Category: Culture Matters

Goodness, Truth, Beauty in the Cinema

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

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At the end of September, Pope Francis, addressing the annual plenary assembly of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications meeting in Rome, said “The challenge is to rediscover, through the means of social communication as well as by personal contact, the beauty that is at the heart of our existence and our journey, the beauty of faith and of the encounter with Christ.”

It is not a totally neglected challenge. The website, Impact Culture (http://www.impactingculture.com) recently published a list of films made in the last decade (in chronological order) – to celebrate the good movies that are still being made.

The Passion, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, and The Chronicles of Narnia are not on this list. That’s just because they’re explicitly Christian. These others are not.

“The cinema,” Pope John Paul II said, “with its vast possibilities, could become a powerful means of evangelization.” These movies undoubtedly tell some of the “good news”. If you haven’t seen all of them, we must issue a SPOILER ALERT. A lot of them are chosen because of the way they end, so… beware, you’re going to be told how how they end.

Spider-Man (2002)
I remember reading an article by a seminarian when this movie was in theaters, and what he said has stuck with me ever since. He compared Peter Parker to a priest. In the film, Peter’s Uncle Ben tells him, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Peter takes the words to heart – his superpowers are meant for something great, and he has a responsibility to use them for the good of society. What’s more, the weight of this responsibility (this is where the priest bit comes in) means that he must sacrifice his desire to be with Mary Jane, the girl of his dreams. Being Spider-Man is Peter’s vocation.

Finding Nemo (2003)
If you read Uninterested, you probably already know where I’m going with this one. In fact, a few of these films were selected on the basis of this same theme: the theme of fatherhood. It’s a theme that I think resonates with a very broad audience because fatherhood in our culture is so broken. Nemo’s father, Marlin, overcomes all his fears and character flaws, faces death and danger, all for love of his son. The film beautifully explores the meaning and power of friendship as well. The love of friends helps all the characters grow in one way or another to become better people (er… fish).
Also, you should know that I originally had a lot of other Pixar films on this list, but I figured that was a little unfair – Pixar is not the only studio making great movies (although they are probably the only one that consistently makes great movies). So Finding Nemo is basically representing all Pixar films on this list – it just happens to be my favorite one.

Cinderella Man (2005)
This movie, like Finding Nemo, was chosen mainly because of its portrayal of fatherhood, but also because of its broader theme of family. Few films show us a stable, nuclear family anymore. Despite all the obstacles this Depression-era family faces, the audience never worries that Jim Braddock will leave his wife and kids or that his wife will leave him because he can’t provide for them. The family is a source of strength and motivation for Jim Braddock – he does everything he does in the film for the sake of his family, and his family, in turn, is always there to support him.

I Am Legend (2007)
This film actually took me by surprise. The symbolism, especially at the end of the movie, is very obviously Christian. At least it was obvious to me when Will Smith literally gives his blood to save the zombies – his blood is pure, untainted, immune to the disease that has turned the rest of the human population into monsters, and he has spent his years of solitude searching for a way to use his blood to cure them, to make them human again. But as soon as he finds the cure, the monsters are closing in. He sacrifices his life to give a woman and her son a chance to get away, but not before he gives them a vial of his blood – the cure. A man pouring out his blood and giving his life to save humanity from their own depravity… sound familiar?

Lars and the Real Girl (2007)
Far too few people have seen this movie, and when I tell you what it’s about, you might think I’m crazy for putting it on this list. Lars is a reclusive young man whose only real companion is a sex doll he ordered on the internet. But trust me, this movie is not what you think. It’s actually a very sweet story about community. When Lars orders this doll, he succumbs to the delusion that she’s a real person, and we soon find out that this delusion – this illness – is a manifestation of Lars’ fear for his pregnant sister-in-law’s life. The love and compassion of the small town community around Lars helps him to overcome his illness and his fears.

3:10 to Yuma (2007)
This is another father one. Christian Bale’s character is, in a lot of ways, similar to Marlin. He starts out afraid. A coward. But by movie’s end, he’s stepping in front of bullets for his son. There’s also something beautiful here about Russell Crowe’s character. He’s evil through and through for almost the entire movie. But by the end, we see the flicker of mercy and nobility.

