The Archie Bunker Effect; or, The Main Mistake Christians Make when Engaging with the World

I grew up watching All in the Family. (Yes, I'm that old.)

All in the Family was an American sitcom that aired in the 1970s. It revolved around the Bunker family: Archie, the loudmouthed, bigoted father; Edith, his dimwitted but goodhearted wife; Gloria, his married daughter; and Michael, Gloria's opinionated, liberal husband. Michael and Gloria lived with Archie and Edith because Michael was in college and unemployed. In the close quarters, Archie and Michael frequently squared off regarding controversial political and social topics.

That was the point of the show. All in the Family was the liberal Norman Lear's vehicle for propagating his views. While Michael was mocked as "Meathead" by Archie, he was actually the mouthpiece for Lear's progressive social and political views. The staging and the dialogue were brilliant. Archie would usually "win" his arguments, but only because he was so stubborn that he would come up with ridiculous rationalizations that no one but he could possibly find convincing. Michael would give up in frustration over Archie's obtuseness, only to fight again another day.

James Franco's Film Adaptation of As I Lay Dying

James Franco's film adaptation of William Faulkner's novel As I Lay Dying is both wonderful and frustrating. Wonderful because it succeeds in capturing the atmosphere of Faulkner's novel so well; frustrating because of the aspects that didn't work, and didn't have to fail.

As I Lay Dying has been thought to be unfilmable because of the central narrative device of using various points of view to tell the story. Fifteen characters narrate a total of 59 chapters, and the book's power lies largely in seeing how different characters view the same events, how each person's hidden perspective and agenda shapes his or her view of the events they are describing.

Charlie Peacock at Trinity House

About a week ago, Cecile and I were invited to see Charlie Peacock at Trinity House Theatre. I'd been there once before, to see a production of T.S. Eliot's "The Cocktail Party," but had forgotten how small and intimate the setting was.

It was a really, really wonderful evening. Charlie has been moving toward piano jazz in his songwriting, and my own musical tastes have moved in that direction. Plus, his lyrics are real and honest, dealing with the realities of life from a Christian perspective, rather than being simply vehicles for worship or evangelism. He did new music as well as reinterpretations of some of his old songs. At any rate, someone recorded a bit of the concert and uploaded the recordings to YouTube. Charlie emailed those of us who signed up for his mailing list and linked to the videos, so evidently he's okay with them being up there. So here they are, for you to get a taste of what the night was like:

In the Light:

Down in the Lowlands

More of Charlie's new music may be found at his MySpace Music Page.

Many thanks to the generosity of Bob and Ideal Systems for the invitation to the concert.

See You Later, Larry

Larry Norman died early last Sunday morning. He's been ill for a long time, and the news of his passing is no surprise. I think I'm saddest mostly because if I hadn't happened to be browsing the iMonk, I wouldn't have known. I wonder how long it would have taken to find out. It pains me to think of how much he meant to so many, and how little he is known now.

Larry virtually single-handedly invented what he called "Jesus music," which later morphed into "Christian rock" and then "Contemporary Christian music," in the late '60s and early '70s. His aim was to reach out to a disaffected generation in terms that they would understand, without worrying about whether those terms would be acceptable to established believers. They weren't. Norman's music was banned from Christian bookstores and vilified from pulpits. He was thought to be trying to bring the devil into the Church, when what he was doing was trying to bring Jesus into the world.

He chose a hard road. He could have soft-pedaled his message and sought acceptance in the secular recording industry. His talent was easily among the greatest of his generation, not merely among Christian artists. In Another Land, the final recording of the "Trilogy" that began with Only Visiting This Planet, deserves a place among the great recordings of the 1970s, containing everything from driving rock to blues to lush orchestral pieces, and even a piano jazz song ("The Sun Began to Rain"). Yet Larry had ongoing struggles with his record companies from the time that Capital Records censored the intended title of his album with the band People!: "We Need a Whole Lot More of Jesus (And a Lot Less Rock and Roll)."

Or Larry could have soft-pedaled his music to seek acceptance within the church. His label, Solid Rock Records, had produced many of the early Jesus Music pioneers: Randy Stonehill, Tom Howard, Mark Heard, Daniel Amos (psst--that last is a band, not a person). And the venture fell apart, partly due to Larry's disappointment that this younger generation of artists were becoming complaisant in the Christian world, refusing to play to secular venues on the one hand, and neglecting to give the gospel in confrontational terms in between songs. Larry simply wasn't content to lapse into Christian celebrity, and so he kept to an iconoclastic path, one that left him in relative obscurity (apart from the following he had made in his early days) and relative poverty.

