Christian Realism

Relevant Magazine has an article that asks the question, “Can Horror Be Used For Good?” The focus of the article is Scott Derrickson, director of The Exorcism of Emily Rose and the upcoming film adaptation of Paradise Lost.

??????

“I love the horror genre for how cinematic it is,” Derrickson says. “I gravitated, I think initially, toward the horror genre because, of all the genres, I think it is the genre that is most friendly to the subject matter of faith and belief in religion. The more frightening and sort of dark and oppressive a movie is, the more free you are to explore the supernatural and explore faith.”

Much of this territory has been covered before (like here, and here), but there is some discussion of Derrickson’s work on Hellraiser V: Inferno, and the inspiration he took from C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters. The article ends with a statement that is dead-on with our Christian Realist idea:

[I]f our God is capable of using anything and anyone for His will, maybe it’s not too much to suggest that God can use horror films for His glory, too.

It was kind of neat to see two seminaries are now part of the iTunesU family.

• Reformed Theological Seminary
  and
• Concordia Seminary

In addition, Gordon College has iTunesU, including interviews from their latest Christians in the Visual Arts workshop.

Now you can listen to lectures on the Puritans, or C.S. Lewis, or even a 380-episode podcast on elementary Greek. Even though my employer has been on the iTunesU bandwagon for a while now, it is pretty cool to see some good faith-oriented resources available.

Nod to J. Mark Bertrand.

Touchstone Magazine is a source of many things interesting and good. The September 2007 issue has an article called Writers Cramped, Three Things Evangelical Authors Can Learn from Flannery O’Connor, which has popped up on a few blogs.

Why aren’t Christian writing great literature?

Christian writers are falling into the trap of simply dressing up and repeating their own beliefs, rather than using those beliefs to inform their exploration of the world and human behavior.

Which pointed to:

How literary are evangelicals?

As I glance at IVP’s list of authors, I see quite a diversity - Anglicans . . . Baptists . . . Methodists . . . Presbyterians . . . Anabaptists . . . megachurches . . . Of course, none of these are “literary” writers in the vein of a Flannery O’Connor. So why don’t contemporary evangelicals tend to produce literary works? Are we too concerned about efficacy of evangelistic message and clarity of doctrine to bother with the mysteries of art and literature?

And the article in Touchstone:

Writers Cramped

“Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.”

If we as Christians believe that creativity and imagination is a gift from God, why have we neglected it for so many years?

An article on forbes.com about the changing relationship between evangelical Christianity and the arts. The author automatically gets +10 points for mentioning Hans Rookmaaker.

http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/07/26/ap3956405.html

I’m reading a review copy of Jeff Overstreet’s new book, Through a Screen Darkly and just came across this gem of a quote:

I have received many letters from parents concerned that fantasy films will lure children to dabble in the occult. One who read my review of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets was incensed at my suggestion that a story about a boy wizard could be worthwhile. She said, “If you think anything meaningful can be conveyed by pagan mythology, you’ve just opened Pandora’s box!”

Priceless. The book is due out early February from Regal. My review will appear in Infuzemag.com.

LONDON (Reuters) - One of Britain’s most prestigious art galleries put
a block of slate on display, topped by a small piece of wood, in the
mistaken belief it was a work of art.

The Royal Academy included the chunk of stone and the small bone-shaped
wooden stick in its summer exhibition in London.

But the slate was actually a plinth — a slab on which a pedestal is
placed — and the stick was designed to prop up a sculpture. The
sculpture itself — of a human head — was nowhere to be seen.
… more here.

Tired of the same old boring “This page intentionally blank” at the
bottom of a page? Here are some alternatives:

The relative blankness of this page in no way diminishes its
usefulness in the report.

Blank page prevention words.

With these words, this page is no longer blank, but is complete.

This sentence lets you know this page was not a mistake.

This almost blank page was intentional.

This page intentionally left unblank.

Despite these words, this page is blank.

The Masters of Documentation have determined that this otherwise blank
page serves our inscrutable purpose, a purpose that we choose not to
share with you lest conveying this arcane wisdom cause severe mental
trauma (at best), or (at worst) cause your tiny grey matter to swell and pop like a
corpulent tick.

Move along. These spaces are not the words you are looking for.

Our own Matthew Winslow has an e-mail .sig line that goes something like this:

Calls for subversion are fundamentally off-base,
because they don’t produce the dangerous stuff.
They produce what the ‘cutting edge’ fondly
imagines subverts the beliefs of the little old
lady in a small town, so the readers can read it
and feel smugly morally superior to her.
–Mary Catelli

That led to him posting the link to this essay by Tom Simon’s blog.

Following are my initial comments to the Simon essay:

That’s a long, rambling essay, but, wow.

I liked the bit where he said that if subversion is digging a hole underneath something so that it finally falls apart under its own weight. However, in a culture of subversion, once something has fallen, how do you continue to be subversive? If you have dug a hole and your target has fallen, continuing to be subversive simply means digging a bigger hole, which seems destructive and silly.

No, the answer is that the radical thing to do then is construction, building something fresh to take the place of the thing that fell.

He coins a word for this, “superversive”:
“In such a state, there is only one way to make a difference. You cannot subvert ruins; but you can build right over top of them. If to subvert is to destroy a thing from below, might we not coin an opposite word? We could destroy a state of ruin from above, and, as I like to say, supervert it. Where people have abandoned their standards, we could suggest new ones (or reintroduce whatever was good and useful in the old). Where institutions have been abolished, we could institute others to do their work. Above all, we could instil the ideas of creation and structure and discipline into human minds and hearts, and especially the hearts of the young.”

The author goes on to laud the benefits of imagination in the face of subversion, and that’s where we come in. When we employ what I’ll call sanctified imagination, we can be superversive, building up where our humanistic sci-fi peers have been tearing down (Timothy Zahn does this in _Angelmass_), and tearing down where our humanistic sci-fi peers have been building up (humanistic sci-fi types love to write about mankind becomes gods - we should deflate that and write about mankind coming to accept the genuine article).

This is a fascinating topic, and is worth some good, hard thought.