Job redux: Loss and the glory of the world meet in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life
Sean Penn as Jack in Terrence Malick‘s The Tree of Life. Penn works his world-weary visage to great effect in the film Don’t worry, there are no spoilers here. In fact, I’m having a hard time even imagining a spoiler for this film. I could tell you the whole thing and it wouldn’t change its [...]
Keep your eye on the story
As Scott at Scotteriology says, this must be what drove Noah to drink after the flood. WARNING Part 1 (above) is fantastic but Part 2 gets really tedious and features some harsh language Henry, my 11-year-old son, has a new hobby: magic. He’s getting pretty good at it, too. Whenever I take our toddler out [...]
Big Head Todd and the mass extinction problem
Todd Park Mohr of Big Head Todd and the Monsters recording at Ardent Studios in Memphis. I missed BHTM back in the 1990′s when they had their major-scale success; I blame graduate school for this. But a good friend introduced them to me several years ago and to this day I am grateful to him [...]
Farewell to an era
STS-135 lands during the predawn hour yesterday morning at Kennedy Space Center. Despite the problems with the shuttle program, its demise makes me a bit wistful. Image source: NASA Well, that’s it for the Space Shuttle. The first one launched in 1981, when I was 13. Now I’m 43, and no one can say where [...]
Apophasis: Just the thing for beefy, well-fed liberals
Image courtesy of Jesus and Mo As I was poking about for images related to negative theology, I found this comic attached to a post at Why Evolution is True, biologist Jerry Coyne‘s blog. In said post, Coyne ridicules negative (apophatic) theology while avoiding saying what’s actually wrong with it. But the strip is pretty [...]
Is it showtime for the Flying Spaghetti Monster?
They have the deity. They have the art. Will the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster make it to prime time? Image source: Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster Unlike some Christians, I have always found great humor in Pastafarianism, the faux (or not) religion centered on the mythology of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM). [...]
On upper-class medieval persons, Bronze-Age goat herders, and semi-enlightened Englishmen, featuring full-color illustrative proof of the Bronze-Age Goat Herder Conceit
Almost enlightened, but not quite: Sir Frederick William Herschel, artist unknown. Image source: Wikimedia Commons “Imagine we could revive a well-educated Christian of the fourteenth century. The man would prove to be a total ignoramus, except on matters of faith. His beliefs about geography, astronomy, and medicine would even embarrass a child, but he would [...]
