'No Country for Old Men'

(link) - the creeper himself

Coming back from the L'Abri conference, we ran into a blizzard going through Iowa and had to stay the night in Mason City, Iowa. For about two months I considered going to Iowa State University to get a masters in Journalism and Mass Communication. If this weekend did anything for me, it convinced me that I made the right decision. Iowa is like a lame version of Minnesota (with its northern beauty and 10,000 lakes) and Missouri (honestly, the roads and scenery drastically improved once we crossed the state line). It's a barren wasteland (thanks to Patrick for the literary reference mid-car ride) and the state patrolmen are jerks.

In the Best Western in Mason City, the two cars from Veritas who were stranded there rented a $10 pay-per-view movie and we voted for 'No Country for Old Men.' It was awesome. And, because we were all feeling intellectual and analytical from L'Abri, we had a terrific discussion afterwards. Sorry for y'all who haven't seen it, but I will discuss the plot line.

We decided that Anton (the villain killer creepy dude) personified evil, Tommy Lee Jones's character (the sheriff) was 'good', and Josh Brolin (who is actually Barbara Streisand's STEP SON, not natural son - "Bad uterus, bad!"), who played Llewellyn, was the everyman- somewhere in the middle. There were some really good points made, and the discussion made the movie a lot richer for me.

However, I think Slate.com's commentary on the movie and soundtrack (here) sheds some helpful light:

"No Country is a different matter. Tommy Lee Jones' Sheriff Tom Bell starts off declaring, "The crime you see now, it's hard to take its measure." By the end of the story he's given up trying to measure evil because he's been defeated by it, professionally and spiritually. Bell is a new kind of character for the Coens, a once-strong man whose pain we understand and care about. We feel for him—even though nearly everything in the movie, including the soundtrack, is radically underplayed. (This being a Coen movie, the violence is not underplayed.)"

I forgot that the Coen bros. directed 'Fargo' - I think the movies look very similar.

I need to rent Magnolia.

More from the article on 'No Country for Old Men':
"The last thing we hear before the credits is the wind and the ticking of a clock. It's not just about death. It's the desert that is eternal and doesn't care about all the human messes played out on its surface, and the wind that will outlast us all."..."The Coens, in their often quirky and passionless way, still have always seemed to be searching for something eternal, and surely in No Country for Old Men they get closer to eternity, in both its human and inhuman dimensions, than ever."

whoa. I am so glad there are people out there who know more about this stuff than I do.

treasures in heaven

I was at the Veritas leadership meeting today and we were reading in Luke 6 about something or other and there was about half a verse about us being rewarded in the afterlife for things we do here. It struck me how very odd this idea is, both from the perspective of our current culture and (from what little I know of the) Buddhist perspective.

I generally tend towards the (wrong view) of us not having any right to protest against any wrongs done to us in this life because we have done so much wrong and therefore deserve what ever is coming to us. I am in the (very long and drawn out) process of Christ changing my mind to want justice in the world. As in, wrongs done to us are still wrong (and should be punished) even though we are guilty as well.

Okay, to get to the point. The idea that we are rewarded is possibly absurd. God promises us a reward for our striving. We don't just do things because they are right and the very rightness is self-rewarding. But God pours even more blessing on top. Maybe. This sounds right, but I have just started thinking about this and honestly have no idea.

But one other thing that goes along with this idea: I was talking to Andy Patton on Wednesday and he has been reading By Demonstration: God by Wade Bradshaw (you can read about his thoughts here at his blog). Wade Bradshaw used to be a worker at English L'Abri - where I was for a semester this time last year, and the book was born out of his experiences there. I tried to read the book while I was at L'Abri but got distracted.

But anyway, Andy said that one thing that he's gotten out of the book is the idea that our current culture looks at Christianity and Biblical values as somewhat beneath their own. Like it would almost be a downgrade morally to adhere to Christian values. Traditional Christian moral standpoints such as being pro-life, womens roles in the church and home, and views of other religions seem almost archaic.

This all relates back to treasures in Heaven, I promise. The idea of us getting rewarded for our strivings and faith by some kind of reward almost seems archaic. Morality should be done for morality's sake, right? To be rewarded for faith-acts seems absurd and greedy.

But God knows us, He made us. He engages with our desires and works with us. It's not just Him in the clouds making demands. He lets us see the fruit of our labors. He gives us hope. He's a good God.

p.s. - my Dad has that picture somewhere up in his office at home. i like it.

I want to work for this guy: Michael J. Bugeja...and Facebook

While researching for my 'Culture, Change and Trends' class research paper on social networking websites, I ran across this guy: Michael Bugeja. He's magical. He teaches at Iowa State University, if it was a cooler place I would totally go get my Masters under him.

He wrote a book called Interpersonal Divide: The Search for Community in a Technological Age
(description of the book here) where he discusses "the void that develops when we spend too much time in virtual rather than real communities, neglecting our primary relationships. In this innovative book, Bugeja traces media history to document how other generations coped with similar social problems during great technological change and makes a compelling case for face-to-face communication in an increasingly technological and world." It sounds really cool. I have to pick it up soon at the Journalism Library for my group project on Schizophrenia in modern communication technology.

Last night at Veritas Luke Miedema spoke on Facebook and he had a really good title but I didn't write it down. It was something like "poke others as you would have them poke you" but a little less graphic. He said some really interesting things all the way through, but I thought his most interesting point was that Facebook makes us think about ourselves more, which is never a good thing. He spoke on the format of Facebook, which is kind of a purified and distilled popularity contest (who's talking to whom, wall posts, etc.). Also that everything is 100% editable. Nothing shows up that we don't want up there. We can untag ourselves in unflattering photos, delete wall posts, etc. Therefore it's kind of like a quasi-reality in which we can have on-demand access to our friends and leave when we want. I had never thought about the pure self-centeredness of Facebook before, interesting.

Oh right! D.A. Carson review.

Well, D.A. Carson is a very very smart man. He gave a very very good talk on suffering and backed it up with Biblical everything. Very impressive. But more valuable was that he said things that I needed to hear this week. I like going to events where the townies come out. It's good seeing non-good looking people over the age of 24.

Here's what I got from it:

• "War makes death real to us" - C.S. Lewis. I like this quote because there are a lot of hippie-type people in Columbia (God love them), and the rebel in me wants to bring up points about how war is sometimes a good idea. I don't want to expound on this. My brother has a funny bumper sticker that says something like "War never solved anything except slavery, genocide, nazism, and fascism"

• sometimes we just don't know why we're suffering (take a look at Job - he never really knew)

• the poem 'Jesus of the Scars' by Edward Shillito

• sometimes you can actually see the gravity of your sin in relation to other people's. Even to the point that there exists innocent suffering. This blows my mind, I sway towards the end of the spectrum of assuming that everyone deserves suffering all the time.

D.A. Carson at Veritas

So... D.A. Carson is coming to speak tonight at my campus ministry. Everyone I tell this to is really impressed, but not many people (including me) know anything about him. Oh yeah, and there's something called Theopedia (Wikipedia for Biblical Christianity - haha!).

I've heard of a couple of his books, I think mostly from L'Abri:

Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church: Understanding a Movement and Its Implications
How Long, O Lord?: Reflections on Suffering and Evil

...also, he WROTE A NEW TESTAMENT COMMENTARY. Geez.

I also found this:

So, you know, tonight could go either way. We'll see.