Year: 2016

Movies

Rogue Too

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1979 was a pretty good year for the Yale University School of Drama. One of their graduates starred opposite Dustin Hoffman in the year’s top-grossing film, a family drama about the breakup of a family. Meryl Streep, class of ’75, would eventually win an Oscar for her performance in Kramer vs Kramer, one of several that now grace her home (although she almost lost that first one, leaving it in the bathroom at the Oscar ceremonies).

The other graduate was in another top-10 box office hit, a science fiction movie not named Star Trek that was still one of the most hotly anticipated movies of the year.

Movies / Spiritual Journey

Godless

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I ran across this statement recently:

“The greatest danger of television and movies is helping (us) to grow accustomed to the enjoyment of the absence of God.”

I’ve pondered that for a couple of weeks. I generally agree with the sentiment: we need to be careful about what we intake, and a lot of our intake these days is television and movies. (Note the absence of books, probably for a couple of reasons: one, it’s possible to find books that aren’t absent God, and two, who reads books anymore?) But there are couple of implications that I’d like to tackle.

Blog

Just Because You’re Paranoid…

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Just a quick site administration note. I’ve setup secure hosting for Broken & Saved, which means you should get here with https://www.brokenandsaved.com instead of plain http://www.brokenandsaved.com. The site will automatically redirect you to https if you use forget and use http, but it would be good to update your bookmarks to the site to add the s after http.1

You will (should?) not notice any difference at all. The only difference is that the communication between your web browser and the web site itself is now encrypted, and you have assurance that when you specify this site in your browser, it’s really this site that comes up. 

Justice / Travel

Impact

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Last time I talked briefly about a woman who’s influence on me was both deep and wide.1 Today I want to talk about the opposite end of the spectrum, a woman I spent a total of forty-five minutes with, in the company of several other people, six-and-a-half years ago.

It was our first trip to Cambodia. The church body we’re members of had formed a partnership with IJM, and a member of their church mobilization team led seven of us from 121 on a trip to meet as many organizations working on the ground as possible, and learn as much as we could about the country and the cause (combatting sex trafficking).

Family

The Power of Pachyderms

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20160204_Cambodia_0223My daughter, who as you know lives with her husband and son in Cambodia, has a new carved elephant sitting on their TV stand. It’s an African bull elephant sitting on his haunches, with painted ears, eyes, and toes. It seems a bit out-of-place — it’s the only carved anything in their house that I know of, and certainly in their family room. As a result, I knew why it was there even before I asked her about it.

Homeland of ElephantMy wife and I also have an elephant — several elephants, actually — on a lacquered piece on the wall of our bedroom.

Spiritual Journey / Television

Alicia Florrick and the Formidability of Forgiveness

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Alicia

The Good Wife has long been my favorite show on TV.1 It’s legal shenanigans are often ludicrous but always fascinating, it has some of the most well-written and well-developed characters around, and many of those characters are multi-faceted women that are the antithesis of the one-notes we usually get on network TV.

A couple of weeks ago, the title character, Alicia Florrick, has a bombshell dropped on her when Eli, a long-time associate and friend, tells her that he once did something that interfered with Alicia’s relationship with another man she loved. Eli is telling her in order to ask for her forgiveness, but until now, she didn’t even know it had happened.