There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

Merry Christmas all you free peoples!

Chris Johns sends us the story of Vicar Glen Cardy abusing his listeners with a freezing bucket of fail:

Progressive Christianity believes the Christmas stories are fictitious accounts designed to introduce the radical nature of the adult Jesus. They contrast the Lord and Saviour Caesar with the anomaly of a new ‘lord’ and ‘saviour’ born illegitimate in a squalid barn. At Bethlehem low-life shepherds and heathen travelers are welcome while the powerful and the priests aren’t. The stories introduce the topsy-turvy way of God, where the outsiders are invited in and the insiders ushered out.

Progressive Christianity doesn’t overlook Jesus’ life and rush to his death. Rather it sees the radical hospitality he offered to the poor, the despised, women, children, and the sick, and says: ‘this is the essence of God’. His death was a consequence of the offensive nature of that hospitality and his resurrection a symbolic vindication.

Hat tip Lydia McGrew and the source (I think): http://www.mandm.org.nz/2009/11/climate-change-statistics-humour.html

It’s no secret that John Williams drew much from Korngold:

While I can’t generally recommend the crass Family Guy, one of the better moments was this spoof pirate scene which, in a stroke of good sense, is set to the same score (sorry for the poor video quality):

A relative gave us money as a gift and bid us to take the kids to a movie. So we went to the movies for perhaps the second time this year. Planet 51 was mostly unoffensive but forgettable. Not so the twenty minutes of previews. Let’s see, we have Jackie Chan, who appears to have lost control of his franchise, or lost a bet:

Next, Julie Andrews, who simply deserves better:

Sherlock Holmes is turned into an superhero and Sir Arthur rolls in his grave:

Alvin and the Chipmunks were rock bottom for me even as a kid. Watch them dig:

Here’s some fairy tale inversion from Disney:

And while The Tooth Fairy was the one that made me want to run out of the theater screaming, the most pernicious was this one that gives us the tired Hollywood lesson that that there is no such thing as evil, just Big Misunderstandings:

Fr. Philip astutely pegs the battle over liturgical translations:

In my experience, people rarely argue over the Real Issue at Hand. We tend to choose what I’ll call “ciphers,” or symbols that allow us to reduce a larger problem into smaller, manageable bits. At stake in the Liturgy Wars is the soul of the Church. Who are we? What are we about? It’s a question of Catholic identity in this postmodern age. But the problem of Catholic identity is cultural, social, economic, religious, legal, etc. In other words, it’s HUGE. And as such, largely unmanageable. So, we pick smaller battles to fight the larger war. The Translation Battles have to do with what sort of language will use to pray together. Both sides of the battle know that language shapes attitudes and influences beliefs. Both sides know that the kind of language we use in prayer together shapes our view of God and our relationship to Him. Some will go so far as to say that language-use is the only reality we have direct contact with. Control language-use, control reality. This is the philosophical base for the P.C. movement, i.e., if we can change how people speak, we can change the reality they live in.

Whistle along. You know you can’t resist:

But what to do when you get to about 1:12 into it? Ha! Haven’t heard that part before have you? As a band composition it’s fine, but imagine trying to whistle it in a Japanese POW camp:

CMR comments on the movie “The Box”:

And all I could think was that maybe this movie was an unintentionally telling benchmark on our national psyche. Are we so far gone as a society with abortion, embryonic stem cell research, and euthanasia and an overall lack of morals that we can’t even have decent moral conundrum movies. You see, for a moral conundrum movie to work you first need morals.

Patrick Madrid is reporting that the debate between Dawkins and Archbishop Onaiyekan and Ms. Widdecombe over “Whether the Catholic Church is a force for good in the world” went very poorly for the Catholics.