The Dark Knight (2008)
Like I Am Legend, I think the Christian symbolism in this one is hard to miss. Batman chooses to take on the sins of another. Putting his physical life on the line for others is nothing new – he’s always done that. But this time around, he’s willing to be counted among sinners and thieves for the sake of Gotham City.

The Blind Side (2009)
This one’s almost too easy – I debated putting this one in the same category with LOTR and The Passion. I really don’t think the filmmakers realized what they had on their hands, though, so I’m putting it on the list. This movie shows us what it really means to put our money where our mouth is as Christians. The themes of family, honesty, integrity, and courage are all explored in this little gem.

The King’s Speech (2010)
There’s nothing obviously Christian about this film, but I love it for its portrayal of marriage. The king has a strong, happy marriage as does his speech therapist. The husbands love their wives, and the wives support their husbands. It strikes me now that I’m writing this that the films I’ve chosen for their portrayal of marriage and family are period pieces… interesting. Anyway, there’s also a lot here about duty and courage and patriotism too.

Tangled (2010)
Okay, this is my one cheat. I chose this movie more for what it’s not than for what it is. I want to draw a comparison here between this movie and The Princess and the Frog. I was a little disturbed by the latter, and it really put me in doubt about Disney’s ability to deliver quality children’s movies. The prominence of voodoo and the assertion that voodoo can be good just really rubbed me the wrong way – probably because I know that the voodoo culture actually exists and thrives in some regions. Tangled, on the other hand, is purely fairytale. It’s set in an imaginary place, and the “magic” in it is not rooted in reality in any way. Plus, Rapunzel is one of the better heroines I’ve seen in recent times – a strong, driving protagonist, but still completely feminine.

So who is obsessed then?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

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The real story revealed by the brouhaha over “that” interview is what it tells us about much of the international secularist media and it’s take on the Christian message. The interview is a moving and penetrating reflection on that message, our response to it, and ways in which we might be transmitting it to each other. For the media, deaf and blind to the spirit which moves the man who gave it, it was about obsession with sex.

In 12,000 words, about 18 pages printed out, the Pope mentions abortion and homosexuality a total of three times. As has been pointed out, a search for other buzzwords shows that Pope Francis referred to God 37 times, Jesus 26 times and St. Ignatius 15 times. As Word On Fire’s Fr. Steve Grunow said on American radio, “Pope Francis referred to Italian and German opera more than he did abortion and homosexuality.”

Wake up! There is no obsession with sex in the teaching of the Catholic Church. What there is, however, is an obsession by the media with the teachng of the Catholic Church on human sexual behaviour. This is plainly because the consensus on this realm of human behaviour within the media generally is deeply resentful of the Christian understanding and teaching on the nature and purpose of human sexuality.

The media pursues this obsession by reporting incessantly on every utterance from the Church on the subject, every sign of any rebellion or resistance to it inside the Church, to the exclusion of the rest of the entire corpus of its teaching on the Decalogue. It would be unfair if the Pope were to blame his bishops for an obsession just because the media grossly distorts the balance of everything they teach, from pastoral letter to pastoral letter, from homily to homily, day after day, year after year. He hasn’t, and they are adding to their distortion by putting words into his mouth. If anyone has a case to answer about obsessions, it is the media.

Kathryn Jean Lopez – in a rare exception in the flood of coverage on the Pops’s interview – points out in a piece she wrote for Fox News that not everything in the world is about sex and politics. That message may take the Irish Times, The New York Times, the BBC, among many more media prganizations, a few more homilies and interviews with Pope Francis to understand. As Shelia Liaugminas concludes on her blog on MercatorNet, “The Catholic Church – or at least those preachers and teachers who are outspoken on matters concerning human sexuality, especially when catechetical discussions are turned into clashes in the public square for political or cultural reasons – is often accused of being obsessed with sex. But the obsession might just be the media’s.” I dont think there is any “might” about it.

A letter in today’s Irish Independent

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

A letter in today’s Irish Independent tells us that “there is insufficient moral consensus in Ireland to ground consideration of the country’s future.”

