Just watched: There Will Be Blood (2007), written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. In an epic cage match between capitalist rapacity and religious charlatanry, who wins? Duh. Do we need to ask?
As much a pleasure it is to watch Daniel Day-Lewis do anything, including his all-time-great villain work here, I found myself unable to fully get over his impersonation of Hugo Weaving doing an American accent. And the sheer relentlessness of his character’s misanthropy, with neither origin story nor heroic counterweight, left me with no one to root for and thus no love for this movie. Plus, Jonny Greenwood’s score is distracting.
Like Kane in the last century, surely we’ve been misled to regard this film as one of the greatest of the 21st. It’s not even one of the greatest films I’ve seen about greed this century. (No Country for Old Men rightly beat it at the 2008 Academy Awards.) Give me Rian Johnson for savvier filmic critique of avarice or religion.
I don’t normally write negative reviews—what’s the point?—but the overpraise for this one almost demands it. I think maybe people just love them a good, scenery-chewing milkshake monologue. (Please do count me among them.)
Just watched: Charade (1963). Having thesetwo all-time most charming American film icons together on the same silver screen would likely have been enough to qualify this thriller-comedy-romance as a classic. Yet here they have at their disposal not only their own abundant charisma and sense of timing, but also a smart script, Henry Mancini, the City of Lights, and Givenchy. Not to mention directorial sparklemeister (né dancer, then choreographer) Stanley Donen, whose feel for space and staging shows up in every shot. Top-five classic Hollywood magic stuff. A parable of courtship as spycraft and of the trust pitfalls of love.
Just finished reading: The Cross and the Lynching Tree (2011) by James H. Cone.
Dr. Cone makes it hard to deny that (1) many 19th- and 20th-century African-American Christians saw—nay, experienced and made pastoral use of—the remarkable congruencies between the cross of Christ and the lynching tree, and that (2) most white Christians, including our best theologians, were and still are blind to the same.
Until I read this book, I myself was one such white Christian. And upon my being enlightened by Cone’s strong voice and ample evidence, those congruencies tempted me to say that my entire thoughtcastle on the Cross is an abstract sham.
With strength training on a two-week hold that ends Friday, listening to new music an activity for which I’ve recently developed a disorienting aversion, and sleeping continuing to include at least three wakeups every night, life feels more improvvy now. These circumstances are mildly destabilizing. I feel like I’m wobbling.
But as of last night, these circumstances are also invigorating. The fact is, if I’m capable of RDLing nearly 380 lb after five hours of sleep, I’m capable of being my joyfully intense self in the whole of life regardless of how much sleep I’ve gotten, regardless of whether there’s a plan for the day, regardless whether I feel “on top of things.”
I’m finally beginning to grasp what some work colleagues probably meant last year or the year before when they said that I need to learn to “lead through ambiguity”: It means that historically, I always want to preplan and then follow the plan, that I never want to make decisions on the fly about how to spend my time—and...
In progressive and evangelical circles alike, I hear so much emphasis on the disillusionment of the Crucifixion and the joyous surprise of the Resurrection that it’s easy to forget that crucifixion and resurrection were both part of The Plan. Jesus purposely reentered Jerusalem and provoked the authorities knowing it would lead to His trial and execution. He withheld any exercise of power to liberate Himself from that excruciation. And He did this having said repeatedly that He’d come out alive a few days later. We miss some good theology and soteriology if we miss this. Let’s not be like the disciples.
For me, there’s a problem with calling God our “Parent” instead of our “Father.” Besides being distracting, it breaks down the felt relationality of the analogy: No one I know calls either of their parents individually their “parent.” Calling God “Parent” makes Him alien.
You might say that God is alien, and that calling things as they are is good. I grant the point. Yet I say that more than that, calling God “Parent,” before foregrounding any actual theological point, foregrounds the supposed sensitivity of the speaker to other people’s theological hang-ups. That’s its purpose.
And even though it does highlight the theological fact of God’s non-sexed alienness and thus can be said to offer a true good, it does so at the cost of losing the greater good: In so-called progressive churches, it’s more important that we linguistically fortify our relationship with God than that we fortify our understanding of His alienness. I’d rather (and occasionally do) call God “Mother” than “Parent.”
Just finished reading: Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling (2025; originally 2013) by Edgar & Peter Schein. Like so many business books, this would’ve made, to borrow an idea from Carla, a much better pamphlet—a virtuous pamphlet, to be clear—than it does a book. But then, you can’t sell a pamphlet for $24.95. Still, spending a few hours hearing the phrase “humble inquiry” repeated hundreds of times can’t have been bad for me, master of the overconfident statement.
