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Saturday night my wife and I went with some friends from church to see Call + Response, a rockumentary (hadn’t heard that one before) about the human trafficking industry. The DG Blog promoted it a week ago yesterday. It was well done and sobered me to the fact that, among other types of slavery, there are real-life girls who are being forced to have sex with real-life perverts who have real-life money to burn on their defiling passions. It’s a sick trade.
Here’s a description from the movie’s website:
CALL+RESPONSE is a first of its kind feature documentary film that reveals the world’s 27 million dirtiest secrets: there are more slaves today than ever before in human history. CALL+RESPONSE goes deep undercover where slavery is thriving from the child brothels of Cambodia to the slave brick kilns of rural India to reveal that in 2007, Slave Traders made more money than Google, Nike and Starbucks combined.
Luminaries on the issue such as Cornel West, Madeleine Albright, Daryl Hannah, Julia Ormond, Ashley Judd, Nicholas Kristof, and many other prominent political and cultural figures offer first hand account of this 21st century trade. Performances from Grammy-winning and critically acclaimed artists including Moby, Natasha Bedingfield, Cold War Kids, Matisyahu, Imogen Heap, Talib Kweli, Five For Fighting, Switchfoot, members of Nickel Creek and Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers, Rocco Deluca move this chilling information into inspiration for stopping it.
Music is part of the movement against human slavery. Dr. Cornel West connects the music of the American slave fields to the popular music we listen to today, and offers this connection as a rallying cry for the modern abolitionist movement currently brewing.
If it’s in your area and still showing, I’d encourage you to see it. Better hurry, though. Most of the show times have come and gone, and the latest I saw was this Thursday the 23rd.
Did anybody else go? What did you think?
Some friends of ours shared this video with us last night. Enjoy.
Spoonbridge and Cherry, 1985-1988. Sculpture by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. Minneapolis Sculpture Garden:
Spoonbridge and Cherry: Ingested, 2008. Interactive installation by Johnathon Bowers. Minneapolis Sculpture Garden:
Seth Godin waxes perceptive on Apple’s recent release of the new iPhone 3G, which was fraught with technological difficulty. According to Godin, Apple mishandled the use of market scarcity. He offers the following advice:
- Use the internet instead of forcing people to wait in line.
- Reward early patrons.
- Vary your treatment of customers depending on how much they have spent or used your product in the past.
- Orchestrate your release so you can catch mistakes early (i.e., use the internet).
- Give your early patrons a venue for reveling in their purchase.
Robert Velarde offers some suggestions for discernment in our choices of technology (HT: Challies).
Also, the Resurgence blog highlights YouVersion, a free online Bible application for the iPhone with some pretty helpful features (it even includes three Spanish translations!).
I saw WALL-E in the theater last night and really enjoyed it. I found Pixar’s creative muscle to be delightfully flexed. It’s not every day you can pitch a robotic love story and have it rake in $62.5 million during it’s opening weekend.
My brother, ever the political pundit, suggested an environmentalist agenda behind the movie. He may be onto something. After all, Josh Harris said the movie made him want to recycle everything.
However, in an interview with World Magazine’s Megan Basham, WALL-E screenwriter and director Andrew Stanton set the record straight:
“People made this connection that I never saw coming with the environmental movement, and that’s not what I was trying to do. I was just using the circumstances of people abandoning the Earth because it’s filled with garbage as a way to tell my story.
I always knew that I wanted WALL•E to be digging through trash for two reasons: One, I wanted him to be the lowest on the totem pole. It’s a janitorial job; it’s the saddest, lowest status amongst his kind; and it just makes him that much more of a lonely guy. Two, trash is really visual. Even the littlest kid understands when there’s stuff in the way and it needs to be picked up, so I didn’t need to spend time explaining his job. And then I just reverse-engineered from there, ‘OK, if there’s trash everywhere, how did it get there?’”
Seth Godin praised the film as a brave move on Pixar’s part.
Have you seen the movie? What did you think?
While we were in Syria a couple weeks ago, our team visited the ruins of a church dedicated to one Simeon Stylites. Born around 390 A.D., Simeon was an ascetic monk who lived on a platform atop a pillar for a total of 37 years until he died in 459. Minus the boulder, the structure Crystal and I are standing in front of is the remains of what used to be his 45-foot-high home (he lived on other smaller pillars earlier, but this rocky pole was his last perch).
Wikipedia explains:
“In order to get away from the ever increasing number of people who frequently came to him for prayers and advice, leaving him little if any time for his private austerities, Simeon discovered a pillar which had survived amongst ruins, formed a small platform at the top, and upon this determined to live out his life. It has been stated that, as he seemed to be unable to avoid escaping the world horizontally, he may have thought it an attempt to try to escape it vertically.”
His odd abode eventually drew a crowd, and he permitted visitors by ladder. From his roost he wrote letters and preached to those gathered below.
Simeon’s unconventional arrangements, of course, present all sorts of logistical questions. Some are probably best left unasked.
Side note: In 2002, magician David Blaine, in Simeonesque fashion, performed a stunt called “Vertigo” where he stood on top of a 90-foot-tall pillar in New York City for 35 hours.
With graduation season upon us, I thought it would be fitting to include a list of five classic commencement anthems that have graced the American scene in years past:
1. “Friends” by Michael W. Smith
2. “I Will Remember You” by Sarah McLachlan
3. “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)” by Green Day
4. “Graduation (Friends Forever)” by Vitamin C
5. “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)” by Baz Luhrmann (this was my wife’s submission)
Any others you would add?