“The clash of antagonistic wills,” Philip O’Neill writes, “evident in the abortion debate and in current discussion of what to do in Syria or with our economy, often parades as rational debate, leaving us with little more than intensified divisions.” So far so good. Certainly, a lot of parading, a good deal of intensity and deep, deep division. Parading is clearly a sham but intensity and division are no bad things in themselves. Fear and loathing of both, which O’Neill seems to harbor, may well be harmful if they lead you to some of his conclusions.

“The continuing drift away from the church”, he writes, “is perhaps the most telling change. However, this is not indicative of a new paganism but a justifiable expression of dissatisfaction with a form of religion that had become radically focused on itself. Even the priests express unease at the church’s sometimes neurotic fear of the slightest shift from fidelity to its programme.”

I think we are dealing with more than the “slightest” shifts in contemporary Irish Catholicism here. If the utterances emerging from some of the followers and sympathesiers of the Ascociation of Catholic Priests are anything to go by, a good few Protestants are more in tune with orthodox Catholicism than with this kind of “fidelity”.

Who ever said morality was about consensus? Well, sadly, a lot of people did – and that is where the radical divide lies. The Catholic Church’s teaching will never be developed or defined by consensus. It is a given – by God – or it is nothing. Otherwise we will just be indulging in another bit of democratic groping for the truth. Mankind in human society deepens in its understanding of the revealed truth down through the ages. That is very different from a process of consensus.

There is no doubt but that a search is involved if we are to know the Truth. But is is not to be found in consensus. It will be found in the way and in the spirit which Pope Francis’ encyclical, Lumen Fidei, suggests when he quotes Saint Irenaeus of Lyons who tells how Abraham, before hearing God’s voice, had already sought him “in the ardent desire of his heart” and “went throughout the whole world, asking himself where God was to be found”, until “God had pity on him who, all alone, had sought him in silence”.

The creeping statist menace

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

When I saw a headline in the current issue of The Week it looked like they had got an article about Irish Education Minister, Ruairi Quinn. It said, “You are a bad person if you send your children to a private school.”

That is more or less what Ruairi Quinn, with his ideologically-driven Labour Party and the social engineers in his Education Ministry certainly seem to think. Just this month he has unveiled more legislative proposals to cut the ground from under those evil parents who dare to attempt to form their own judgments as to what kind of school might give their children a better chance in life.

Quinn is proposing, among other things, to put a cap in the number of children any school can accept from families of past pupils of that school. In other words, the great statist leveling machine – regardless of whether that leveling might be down as well as up – trumps parental choice, experience, judgment and loyalty to the old school tie.

The quote was not in fact from Quinn. It was from across the Atlantic, but it surely came from the same soviet ideology to which Quinn subscribes where the family, individual preference, and parental responsibility are always sacrificed to the socialist pipe-dream of an egalitarianism totally divorced from human nature.

Jack Jennings on The Huffington Post dew our attention to the Council for American Private Education’s statistics showing us that there are 33,366 private schools in the US – 25% of the total. Because they tend to be much smaller than publicly funded schools, they cater for just one in ten of the school-going population. Nor are they all expensive boarding schools for the elite, the Post told us. The vast majority have a religious affiliation, and the bulk of these are Catholic.

This freedom of choice really annoyed Allison Benedikt on Slate.com. My take on this is simple, she said, “You are a bad person if you send your children to private school.” That parents choose to send their children to these schools because they live in urban areas with bad schools, or because their kids are gifted or have learning issues, or because they want small classes and personal attention and courses in modern film and Mandarin, cut no ice with her at all.  You know who else wants those things? She asked. “Everyone.”

When affluent parents pull their kids out of public schools, her argument went on, those schools lose the clout and resources they deserve. So don’t run away from the schools poor families are forced to depend on. “Send your kids to school with their kids,” and then fight to make things better for everyone.

Poverty is blamed for everything in this world view, ignoring all the other multiple factors which contribute to quality – or the lack of it – in education. In other words, sacrifice your kids to this social ideology which tells us that the state and not the family is the heart and soul of society. The state in all things knows best.

Rod Dreher, on TheAmericanConservative.com, answered her, describing her line as “the educational equivalent of Soviet economics”. Am I supposed to believe I have a moral obligation, he asked, to give my kids a “crappy” education, “when I know something better and higher is available?” For liberals, he continued, all that matters is that “we are united in the state, no matter how stupid, ignorant, and poor it makes us”.

