[Most Recent Entries] [Calendar View] [Friends]
Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
thecosmicdance's InsaneJournal:
| Tuesday, September 16th, 2008 | |
| 7:51 pm | Why Context Really Is Important After All There’s a line in the NT when Jesus tells his followers “the poor will always be with you.” Many Christian denominations and individual leaders have spent an awful lot of time trying to figure out just what he meant by “the poor will always be with you”. I am not about to start claiming that I’ve discovered something no one else ever has but it might help if they remembered the line that comes after “the poor will always be with you.” The next part is basically “but I won’t be here much longer.” People concentrate so much on the first part that they forget what story that verse actually comes from. It’s from the story in which Mary Magdalene smashes that jar of perfume and uses it to annoint Jesus’s feet. The disciples were upset because they thought she could have sold the perfume and used the profits to help the poor. So Jesus dismisses that with “the poor will always be with you.” The focus of the story is not the poor, or what we should do with the poor or why they will always be with us. That's important to discuss, sure, but the Bible gives us many other opportunities to do so. By obsessing over what that one line means, you’re kind of ignoring the whole point of the scene. In context that line is about Jesus saying “look, forget about the poor for a second, something amazing is happening and I need you to be watching.” You can debate about what the amazing thing was that was happening. Was MM performing an ancient, sacred ritual designed to formally announce Jesus as their king? Or was she symbolically annointing him prior to his death? Or was it important because she was a worldly sinner who is so overwhelmed by her religious experience that she smashes her most prized possession? Did she know why she did it, or was it just a coincidence? All of those questions are more important here than "why did he say the poor would always be with us?" |
| Thursday, September 11th, 2008 | |
| 10:57 am | Maybe non religious people get annoyed by Christians acting like they own Narnia. Because there are lots of Christians who keep using the stories to try and push their beliefs, in ways that I’m betting would have driven the original author absolutely nuts (it didn’t work on him, after all). They’re pushing Narnia as a “witnessing tool” so much that they’ve forgotten Narnia doesn’t need their help. I mean, if the books are a metaphorical, child sized version of the author’s personal testimony, you might want to pause and take a look at how belief in Aslan and Narnia is handled in the books. The more you push, the more annoyed people get and the less likely they are to want to keep enjoying a series that so many obnoxious people are big fans of. One of the secrets to the popularity of this series with children is the narrator’s voice, I think. It has a very “this is just between you and me” vibe. The books were a conversation between me and the author, not me, the author and five grownups standing behind me telling me how to interpret things. So maybe it doesn’t matter if people are getting things “wrong”. |
| Tuesday, September 9th, 2008 | |
| 11:23 pm | So there’s been a couple discussions about the Banned Books list. I saw A Wrinkle in Time listed there. And I remembered, well, A Wrinkle in Time. Aside from being strictly sci fi, which I'm not into writing, it’s very close to the sort of thing I meant when I tried to describe my story idea. It’s basically the American Narnia. People often forget that, and the Christian community never, ever gives it as much attention as C.S Lewis gets (he’s a “one of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century”, she gets- “isn’t she that woman who wrote those books? Yeah, I heard she was a Christian”. Maybe if she was a guy they’d be all over it more, but then, nobody ever talks about Terry Brooks* either). No, they don’t deal with American mythology per se but they do deal with a lot of the fears and issues Americans had during the era it was written in, and those just happen to be things that are still relevant, and perhaps always were, to Americans. It even has a weird kind of actual connection to Narnia. Apparently, the man who ghost wrote part of the Lewis stories that were posthumously "discovered" and published was a WiT fan too. According to The C.S Lewis Hoax, one of these stories bears an intriguing resemblance in places, to WiT. And by that I mean, it sounds like Lewis was copying her. But that isn’t possible, because it was published after his death. So either 1) L’Engle showed an early draft to Lewis, who then either accidentally or totally shamelessly, stole it, even though everyone is pretty sure this could never have happened. 2) Lewis showed an early draft to L’Engle, who then either accidentally or totally shamelessly, stole it even though everyone is pretty sure this could never have happened. 3) Someone who was a fan of both and wanted to publish work under Lewis’s name but had no originality, copied off other sf/f authors they also liked, to fill in the holes of some drafts they’d found. **Brooks pings my Christiandar quite a bit. First, his Word/Void series is built on a magical concept that sounds based on a Bibleverse (“In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God” John 1:1 and “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep” Genesis 1:2). And second, his heroine who is between the ages of 14 and her early twenties, attends church voluntarily every Sunday. Who does that? I don’t even do that. Not only that, but she bakes for church bake sales, and goes Christmas caroling with the youth group. She does this, as I’ve said, voluntarily. There's a reason why most churches don't have much in the way of services for college age/twenty something people-that age group doesn't go to church unless they are very devout. Nest Freemark going Christmas Caroling with the youth group is a plot point in Angel Fire East. In the final book, the villains attempt to get to her through her church. Brooks also seems familiar with the inner workings and set up of a typical small town Congregational church in the US, using terms that only a regular church attendee would know. Unless they’d done specific research and who would bother? Authors never research mainline Christianity. Catholics get researched all the time, and people will research evangelicals just to figure out WTF is wrong with them, but Congregationalists? Never. I also remember having a discussion with someone about how Brook’s social politics and philosophy is the mirror opposite of Terry Goodkind’s uber Ayn Randian worldview. I haven't read all his stuff, so don't go around quoting me on this. I should cover both series more thoroughly some time when I'm not obsessing over other stuff. |
