Movies: a machine that generates empathy

Roger Ebert said movies are “like a machine that generates empathy.”

God can draw a straight line with a crooked stick

"God can strike a straight stroke by a crooked stick."
~ Thomas Watson, English Puritan

"God can draw a straight line with a crooked stick."
~ Martin Luther, German Reformer

"God uses crooked sticks to draw straight lines."
~ Ignatius Loyola, Founder of the Jesuit Order

"God writes straight with crooked lines."
~ Spanish/Portuguese proverb

quotes researched by Virginia Huguenot, librarian

"Who is a hero? He who turns his enemy into a friend.”

“Who is a hero? He who turns his enemy into a friend.” 
~ The Talmud, Avot de-Rabbi Natan 23

Spirituality

SPIRITUALITY

Spirituality is "the progressive unlearning of the strange ideas about God you've been taught..."
~ Rabbi Kaplan

"We are not human beings having a spiritual experience;
we are spiritual beings having a temporary human experience."
~ Christian philosopher Teilhard de Chardin

"You were born to walk with God...
So why would you walk alone?"
~ Dr. Steve McSwain

Confront the Major Anxiety

 "All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership."
~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Peculiar traits of rich people

Peculiar traits of rich people

Morgan Housel, The Motley Fool 8 a.m. EDT April 19, 2014
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2014/04/19/peculiar-traits-of-rich-people/7871695/

They are (mostly pleasant) sociopaths

But sociopaths can disregard emotional events that cause normal people to worry and panic.  ...
My lack of empathy means I don't get caught up in other people's panic. It gives me a unique perspective. And in the financial world, being able to think opposite the pack is all you need.

Napoleon's definition of a military genius was "The man who can do the average thing when all those around him are going crazy."

They care about time periods most can't comprehend

Long-term investing is the only sane choice. But it's unnatural. ... 
"If you look carefully," Bill Bonner writes in his book Family Fortunes, "almost all Old Money secrets can be traced to a single source: a longer-term outlook."

They don't give a damn what you think of them

Dilbert creator Scott Adams once wrote: "One of the best pieces of advice I've ever heard goes something like this: If you want success, figure out the price, then pay it. It sounds trivial and obvious, but if you unpack the idea it has extraordinary power."

The price of being rich is really simple: You must live below your means. ...
A lot of them are after control over their time, which comes from having a wide gap between what they can afford to buy and what they actually buy.

Having the emotional backbone to drive an uglier car than you can afford, live in a smaller house you can afford, eat out less often than you can afford, and wear cheaper clothes than you can afford is rare. In my experience, less than 10% of people can do it in a meaningful way. It's the cost of being rich, and most people have no desire to pay the price.
"A miser grows rich by seeming poor," poet William Shenstone wrote. "An extravagant man grows poor by seeming rich." I don't think it's any more complicated than that.

“My life got reduced down to the 2 most important things, and we're so fortunate, I'm so fortunate”

SURVIVOR STORY: Mom holds baby during WA landslide
http://fox44.com/news/survivor-story-mom-holds-baby-during-wa-landslide

SEATTLE (CNN) — We’re hearing for the first time from the mother who held onto her son as last month's landslide in Washington State wiped out her home and her whole community.
Ask Amanda Skorjanc how she's doing, it's one question she'll never take lightly.
“I thought I wasn't going to make it, so I'm feeling good,” Skorjanc told CNN affiliate KING-TV.
Good, despite crushing injuries. Her legs, in casts. Her arms in a sling. Her bloodshot eye. But they can only tell part of the story. On March 22nd, Amanda and Duke were home. Her partner, Ty, Duke's dad, had just left for the hardware store.
“And then I looked out our front door, it was like a movie, houses were exploding. And the next thing I see is our neighbor's chimney coming into the front door. And I turned and held Duke and I did not let him go,” Amanda said.
Duke and Amanda would literally ride out the slide. It would carry them 600 feet before the earth beneath them would finally stop moving. Baby Duke was still in her arms.
“He was dirty and a little blue and I thought I was losing him so I would give him little...rubs, and I would pat on his chest and I would say stay with me bud, and I would ask God to not take him in front of me,”
Amanda heard someone screaming, a passerby, is anybody out there, the voice called.
“I was just the right guy there at the right time,” Cody Wesson explained.
Cody was the first to hear Amanda and Duke.
“As soon as I heard that voice I knew that he was going to be OK,” she said.
Cody took Duke from her arms and rescuers took out a chain saw to free Amanda from the debris, including the couch and recliner she credits for cushioning their ride.
“I know that God was with us because as it was going I cried out to him, I said please save us,” Amanda said.
Baby Duke is now recovering at Seattle Children's Hospital. He is best medicine for his mom.
“He's my motivation. Every time I get an update on him, it motivates me even more, to do my physical therapy no matter how much it hurts,” Amanda said.
Surrounded by cards and letters from around the world, as much as this family has lost, they know they still have what matters most.
“My life got reduced down to the 2 most important things, and we're so fortunate, I'm so fortunate,” said Ty Suddarth, who is Amanda’s partner and Duke’s father.
“We will pay it forward for the rest of our life,” Amanda explained.