When I claim to be Anglophile, what it seems to me today to mean more than anything else is that I deeply enjoy some of the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams. Not just the evergreen chestnuts The Lark Ascending and Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, either. If you were to translate the electrical impulses of my heart into sound, you would hear those, yes, along with most of his nine symphonies, at least one song cycle, some incidental music, and Job: A Masque for Dancing (maybe his greatest work).
Had I written a sign for today’s protest, it would’ve born the boringly straightforward “Our president is a capricious, narcissistic incompetent.” I didn’t. But I did initiate a short, catchier chant: “Dump Trump! He’s a chump!” People seemed to like it.
I feel ambivalent about most display protests, including this one, mostly because (1) I’m frequently niggling about the imprecise match between what I think and what I hear and read other participants thinking (e.g., for me, it’s “No kings but Jesus”), and (2) I harbor doubts about their efficacy and thus fear that they sap energy that’d be otherwise and better deployed toward direct action and participation in governance itself. I’m probably wrong about that second reason.
Just rewatched (with Sully, who hadn’t seen it yet): The Shawshank Redemption (1994), written and directed by Frank Darabont and based on a short story by Stephen King. Excellent, chockablock with virtue (moral, thespian, and filmic) and vice (mostly moral), yet misses being a must-see because it crawls through a river of shit and comes out clean. Darabont directing is like Rubin producing: Unambiguous, transparent, safe. Like Capra with cusswords.
[edit, 3/25/26]:
Today, the part of this movie that gets me most is the following lines from Brooks’ letter:
I can’t believe how fast things move on the outside. I saw an automobile once when I was a kid, but now they’re everywhere. The world went and got itself in a big damn hurry.
Rage, rage against the dying of The Life. Or rage against The Machine. Or something like that.
Love has a speed. It’s a spiritual speed. It is a different kind of speed from the technological speed to which we are accustomed. It goes on in the depth of our...
If I am to “follow the impulses of [my] heart and the desires of [my] eyes, yet know that God will bring [me] to judgment for all these things” (Ecclesiastes 11:9), how am I to distinguish the impulses and desires that God will judge favorably from those that He will frown upon? If a way already “seems right to [me]” (Proverbs 14:12/16:25), how am I to determine whether it’s the kind whose “end” is “death”? How am I supposed to tell a righteous “desire of my heart” from an unrighteous “desire of the flesh” or “desire of the eyes”?
One rule of thumb is to ask myself, in keeping with my working definition of love, the following question: “To whose importance am I responding?” If the honest answer is “my own,” then I am loving myself, and unless I am a doormat in need of some assertiveness training (which I myself am most verily not), then there’s my clear signpost: WAY OF DEATH.
I’m about to do my first ever purposeful deload week in the weight room. The working hypothesis is that a central nervous system kept constantly hot by near-daily high-intensity strength training is the prime suspect for the lightness and shortness of sleep I’ve increasingly been experiencing over the past several years.
I feel hopeful. I feel anticipatorily happy for a new balance, a new plateau where intensity and relaxation can coexist, where self-discipline doesn’t crowd out levity, flexibility, and rest, but rather is itself pressed into service to those things.
It’s also making me both grateful and newly hungry for long walks with friends, which I haven’t had enough of lately. That could be the letdown from a week a few weeks back when I had one-on-ones, mostly while walking‚ nearly every day and night. A great week. I remember sleeping better that week. That makes sense: long walks calm the nervous system, and all the more so when they’re shared with a trusted friend and real...
Genesis is full of weird relational episodes with sometimes inscrutable morality. But the lesson of Genesis 20, one of several stories in which, as Marilynne Robinson puts it, “the patriarchs act badly and the pagans act well,” is clear: Do not presume the moral fiber of people whose ethnicity—or, more pointedly, whose metaphysics—are different from yours. I feel disappointed to be feeling the need to say this.
Given that “if we ask for anything in agreement with [God’s] will, He listens to us,” and that “if He listens to what we ask, we know that we have received what we asked from him” (1 John 5:14-15), then—from a place of excitement—I’m going to stick to asking Him for what I know is His will and not sweat the rest. Actually, it’s more like going to have a field day asking Him for what I know is His will.
NB: There’s very little that I know to be His will: the growth of the knowledge of Him and the flowering of undisputed goods and virtues, such as wisdom, generosity, and the fruit of the Spirit, are pretty much it. The rest, I might talk with Him about and occasionally make requests about, but I won’t come with an expectation of getting what I want.
Just listened to: Harmonies du soir (2011), a Liszt recital recorded on Decca by the late Nelson Freire, who trades in neither treacle, nor mud, nor exhibitionism. Just music.