Another commentator pointed out that Benedikt was also mistaken about her basic premise. John Carney on CNBC.com said competition improves education and numerous studies show that when public high schools have to compete with private schools, they raise their game in every way. So parents who send their kids to private schools aren’t doing something wrong – “they are performing a verifiable public good”.

What hope is there that Ireland might escape from the grip of this wretched ideology? Little at present, unfortunately. It appears that Irish social public policy, in health and education particularly, is captive to a clique of unreconstructed ‘sixties and ‘seventies apparatchiks who would have felt perfectly at home in the soviet block 40 years ago.

An Eastern European observer of the Irish scene recently observed that in terms of the onslaught which he has seen the Irish State making on Irish institutions still maintaining a Christian ethos, the Communists in his country 40 years ago were very much in second place. They haven’t gone away, you know.

Moved by the muse…

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

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Simon Schama, currently exploring the history of the Jews on BBC Two, is the guest contributor to Prospect Magazine’s quirky column, “If I ruled the world” this month.

While saying emphatically that he does not want the job he does give us a short wish-list of some of the trivial and not so trivial challenges he would take up if forced to put on the mantle of world leader.

In the latter category is the not very surprising but highly commendable desire to make it compulsory for people to study history up to 16 years of age – and for a minimum of two hours a week. His reflections on the subject are worth relaying, as also are his take on religious tolerance.

“It’s important for children to learn history because if you don’t know where we’ve come from, you don’t have much of an anchorage for the present. For example, once upon a time, Britain was a compulsively, ferociously Christian country. We fought the Civil War over religion and our religious wars didn’t stop until the 18th century. Because of that, we should be in a position to understand when religion, for better or worse, becomes political, as it is in a large part of the world.

“If I ruled the world, I would make it impossible to make “sin” a crime. I would make it a matter of international human rights that nobody should ever be prosecuted, much less punished, for blasphemy. Jefferson argued for that in 1770 but it doesn’t seem to have come about. I’m not an atheist, but I do think that everybody should be allowed with absolute impunity to profess whatever religion they have, or none.”

“History”, he concludes, “is a tragic muse. One of its great founding moments is the Peloponnesian War and the whole majestic, terrifying drama of that builds up to the expedition against Syracuse that sees Athens sailing into massive hubris. That is good, honest, western history. It should never be self-congratulation; it should keep people awake at night.”

Ruairi Quinn, Ireland’s Minister for Education, who is killing any real history teaching in Irish schools, and other totalitarians or would-be totalitarians masquerading as liberals, please take note.

Also in this month’s Prospect, A. C. Grayling touches on the uses and abuses of history – for there is no doubt but that the greatest villians have put history in shackles to serve their nefarious ends.

He writes of the abuse of history to serve the ends of “the arrant nonsense we call nationalism, patriotism and other dangerous absurdities”. Noting that most borders between states were drawn in the blood of wars and are highly artificial things, “a fiction of history” – in other words, not really history but only imagined history – “an uneven line on a map turned into a fetish.”

“All over the planet”, he notes, “there are claims by one country to ownership of part or even the whole of another. One of the more comical is Spain’s claim to Gibraltar – comical because Spain possesses about a dozen Gibraltars on and around the North African coast and even inside France… Yet Spain wants Gibraltar ‘back’. It has about as much right to it as Turkey has to Spain itself, through the historical link of the Caliphate.”

He talks a lot of sense. Why can’t we all grow up and preoccupy ourselves about the things that really matter?

The threatening conflagration of the Islamic world

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

David Brooks had an interesting – and worrying – article in the New York Times on August 29, in which he quoted this assessment of the Arab crisis which – in more optimistic times – we used to call the Arab Spring.

The strife appears to be spreading. Sunni-Shiite violence in Iraq is spiking upward. Reports in The Times and elsewhere have said that many Iraqis fear their country is sliding back to the worst of the chaos experienced in the last decade. Even Turkey, Pakistan, Bahrain and Kuwait could be infected. “It could become a regional religious war similar to that witnessed in Iraq 2006-2008, but far wider and without the moderating influence of American forces,” wrote Gary Grappo, a retired senior Foreign Service officer with long experience in the region.