Larry's music, and that of other Jesus Music pioneers, was a tremendous influence on me in my youth. I am saddened by our loss, but glad to know that he is finally in the presence of our Lord. I look forward to the day when I'm there, too. It'll be nice to meet him.

Gilmore Girls, RIP

The best-written show in a very long time has passed, not with a bang, but with a sigh. Gilmore Girls never got great ratings, and was probably dismissed by most men as a “chick show,” scheduled as it was against the testosterone-driven 24. Nonetheless, the quick wit, fast-paced dialogue, avalanches of pop-cultural references, and heart of the show should have appealed to men and women alike.

The basic story was about a mother and daughter who are best friends, Lorelai and Rory Gilmore. Having given birth to Rory at the age of sixteen, Lorelai had run away from her upper-crust parents' home to make a life for herself and her daughter in the small, quirky town of Stars Hollow. As the show began, Rory was now fifteen and obviously an intellectual prodigy with ambitions of becoming a journalist. Lorelai knows that for Rory to realize her ambitions and potential, she needs to go to the best schools, so she reluctantly crawls back to her parents to borrow the money for Rory's tuition to Chilton, an exclusive private school. The parents, Richard and Emily Gilmore, agree to loan her the money, on condition that Lorelai and Rory begin having Friday night dinners with them--they want to reestablish a relationship with their granddaughter, and be able to exert some "influence" (read "control") over her future.

So there's tension in the relationship between Lorelai and her parents, tension between the down-to-earth Rory and her new prep school environment (and her continuing relationship with friends from Stars Hollow), and tension caused by both Lorelai and Rory dipping their toes into the dating waters at the same time. Lorelai had a few different relationships, including one with Christopher, Rory's charming but undependable father, all the while avoiding her real attraction to the local diner owner, Luke. Rory falls for a nice guy, Dean, but then leaves him for Luke's much more edgy nephew Jess. Description doesn't do the show justice; it was the sharp-edged wit that made it work. That and Lorelai's character, played inimitably by Lauren Graham: having been thrust into adult responsibilities at an early age, Lorelai is emotionally the peer, or even the junior, of her own daughter. A charming veneer of clever verbal repartee covered a heart of pain and fear--primarily, the fear that she may have missed the chance for a lasting romantic relationship forever.

Eventually, the show changed. During Rory's final year at Chilton, she gave up her lifelong dream to go to Harvard in order to attend Richard's alma mater, Yale, doubtless to keep her in closer proximity to the other principals in the show. It didn't really work; the show about a mother-daughter best-friendship struggled with trying to put its two principals on the same set at the same time. It became two parallel stories, not a single complex intertwined one. Plotlines were invented to accommodate the exit of supporting cast members. Other plotlines worked better in anticipation than in execution: for instance, Rory's friend Lane was originally an extremely hip music afficionado whose ambition was to be in a band; once the dream was achieved, though, the band was just silly, sporting a thirtysomething (fortysomething?) front man who looked like a David Lee Roth wannabee, and touring Seventh-Day Adventist churches under the direction of Lane's mother, the stereotypical religious zealot whom Lane has been trying to get out from under all her life. And Rory, heretofore driven by ambition and a love for learning, dropped out of college for no particular reason other than getting involved with a slacker rich kid boyfriend, evidently because college life didn't provide any interesting plot lines to develop. Even when she returned, the focus was more on her out-of-nowhere promotion to editor of the Yale Daily News; evidently Yale doesn't require the taking of any actual classes.

But the major cause of plot gridlock in the show's later years was the unwillingness of the show's creators and writers, primarily Amy Sherman-Palladino and her husband Daniel Palladino, to allow Lorelai to move forward in her emotional and relational development. In the fifth season, the relationship that everyone was waiting for between Lorelai and Luke finally materialized and culminated in a proposal of marriage; however, in the sixth season, the writers invented a long-lost daughter for Luke, eventually spoiling the wedding plans and ending in a breakoff of their engagement. Wanting to avoid the mistakes of Moonlighting and Cheers, the writers didn't want to lose the romantic tension by putting the principals together; they didn't notice that the romantic tension had already dissipated because of the increasingly artificial plot devices to keep them apart.

In the final season, the Palladinos left the show over contract disputes and their heir apparent, David Rosenthal, became the primary writer and showrunner. Rosenthal developed the relationship between Lorelai and Rory's father Christopher, culminating in a quickie marriage in Paris which Lorelai immediately regretted. Fans faulted Rosenthal for losing the pace of the Palladino-led show; in reality, much of that had already been lost in the angst-ridden sixth season. Rosenthal obviously wanted to explore what a marriage to Christopher would have meant (something the show had hinted at throughout its run), while reestablishing Lorelai and Luke's relationship. Unfortunately, this meant rendering Lorelai and Christopher's marriage vows meaningless. I had always wanted to see Lorelai and Luke end up married, but once married to Christopher, that should have meant something.