Al Mohler examined Grand Theft Auto IV in a very helpful article yesterday. He addresses the question of whether violent video games produce violent children. Here is his answer:
“In some sense, we are what we play. This is not to say that every young male playing ‘Grand Theft Auto’ is now or will become a violent sexual predator who steals cars. That is clearly not the case. But it is to say that these players are filling their minds with these images and narratives and they are feeling the competitive exhilaration of engaging in immoral acts as players in a game that engages multiple senses and sensations. This is dangerous stuff for the soul.”
I think this is right on, and I think it also gets at a deeper issue. Whether or not an addictive consumption of Grand Theft Auto IV will produce an army of thugs is secondary. The primary concern is what kind of a heart games like these cultivate. Do they nurture a heart that finds pleasure in violence or theft or sexual immorality, even if it’s all virtual? According to Jesus, that is what defiles a person.
“…what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person.” (Matthew 15:18-20)
I’d be interested in any further thoughts you might have.
Today marks the release of the widely-acclaimed “Grand Theft Auto IV.”
BBC reports:
“Highly anticipated video game Grand Theft Auto (GTA) IV has gone on sale worldwide with analysts expecting it to smash sales records.
Many shops in the UK and the United States opened their doors at midnight.
The game is tipped to break the opening week sales figures of Microsoft’s Halo 3, and pull in up to $400m (£201m).
Early reviews of the game have hailed it a ‘masterpiece’ and it is on course to be the most critically acclaimed title of all time.”
Seth Schiesel from the New York Times wrote in a review of the game: “Grand Theft Auto IV is a violent, intelligent, profane, endearing, obnoxious, sly, richly textured and thoroughly compelling work of cultural satire disguised as fun.”
The game is rated “M” for mature audiences.
Allie Cook from World Magazine wrote an interesting article on April 24 titled “Video games = less violent kids?” In it she cites an interview with Harvard professors Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl Olson, who argue that there is no evidence to support the claim that playing violent video games necessarily produces greater tendencies toward violence in young people.
What do you think?
I was talking with my wife a few minutes ago, and she told me it would be a good idea to throw up a personal post about us and what we are doing right now.
I am currently enrolled in an apprenticeship program at Bethlehem Baptist Church called The Bethlehem Institute. I go to class on Mondays and Thursdays with eight other men. We sit in a circle and discuss everything from participles to poverty. It has been a mercy from God to be here.
Crystal, my wife, works part-time as a pediatric hemotology/oncology (blood diseases and cancer) nurse at Minneapolis Children’s Hospital. She goes to work three days a week with about eight other people. They neither sit in a circle nor debate participles. However, they do get to see poverty first-hand.
We have been married for two years, nine months, and twenty-six days. I love her two years, nine months, and twenty-six times more than I did the day we wore a tux and a white dress.
Random fact: Crystal likes to sew potholders, and I was wildly obsessed with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as a boy:
Russell Moore from Southern Seminary has posted a perceptive article on Charles Schulz, titled “You’re A Lost Soul, Charlie Brown.” In the article, Moore reviews the book “Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography” by David Michaelis.
Sadly, life for the Peanuts creator was not as idyllic as his fictional characters might suggest. After serving in World War II, Schulz immersed himself in the Church of God community and seemed to have been influenced in his lifestyle by the Christian ethic. However, as he began his cartooning career, this influence began to wane and he gradually declined into a Godless despair. Moore writes:
“Unlike Schulz’s view of comic strips–they should never have an ultimately unhappy ending–the end of Schulz’s life was the capstone of his despair. The man who, like Charlie Brown, always feared that no one could truly love him, died, in the words of another cartoonist, ‘angry at God, angry with friends, angry with fate–angry [about] all the troubles he could never let go of.’ This fellow artist concludes: ‘He had control over the [ Peanuts] universe for fifty years, but he had no control over his death. He didn’t accept it graciously. He wasn’t ready.’”
Schulz’ despair need not be the final word. Moore admonishes us to learn from it and love those who are gasping for hope:
“That kind of vanity, that kind of despair, is found all around us, even next to us in the pew. This book is a sober call to us to remember, to pray for, and to love those especially who will never believe they can be loved.”
This is the kind of love the world needs. We have all settled for cheap replacements. Hobbies. Facebook friends. Grades. Buffets. Jokes. Visa cards. They are caves of futility if they become our gods. Real love comes through blood, spikes, and splintered timber:
“For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person — though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die — but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:6-8).
May God grant us to drink deep from this love and pass the cup to others.
Charleton Heston, versatile movie actor and recent president of the NRA, passed away this past Saturday in Beverly Hills. The cause of his death has not been released. Heston had announced Alzheimer’s-related symptoms in 2002.
Anthony Sacramone over at First Things posted a helpful round-up of articles related to Heston’s death. He writes:
“Heston was one of those towering figures you could count on to bring a certain dignity to even the most surreal premises, and who wouldn’t get swallowed up or overwhelmed by CinemaScope. Who’s left of his generation of equal stature? Peter O’Toole. Maybe Connery. That’s about it.”
Heston was known for his roles in movies such as “The Ten Commandments,” “Ben Hur,” and “Planet of the Apes.”
A description of the actor at CNN.com includes the following comment:
“With his large, muscular build, well-boned face and sonorous voice, Heston proved the ideal star during the period when Hollywood was filling movie screens with panoramas depicting the religious and historical past. ‘I have a face that belongs in another century,’ he often remarked.”
The family plans to hold a private memorial service.
