I was chatting with some Catholic friends, and (as happens more and more frequently as the election approaches) the subject of Mormons came up. Which means you can pretty much set an egg-timer until someone says, “Not to mention magic underwear!” (I think in this case the elapsed time was about a minute thirty. There’s never an egg timer around when you need one.) The ‘magic underwear’ crack is pretty common (it’s the featured visual on the billboards American Atheists are... Read more
— 1 — I’m still a little swoony from the news that GetReligion is joining Patheos, but that’s not the only cool thing happening outside my channel. Over in the Mormon channel, Alan Hurst is exhorting his coreligionists to write more fantasy novels. But good fairy stories are not merely fables, presenting simple lessons in didactic style. They deal with deeper matters—a truth I learned from the great fairy-tale writer of our time, J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien hated shallow allegory, grumpily refuting... Read more
Apropos of the discussion of romances that end with a clinch, not a child, I thought I’d share an excerpt from io9’s review of The Odd Life of Timothy Green. This is the recently released film where two childless parents write down all the qualities they’d like their kid to have, bury the list in the backyard, and have a magical 10 year old sprout up. Watching The Odd Life of Timothy Green, I kept being reminded of Ruby Sparks, which... Read more
Oh, you had better believe that I am capering. GetReligion is a blog run by religion journalists that calls out a lot of religion news stories for omissions, ignorance, and general sloppiness. The articles they fisk don’t usually err out of malice, but they can really skew the discussion of religion issues. GetReligion’s watchdogging is so good that my friends and I say, as a matter of course, “Is there a GetReligion post on this, yet?” There is only one expression... Read more
Welcome to part two of my Q&A with Steve Dawson of the St. Paul Street Evangelization project. You can read part one here. What are some of the most common questions/responses you get? It’s really not the norm that we’re getting people with really tough questions. We get apologetic questions, such as “Why do you worship Mary,” or all these real Protestant issues. More often, if people are presenting a challenge to us, it’s about a moral issue, or some sort of... Read more
A little while ago, I mentioned the St. Paul Street Evangelization project on the blog. SPSE is trying put a Catholic presence in the public square that opens the door to dialogue. They’re currently doing a fundraiser on IndieGoGo. Since apologetics and arguments are basically catnip to me, I contacted Steve Dawson to ask some questions about the project. I’ve divvied the Q&A up into two parts: the first is focused on a big picture view of the project, the... Read more
This post is part of a symposium on Stephen Sondheim’s Company. I really enjoyed Gilbert’s post on the absence of children in a musical about marriage. This isn’t a problem unique to Company, but I think it’s more noticable these because Company seems like it’s intended to say more about marriage. In most romances, the catharsis comes with a clinch, not a child. The couple run at each other in slow motion, the music swells, and the pair lock lips. Sometimes the camera will... Read more
I want to kick off the Sondheim Symposium this week with a guest post by Gilbert of The Last Conformer. He originally wrote it as a comment on the original post, but I like starting off the conversation by discussing something omitted, plus I want to reply to it tomorrow. I’m in italics, everything that follows is his. Oh, and I’m to blame for the stealing the post title from a different musical, I couldn’t let Eve Tushnet have all... Read more
Just a quick housekeeping note. If you’re in the DC/Maryland area, I’m going to be chatting at an Ellicott City Theology on Tap tomorrow night. You can find the logistical details at the facebook event page. I should note that this speaking engagement has already been a learning experience, as I’ve found out that, when asked for a title, I shouldn’t say “I don’t know. I like puns and math.” Because now I think part of the discussion is going to have... Read more
This post is a follow-up to a reflection on how going to rationality camp made me really grateful for my college debate experience. “Break on the floor” is, I’m pretty sure, part of the Yale Political Union vernacular, so a definition is probably in order. Our debates operated by Robert’s Rules of order, but our parliamentary debate style bears little resemblance to the gatling-gun style of debate you may be used to from high school and college. In some forms of competitive debate,... Read more
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