“Forrest Gump (1994) and its predecessor Being There (1979) are both popular movies that communicate the idea of a chance world in which events occur without purpose. The use of mentally challenged men in both films is a metaphor for chance itself. They have no ‘intelligent design’ to their lives and yet both of them …
History is Organic
“We must also recover a doctrine of generations. Our children grow. They do not grow up in a detached way, as though the twig were unrelated to the branch, which in turn is unrelated to the tree. Our children are not interchangeable ball bearings, able to be placed in different machines across the world; they …
Subversiveness Is Bad?
“When a kid watches the animated movie Shrek, he probably doesn’t know about Carl Jung’s theories of psychological types and the collective unconscious, but he is ingesting them nonetheless through those characters and that story adapted after the Jungian model . . . The screenwriters admit Shrek’s Jungian ideas: ‘The book is very clever, because …
The History of the Church Is the Center of World History
“In the providence of God, the kingdom of God was preached in the Greco-Roman world, and Christianity spread, for the most part, north and west. The direction of this movement has changed recently but only in the last century or so. Now the kingdom of God is not to be identified with Western culture, but …
Stories As Preachers
“Movies are finally, centrally, crucially, primarily, only about story. And those stories are finally, centrally, crucially, primarily, mostly about redemption.” (Brian Godawa, Hollywood Worldviews, p. 54).
Keeping An Edge On Our Kitchen Knives
“At this point, all Christian educators must know that clear thinking is a moral issue. Blurry thinking is one of the great sins of the age. To teach the dialectical stage without a constant grounding in the ethical absolutes of Scripture is worse than folly. Learning to distinguish rightly, learning to evaluate, is the meaning …
There Are Slugs On the Bottom of the Salad Too
“Two of the most frustrating replies to hear when asking people what they thought of a movie are ‘I liked it’ or ‘I didn’t like it,’ accompanied by an inability to explain why . . . We have already established that stories do not exist in a vacuum of meaninglessness. Movies communicate prevailing myths and …
Canaries and the Canadian Moose
“At the same time, we are not required to believe the opposite of whatever any unbeliever discovers. Through common grace, many unbelievers have noticed that the sky is blue and that canaries are yellow. This is fine, and faithfulness does not require any hot denials from us. However, the fact that unbelievers think that the …
No Neutrality On the Screen
“Every story is informed by a worldview. And so every movie, being a dramatic story, is also informed by a worldview. There is no such thing as a neutral story in which events and characters are presented objectively apart from interpretation” (Brian Godawa, Hollywood Worldviews, p. 25).
Dullardry, That”s It
“Polish without substance is sophistry. Substance without polish is . . . well, actually we don’t know what it is because nobody pays attention to it” (The Case for Classical Christian Education, p. 133).