Anyway, the final episode was charming and fitting. Rory, who had (incomprehensibly) been moping around about What To Do After College, regained her lifelong ambition to pursue journalism and got an opportunity to cover Barak Obama's campaign. The town, led by Luke, engineered a surprise party as a send-off (overruling objections by Taylor, the heavy-handed mayor of Stars Hollow). Lorelai is busy being supportive while covering her grief at her daughter moving into full adulthood without her--a characteristic "roller coaster tour" that Lorelai and Rory were planning during the summer after her graduation will have to be put off, and we understand that it's never going to happen. Richard Gilmore finally acknowledges that Lorelai has done a good job with her daughter, and comes perilously close to asking forgiveness for the rigid disapproval that had pushed Lorelai into having to do it on her own in the first place. Meanwhile, Emily is busily plotting subterfuges to keep a relationship with Lorelai alive, now that all obligation regarding Rory is discharged; Lorelai graciously offers to keep the Friday night dinner tradition going. And, Christopher having disappeared several episodes earlier, Lorelai kisses Luke, suggesting that their relationship will be reestablished. But the show ends just as the pilot episode had ended, with Lorelai and Rory sitting in Luke's diner, mother and daughter and dear, dear friends. It was a fitting end.


Technorati Tags: Gilmore Girls, Amy Sherman-Palladino, David Rosenthal, Lauren Graham, television, TV

Brouhaha Over the Jesus Family Tomb

If you read Christian blogs at all, it would be hard to miss this year's version of the Lenten tradition of debunking some radical new theory or "discovery" that purports to invalidate the historic claims of Christianity. The current entry is a Discovery Channel special on the Talpiot tomb in Jerusalem, which the special argues is the "lost tomb of Jesus." There will also be a book by Simcha Jacobovici and Charles Pellegrino entitled The Jesus Family Tomb: The Discovery, the Investigation, and the Evidence That Could Change History. So the usual suspects are giving us the typical full-court publicity press timed to exploit the Christian practice of reflecting on Jesus' crucifixion and celebration of his resurrection.

Articles opposing the special and the book have been written by many; some of the most helpful have been those by Ben Witherington (including an interesting and detailed comment on statistical analysis) and Nathan Busenitz at Pulpit Magazine. The basic argument that these and other Christians are making is that the names on the ossuaries in the tomb are common, and therefore should not necessarily be identified with the figures in the New Testament who bear those names, and also that the statistical analysis used by Cameron, Jacobovici, and Pellegrino--to the effect that the cluster of names is highly unlikely to refer to anyone other than the family of Jesus--is flawed and skewed to produce a predetermined outcome. I think that this type of evidential apologetic has its value, but I also think that in a significant sense it misses the point.

Dr. Witherington and Mr. Busenitz do not oppose the identification of the Talpiot tomb as Jesus' tomb because they've conducted a dispassionate statistical analysis and found the idea without merit. Rather they believe, as do I, that Jesus was physically raised from the dead, and therefore his body is not to be found in any tomb. That belief means that we have an a priori commitment to reject any purported evidence to the contrary, and we may as well admit it. This doesn't mean that critical assessment of these annual theories, always timed to exploit the season just prior to Easter, is incorrect or without value. But in responding point-by-point to the charges and slogging it out in the world of statistics, we end up lending credence to the charge and actually helping to publicize it. There must be something to it if we're this worked up about it, right?

Like I said, I'm divided on the issue. Of course, someone does need to respond to these theories, for the sake of those who may be led astray by them. It's worthwhile to demonstrate that even if you don't assume Jesus' resurrection, the claims being made are without merit. Amos Kloner, the archaeologist who oversaw the excavation of the tomb in 1980, told the Jerusalem Post, "It’s impossible. It’s nonsense.” At the same time, I think that scurrying to preemptively answer charges sends the wrong signal. Alongside the evidential apologetic, I think we need a bit of a presuppositional mindset as well. God's truth hasn't been suppressed for two millenia. It's not going to happen now. There's something to be said about standing above the fray and simply being the witness that the world needs to see. 

