both films have two things in common: the title beasts wreak carnage, and human activity is to blame.

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‘Stranger Things 4’ — The Desire for Greatness, and Justice, and Perceived Good

NOTE: This is the seventh and final installment of a series. For parts one through six (listed in reverse order top to bottom), click here.

Whew! Sorry that took so long. A number of things have intervened since I published part six: the holidays, my concern for timeliness in publishing my thoughts on the late Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, etc.

For this final installment of my Stranger Things Season 4 commentary, I wish to circle back to the topic with which I began: teendom. ST4 mirrors contemporary reality in its honest look at teen isolation and angst; at the same time, the show’s young protagonists reflect an interesting, and promising, trend coinciding with the more negative one we’ve been exploring. Now is an opportune moment to turn to this.

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Some Thoughts on the Late Queen

Well a couple of my relations went to England for the first time about a month ago.

They just made it. Unlike myself, they can say they that they set foot in the England of Queen Elizabeth II.

I thought I’d spend some time reflecting on the late queen and the institution she represented — which, like it or not, still claims the interest of Western minds and hearts.

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Babies, Christmas, and the ’Use-less’

Well it’s common to feel sorry for people who were born on Christmas. Birthday and Christmas being the year’s two big ”present days,” the idea of having them on the same day strikes one as doubly undesirable for involving a longer wait time (“gift-getting day” being only once a year) and being sooner finished.

But Christmas and babies do go well together, and not just because of pictures of cute little babies in Santa hats.

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Hallmark Movies: They’re Not All That Bad

It’s kind of amazing how big the corner of one’s eye can be.

The Hallmark Channel is running its annual Christmas movie marathons. While I cannot claim a place in the ranks of Hallmark fandom, I have had ample opportunities to catch fragments of these movies while others are watching them — you guessed it, out of the corner of my eye.

I’d like to share a few thoughts, for what they’re worth.

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Macro vs. Micro, Part 3: Tribalism, and Final Musings

NOTE: This is the third, and final, part in a series. For parts one and two, which appear in reverse order top to bottom, click here.

Yes, I know…I skipped two weeks. Guess I thought everyone could use a break for Thanksgiving, and then last week I was just unprepared. Mea culpa.

We looked at the implications of the Noah and Nimrod stories for a Biblical stance against excessive globalism. Do we see the other extreme — to wit, the tendency toward tribalism — anywhere in Scripture?

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Quote of the Day, 8/20/14

I am so, so sorry — last week I missed the post because of Thanksgiving (figured others would also be busy with merriment anyway), and part three of my current series is still unready. Will work on that for next week. Until then, enjoy a quote from the great C.S. Lewis on the human desire for God…

Into the Dance

We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience.  We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it … Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past.  But … (i)f Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering.  The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing.

-C.S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory”

 

Image from Wikipedia

 

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Macro vs. Micro, Part 2: Towers and Floods

NOTE: This is a follow-up to Macro vs. Micro — Is Society Too Big or Too ‘Clique-y’?

Okay…assuming that you have read part one — which dealt with the extremes of over-globalization and unhealthy tribalisms, and their tension, in our world today — you are ready to take the next step with me.

Let me be clear that I am no Bible scholar. Nor am I a theologian. I am not a priest or a Sunday school teacher either. I am a simple Catholic layman. But I have been studying my faith on my own for nearly a decade and a half, so I’ll try using my share of the sensus fidei to explore how the timeless Word might be able to help us make sense of this timely topic.

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