— 1 — I’ve been nervous about seeing The Hobbit since I saw this passage in Anthony Lane’s review: Instead, before Bilbo stumbles upon the ring, we see it slip from Gollum’s safekeeping, tumble in refulgent slow motion, and, on impact, give a resounding clang. (If Jackson ever films “Othello,” wait for Desdemona’s handkerchief to hit the ground like a sheet of tin.) When you adapt a classic, it’s tempting to engage in fanservice (“Hey, look! It’s this moment! The one... Read more
This was going to be a short post, but there were a lot of good women to link to, so just think of this post as an epic crossover. Perhaps it’s not intuitive to go to tumblrs commenting on the questionable anatomy of girls in comic books for smart, incisive commentary on feminism and (sometimes inadvertent) misogyny, but man oh man are you missing out. I follow Escher Girls, a tumblr that collects professional drawings of superheroines that have something terribly wrong... Read more
Yesterday, I used Georges Seurat (as imagined by Stephen Sondheim in Sunday in the Park with George) to open up a discussion about the difficulty of pursuing intimacy with God (or, often, other people). Play!George might approve of my framing a discussion of truth through artifice, since that’s exactly how he manages to see and comprehend others in the show. In “Finishing the Hat” (below), George explains that he can only understand or interact with people from a distance. Entering the... Read more
So, apparently if I host an installment of the Stephen Sondheim film festival the night before a silent retreat, I end up spending a lot of time meditating on Seurat instead of Scripture. A few weekends ago, I invited friends over to watch Sunday in the Park with George, Stephen Sondheim’s musical about Georges Seurat’s creation of A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. (It’s on Amazon instant streaming, go enjoy!). In the first act, Georges struggles to... Read more
This month, the Patheos Book Club is reading Catholic Spiritual Practices: A Treasury of Old and New, a collection of description of and reflections on common Catholic spiritual practice. The book is essentially a tasting menu; each of the twenty-six meditations is only a few pages long. It’s the book equivalent of Lewis’s Wood between the Worlds (or Grossman’s Neitherlands). This book alone would not be enough to get you engaged in any form of spiritual praxis, but you might end up... Read more
The post on judgement and culpability has (terrifyingly) crested 300 comments (but I probably deserved that). I’ll be reading through them and making notes tomorrow, but I won’t be responding until later in the week, since there’s a highly relevant lecture tomorrow night that I’d like to hear first. And DC area folks may want in. The Dominican House of Studies is holding a series of talks on the Four Last Things for the four Sundays of Advent. (Advent is... Read more
The best derogatory term for Catholics is pretty obviously “mackerel-snapper.” (The best derogatory cartoon is the bishops’ mitres as alligator jaws one) The slur comes from the Catholic practice of fasting from red meat and poultry on Fridays (and therefore eating fish instead). In Catholic tradition, every Friday is a little Lent and every Sunday a little Easter, so there should be some remembrance of fasting and feasting as appropriate. (I should add that every time I explain this, I immediately get... Read more
— 1 — There’s been some discussion this week about what happens after death to the soul, but this New York Times article (“Giving New Life to Vultures to Restore a Human Ritual of Death“) is focused on a religious concern about what happens to the body. Fifteen years after vultures disappeared from Mumbai’s skies, the Parsi community here intends to build two aviaries at one of its most sacred sites so that the giant scavengers can once again devour human... Read more
Yesterday, I linked to Luke Muelhauser’s commentary on the inability of philosophers to come to consensus. He’s continued on the topic, proposing a curriculum for building better philosophers in “Train Philosophers with Pearl and Kahneman, not Plato and Kant.” His list of recommended topics include Bayesian statistics, machine learning, mathematical logic, game theory, cognitive neuroscience, etc. (Go to the link to see his syllabus). When you look over all the prerequisites, you can see why Luke concludes, “I do think philosophy should... Read more
I know there are some rumblings in yesterday’s thread about sin, judgment, and necessity about my being tardy to reply to comments. When there’s such a fast discussion (over 100 comments in 12 hours, I can’t pop in and out as much as I’d like to. I did quite appreciate Steve Schuler’s comment that, even though my tardiness was frustrating, “For my purposes the best aspect of Leah’s blog are the comments threads and the overall civil and thoughtful... Read more
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