Technorati Tags: Jesus Tomb, Jesus Family Tomb, Lost Tomb of Jesus, Jesus, Jesus Christ, Christianity, Resurrection, Discovery Channel Special, Talpiot Tomb, James Cameron, Simcha Jacobovici, Charles Pellegrino, Ben Witherington, Pulpit Magazine, Nathan Busenitz, Amos Kloner

Groundhog Day is Today

Republished without picture, since ImageShack decided to yank my access. No new content.

So put your little hand in mine
There ain't no hill or mountain we can't climb
     -- Sonny and Cher

If you haven't ever seen Bill Murray's movie, Groundhog Day, you really should check it out. The movie is based on a simple premise: a self-centered, shallow weatherman (Murray) finds himself repeating the same day over and over. It recounts how he first disbelieves and resists his situation, then decides to exploit it, tries repeatedly to kill himself (only to wake up the following morning), falls in love with his producer (Andie MacDowell) and tries to exploit the situation to win her, and finally becomes aware of the needs of the people around him, choosing to use this eternally-recurring day to serve others and improve himself.

I've long enjoyed the movie; it's Murray at his best, both funny and poignant. The central idea is irresistible, and much of the fun of the movie is watching the same scene setup play itself out in a myriad of different ways, based on Murray's character Phil Connors trying out all sorts of different responses to the situations that repeatedly confront him. Once the movie has established the basic setup, we often see the same scene repeated a number of times in a row, as when Connors uses information gleaned from a previous day--say, a woman's high school or favorite drink--to his advantage on a subsequent day. Or sometimes, the same type of thing happens in different settings (the slapping montage is the most priceless example).

But the movie makes its turn when Connors sees the needs of the people around him. A child falls out of a tree; a group of women are stranded with a flat tire; a man in a restaurant chokes on some steak; a homeless man dies. Connors begins setting for himself a set of "chores"; things that he does for people every day, despite the fact that when he wakes up again, the same needs will exist again, and the people he's helped won't even remember that he has done so. Besides this, he also does things, like taking piano lessons, to better himself in a personal way. As he does so, he earns what he could not gain by manipulation: the admiration--and the beginnings of love--from MacDowell's character.

What struck me the last time I saw this movie was how it really played as a parable of our own lives. To be sure, we are not caught in a time loop during which we are literally repeating the same day over and over. But for most of us, life settles into a routine. We go to work, we come home, we frequent various places for amusement, we travel the same routes, we see the same people. The real question for each one of us as human beings is, what are we doing with that routine? How aware are we of the people that cross our paths every day? What kind of people are we making ourselves into? What influence are we having on others?

It's all-too-easy to find ourselves mindlessly repeating the same pattern, hoping for some Big Thing to get us out of our rut and make a change in our lives. It's tempting to think of ministry as something that we will do if the right opportunity comes along. Some of us, frankly, are stuck--in jobs we didn't expect to have, in places we didn't intend to be, in situations we didn't plan on. The real question is, What do we do with the place we're stuck in and the people we're stuck with? Because how we answer that question determines the kind of person we are. Jesus, to be quite frank, didn't say, "Repeat this prayer after me, and if you really believe it in your heart, then you can live forever in heaven." He did say, "Inasmuch as you have done it to the least of these, my brothers, you have done it unto me. Enter into your rest."

Technorati Tags: Movies, Bill Murray, Andie MacDowell, Comedy

Becoming Missional

I'd like to welcome Becoming Missional to the blogroll. Jerry's most recent post has a fascinating YouTube link showing Bono at a Washington prayer breakfast. Bono's remarks are extremely challenging, and much more overtly Christian than anything else I've heard (or read) of him.

Jerry also has some interesting stuff on a church transitioning from traditional to missional. I don't yet know if I'm a "friend of missional." I'm probably an acquaintance. I'm really not sure if there's something genuinely new here, or if there is largely idealism here that hasn't yet hit the wall of the sometimes painful realities of life in the church world. Even if it's the latter, there's something to be said for renewing idealism periodically.

Bono and Bill Hybels on RedBlueChristian

RedBlueChristian has an interesting post containing part of an interview of Bono by Bill Hybels.

Rilstone on Superman

Andrew Rilstone has a good post on the "Christian symbolism" of the recent Superman movie. A brief excerpt:

Spider-Man, Frodo Baggins, Neo, Leo DeCaprio, Indiana Jones – Hollywood turns all its heroes into Christian symbols. (All except Aslan, obviously.) But do the symbols actually symbolize anything?

Good point. Except that I think Tolkien actually meant for Frodo to be a type of Christ (Gandalf and Aragorn too), no matter what he said about allegory. But for the rest--I think we need to examine what it means for Christian imagery and symbolism to be bestowed on characters who are eminently unworthy of it.