This year’s Ash Wednesday sermon comes to us from Jason Micheli: Whenever I do a wedding rehearsal, I like to quash the unhelpful romanticism of the moment by pointing out to the bridal party that the ancient Church stole the outline of the marriage service from the Roman ceremony for the transferal of property. Who […]
Game Over: A Broken King, a Scapegoat, and an Imputed Legacy on Game of Thrones
It’s been a fun ride, fellow Game of Thrones viewers. But all games must end, and most of them have a winner. It seems silly to warn that spoilers abound now that the show is over, yet spoilers abound below! One of the things that made Game of Thrones such a popular show was its […]
The Straight Road Out of a Buried World
November 11 came and went as unexceptionally as any Sunday ever does, a day living under the permanent shadow of Monday, almost exclusively spent hoping against hope to recuperate before the work week resumes. Most Sundays, however, don’t mark one hundred years since the armistice that halted the First World War and gave the day […]
Fear and the Reality of Horror, Part 3
Find the other installments in “Fear and the Reality of Horror” here: Part 1 and Part 2. The perpetual complication that hinders the attempt to understand evil is that of isolating what exactly evil is in its being. In many ways it seems as plain as the meaning of time: immediately intuited as a resource […]
The Office: Middle Earth
As we brace ourselves for the final Hobbit film hitting screens this week, SNL produced a truly funny parody:
For more along these lines, check out Stephen Colbert’s interview with Smaug.
Star Wars Reticence
On this site, it is hard to miss the emphasis on God’s grace and our passivity. Grace as God’s overriding disposition toward the human condition in Christ and passivity as suffering the work of an interested and loving God on His people. All of the grace, celebration, joy, redemption, and catharsis we receive rest on […]
Escapism? Life as Real as British Fantasy Television
This piece comes from Lynn MacDougall, who reflects on last month’s Fall Mockingbird Conference, the suffering human pull between good-and-evil and, of course, the illustrious genre of fantasy television. “In each of us, two natures are at war – the good and the evil. All our lives the fight goes on between them, and one […]
A Couple Tolkien Quotes
John Ronald Reuel (Reuel: coolest name ever!) Tolkien on the Theology of the Cross and the Freedom of Humility: I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’ — though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) […]
Another Week Ends: More Pale King, Game of Thrones, Moonwalker, Manny Ramirez, Take The Money and Run
Happy Tax Day! We hope you’ve enjoyed this first week on the new site. We certainly have. Be sure to be in touch as you notice things/bugs, either via the form at the bottom of each post or info@mbird.com. Two small updates: 1. The glossary section will be returning soon-ish, but in rewritten form. In […]
