Last week, I heard an interview with the president of Maggiano's, Steve Provost, about a particular scene in a Maggiano's restaurant in Washington D.C. where a white nationalist group had gathered and ended their time with some Nazi salutes as well as protesters who shut the restaurant down. I felt really bad for the guy because he said the restaurant didn't know who it was they were hosting. I believe him. Why would they think to pay close attention to that? But in the interview, discussing the issue of the white nationalists, Provost said that he was offended by their remarks and the Nazi salute and that it goes against their principle which is that "we welcome everyone." He walked right into a linguistic and ethical/moral trap. I know. I have walked into it myself a few times. One of the big points that churches like to make is that "everyone is welcome." I once attended a campus ministry event at a Christian college in which the group pr...
Let's change gears for a post. Let's talk about comics. I just finished watching the Netflix series "The Defenders" based on the Marvel Comic series (that should be plural, I suppose!). It wasn't bad. It wasn't great, but it wasn't bad. Here's why it wasn't bad. It did a good job at pulling the characters together in a short amount of time and resolving the story line in a short amount of time as well. In some respects, the series was the vehicle for the next seasons of Daredevil, Luke Cage, and Jessica Jones (and probably Iron Fist, but I will get to that in a minute). It pulled the stories of these heroes together and provided them with direct knowledge of each other and a (mostly) willingness to work together. The Defenders is a tough comic to bring to the screen, large or small. That's because the more recent iterations of The Defenders focuses on the idea that it is a non-team, but a name that applies to a particular group who...
As the gopher wood bandwagon is being built for the movie “Noah,” I thought I might take a few minutes to offer a few observations about this mostly well-known story from the book of Genesis. The first observation is that the character of Noah has more lines in the movie trailer than he does in the actual Biblical text. Not that that’s a problem, but it is something to keep in mind. Of course, Noah in the movie “The Bible” (1966 – and played by John Huston) also had a few more lines, though not as many as are likely in the upcoming movie version. And there was the John Voigt “Noah’s Ark” movie in 1999 that had Noah’s Ark come under attack by pirates . Anyway… Whenever a Biblical story gets adapted into a movie (for good or for ill), inevitably it will garner some discussion from church-goers. Usually the discussion centers around authenticity, but sometimes it pushes us to deeper theological questions. Mel Gibs...
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