| 4:07 pm | |
| Sunday, September 7th, 2008 | |
| 2:44 pm | No Narnia right now, it's Firefly time! She pulls out some more pages as Book tries to stop her. Book tells her that you don't "fix" the Bible. River repeats that it's "broken." It doesn't make sense. Book explains that "it's not about making sense. It's about believing in something, and letting that belief be real enough to change your life. It's about faith. You don't fix faith. Faith fixes you." Wow, he's the most unconvincing preacher I've ever heard. ( Yes, actually. I agree with the recapper. ) |
| Friday, August 29th, 2008 | |
| 8:24 pm | |
| Monday, August 25th, 2008 | |
| 8:22 pm | Mabfan's post on evolution. I usually like his opinions on how science can work alongside faith because so many Sci Fi authors are so...not like that. But he said " it annoys me when creationists refuse to accept the idea that someone could both accept the fact of evolution and be a religious person." And I got sidetracked from other stuff I have to do because I have to respond. Even if I'm probably going to run away from any sort of debate. ( Here I go ) |
| Friday, August 15th, 2008 | |
| 7:09 pm | This generator mixes up phrases from your LJ. Some are nonsensical, others are funny taken out of context and mixed up, while others make perfect sense aside from the fact that I never technically wrote them. http://hewgill.com/cgi-bin/ljmarkov.p ( Crack!Theology ) |
| Monday, July 21st, 2008 | |
| 2:22 am | Because I am not sleeping ( More on gender issues in Narnia ) |
| Monday, July 14th, 2008 | |
| 1:33 am | |
| Saturday, July 12th, 2008 | |
| 12:35 am | The Last Battle pt11 ( Dignified Lion versus Screeching Bird Thing ) |
| Friday, July 11th, 2008 | |
| 12:20 am | The Last Battle pt 10 ( She Saved the World. A Lot pt2 : Girls, Battles and Belief ) |
| Thursday, July 10th, 2008 | |
| 4:18 pm | the Last Battle pt9 I would agree that C.S Lewis had some…issues. Every author does and the majority of them are flawed people in their personal lives. But it's unfair to flip out and overreact to every percieved instance of sexism in books that are hardly worse about gender relations than a lot of their contemporaries. I'm not under the delusion that he's some great feminist, but I can definitely say I've seen much, much worse. Like the last season of Angel. Perhaps I own some special edited versions of the books, where all the Horribly Offensive Stuff has been removed? Lewis has a chatty, conversational style, at least in these books. And while this means you feel as if he’s confiding in you personally, it also means people tend to feel like he’s personally approving or disapproving of their lives- the favorite uncle telling you wonderful stories by the fireside is someone you do not want to feel like you've let down and you feel betrayed when it turns out he's not perfect. They get very upset if his opinions on something are different from theirs- much more so than they do when they disagree with JKR or Terry Pratchett or Stephen King. And sometimes they overreact when they think he is making judgments about them, and start yelling before even considering that there might be something more to it or that they are taking things too literally or looking at it from the wrong angle. Everyone comes to a book with filters on based on their own life experiences, and sometimes we take these basic sets of meanings and try to plug them into every book whether it works in that book’s universe or not. Even if answers to questions asked are contained in parts of canon we haven’t bothered to read. But this is not a post about why Jadis is no misunderstood feminist icon. It is, however, a bit of an UnPopular Fannish Opinion I'm about to express. And I'm probably going to regret it. This one's a two parter, folks. ( She Saved the World. A Lot : Girls, Battles and Belief ) |
| Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 | |
| 10:16 pm | The Last Battle pt7 ( Are We the Waiting? :The Friends of Narnia ) |
| Tuesday, July 8th, 2008 | |
| 10:58 pm | The Last Battle pt 6 ( The Rapture of the Rapture...or not... ) |
| 7:09 pm | The Last Battle pt 5 ( The Last Generation pt 2: If They Want a Fight, Can't Someone Else Give It To Them? ) Current Music: Bonnie Tyler I Need a Hero |
| Monday, July 7th, 2008 | |
| 6:33 pm | |
| Sunday, July 6th, 2008 | |
| 11:43 am | the Last Battle pt3 ( Clever Cut Text Involving a Joke About Dwarves ) |
| 11:02 am | Last Battle pt2 ( Istanbul Was Constantinople: The Calormene ) |
| Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 | |
| 8:17 pm | The Last Battle pt1 The first line in the last book says “In the last days of Narnia” so it’s very clear that this is, in no uncertain terms, The End. I have a love/hate relationship with this book. It’s well done, except where it isn’t. It’s awesome, except where it sucks. And if you grew up in the world I grew up in, the entire plot has an extra level of scary attached. To make it easiest on myself, I’ll be tackling this book in entries split up by character, group of characters, or theme. ( Shift the Ape: Brother Hate’s Traveling Damnation Show ) Current Mood: achy |