“It has become clear over the last year that the upheavals in the Islamic and Arab world have become a clash within a civilization rather than a clash between civilizations,” Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies wrote recently. “The Sunni versus Alawite civil war in Syria is increasingly interacting with the Sunni versus Shiite tensions in the Gulf that are edging Iraq back toward civil war. They also interact with the Sunni-Shiite, Maronite and other confessional struggles in Lebanon.”

The borders of Islam remain bloody but the heartlands of the Middle East and North Africa now seem far more threatening. The dimensions, the character, and the irrationality of this conflict are such that the rest of the world may have little option other than looking on in horror.

A voice from an age of innocence – and wisdom

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters2 Comments
Contending with the Waste Land

Certainly, if the headlines are anything to go by – and it’s better not to go too far beyond the headlines on this one – August was a wicked month for teenagers and their reputation for any kind of propriety and common sense this year.

Did “Slanegirl” and Miley Cyrus really say it all? Hopefully not. Nevertheless, something I found among some old papers – harking back to the month of August, precisely, 110 years ago – made me feel a little like old Tiresias contemplating more young men carbuncular than even he had to perceive. It was the contrast which hit home.

On an August day in 1903, a young 18-year-old girl was passing the time in her family home in Donegal when an inconsequential idea struck her. The house may have been undergoing repairs – or at least some floorboards were loose. She got the idea, executed it and then, probably forgot all about it. It took nearly a hundred years for her idea, in terms of the request which it embodied, to have any consequence at all.

Annie Brigid – for that was her name – wrote a message, put it in a bottle, and placed it under the floorboards in her house. Her little trick only came to light in 1997 when workmen with the National Parks and Wildlife Service – which now owns the house – discovered her bottle and its message.

That a young girl should do this in an idle moment is not what is particularly interesting. What her message reveals about herself and her time is what is remarkable. It is remarkable in the stark contrast it shows between her preoccupations, her vision of life and its ultimate destiny, and those reflected in the behaviour of our contemporaries of a similar age.

Annie’s message was this: “I, Annie Brigid Evangeline MacGlinchey, aged 18, write this on 27th day of August, 1903, and intend putting it in a bottle under the floorboards upstairs. Whoever finds it, I ask that person to pray for my soul. If not, my ghost will walk about upstairs. Annie B. E. MacGlinchey, Undergraduate, R.U.I.” (Royal University of Ireland).

A jest? Yes, but like many jests, revealing more than they may mean to reveal. The poignancy for us comes with the question, would any teenager in a thousand today, in a 100 thousand even, think of writing a message like this? Among the few million on Copacabana beach this summer would we have found even a few who might think it important to ask someone to pray for their soul?

I wonder what Annie Brigid might have thought of the preoccupations of contemporary Ireland this summer when a Bishop was heaped with sanctimonious opprobrium for failing to feel the pain of those who saw their relatives and friends pass from this life. He had the temerity to try to bring his Catholic people back to an understanding of what funeral Masses were supposed to be about, intercession with God for the souls of the departed. Annie knew, and we might remember her request in gratitude for reminding us of what we foolishly choose to forget.

Addendum – in case you don’t feel my Tiersian pain, read this from the Washington Post today.

Campaigning journalism has corrupted our media

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

BRENDAN O’NEILL writes in the current post fro Spiked.com,
This week there was international outrage over the questioning of a Guardian journalist’s partner by anti-terrorism police at Heathrow. But there was no outrage, zilch, over the revelation on Thursday that a Sun journalist who was arrested in a dawn raid and subsequently spent 13 months on bail on suspicion of handling a stolen mobile phone had in fact never set eyes on the phone. Nine hours’ questioning of a friend of the Guardian provokes a storm; the placing of scores of tabloid journalists on year-long bail, often on very flimsy charges, causes no storm. Double standards have never been as explicit as this, and it’s press freedom that suffers – for that requires moral consistency, a willingness to defend redtop as well as respectable hacks from the long nose of the state.

Has international media ever been as blind as this? Add the persecution of Christians in Egypt to this, not to mention the shameless non-coverage of the Gosnel trial, the gay agenda support without even a shadow of serious analysis, and you can only conclude that journalism has surrendered itself to blind campaigning at the expense of telling the simple truth.