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...
A friend of mine and I were speaking in general terms about the authority of the pastor within the context of the local church. As I wrote in my post a few weeks ago, sometimes the authority of the church subverts itself, as in the case of stigmatics, by proclaiming them to be persons with a special revelation, but then have to backpedal when or if that revelation runs counter to the accepted and orthodox traditions. On the other hand, as my friend and I were saying, the Protestant church itself is struggling with the issue of pastoral authority. Not because we have stigmatics running around proclaiming against us, but because we have congregations in which the pastor is not viewed as the theological authority. Let me explain how that happens. In many cases, the authority of the pastor is only granted so long as the pastor preaches or teaches that which is already accepted as 'true.' In other words, the pastor has authority if what they say matches with wh...
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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