Four things that make you stupid: sex, envy, a love of power, and wealth

"Just as L.B.J. observed that the two things that make politicians more stupid than anything else are sex and envy, W. [Bush] said that he was not surprised by how Putin evolved because the three things that can change someone are 'a love of power, wealth and sex.'"

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/02/19/opinion/dowd-history-get-me-rewrite.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20140219&_r=0&referrer=

Three Irrational Beliefs

Leadership Journal

http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/2011/summer/irrationalbeliefs.html

Three Irrational Beliefs ...  that I constantly have to fight

David Slagle

September 26, 2011

...

Albert Ellis (1913-2007) was a psychologist, a devout atheist, and until late in life, openly hostile toward all things religious. His views on human sexuality were antithetical to the teachings of Scripture. For those reasons (and because he's dead) he would not be on the short list of speakers at most pastors retreats, but he does offer some wisdom and sanity for weary Christian leaders.

Ellis is most widely known for his Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, so named because it is directed at irrationality. Ellis theorized that much of our inner turmoil is caused by our tendency to embrace irrational beliefs, which leads to stress, low self-worth, frustration, conflict, anger, avoidance, procrastination, diminished productivity, and difficulty in relating to others.

He identified three irrational core beliefs that cause the most trouble:

#1: "I absolutely MUST, at all times, perform outstandingly well and win the approval of significant others. If I fail in these important—and sacred—respects, that is awful and I am a bad, incompetent, unworthy person, who will probably always fail and deserves to suffer."

#2: "Other people with whom I relate absolutely MUST, under practically all conditions, treat me nicely, considerately, and fairly. Otherwise, it is terrible and they are rotten, bad, unworthy people who will always treat me badly and should be severely punished for acting so abominably to me."

#3: "The conditions under which I live absolutely MUST, at practically all times, be favorable, safe, hassle-free, and quickly and easily enjoyable. If they are not, it's awful and horrible and I can't ever enjoy myself at all. My life is hardly worth living."

…

David Slagle is pastor of Veritas Church in Decatur, Georgia.

 

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today International/Leadership Journal.

Fear of the Cross

"You can't be afraid to do something just because there is a cross involved."

~ Truthful Grace

Make a new ending

"Nobody can go back and start a new beginning,
but anyone can start today and make a new ending."
~ Maria Robinson

Existence without God

If it were somehow possible that God could be removed from the universe and I were left alone in it, I don't think my cells would be able to function.  All the energy in my body comes from God.  I would be like a cell phone with a dead battery.

~ Truthful Grace

a true theology of tragedy

Image, Issue 61
imagejournal.org/page/journal/editorial-statements/the-tragic-sense-of-life

Gregory Wolfe

The Tragic Sense of Life

quote:

"The notion that Christianity is somehow alien to tragedy—that it is simply and straightforwardly “comic” because the resurrection makes for a happy ending—could not be more radically wrong. In his essay “Tragedy and Christian Faith,” Hans Urs von Balthasar singles out three essential elements of tragedy: that the good things of the world cannot sustain themselves and are lost; that this places us in a position of contradiction or alienation; and that this condition is bound up with an “opaque guilt,” in which individual moral responsibility cannot account for all suffering, leaving us subject to a mysterious “inherited curse.”

According to von Balthasar, Christ does not banish tragedy but carries it into the heart of God. Christ “fulfills the contradiction of existence...not by dissolving the contradiction but by bearing that affirmation of the human condition as it is through still deeper darknesses in finem, ‘to the end,’ as love....”

To go to the end means...not only entering total defeat, the total bankruptcy of all earthly power and every project of salvation, but to go to the end of the night of sin, in that descent into hell where the one who dies and the one who is dead come into an atemporal state of being lost, in which no more hope of an end is possible, nor even the possibility of looking back to a beginning. And this as the conclusion of a tragedy of earthly life that itself already stood under the law of contradiction: since God’s omnipotence wished and was able to make itself known ontologically in the Incarnation as powerlessness and unutterable limitation....

This may sound grandly theological, but I would argue that it has the most concrete and far-reaching consequences for the way we experience the world. If faith is to remain true to experience and not become a sentimentalized blindness, it must be permeated by the tragic sense of life. Unless we can believe that God has willingly submitted himself to the harsh necessities of the created order, then we will be helpless when those necessities lay us low. We can only lean in to these forces, and know that such a posture is not passivity but action of the profoundest sort. Passion is not passive.

My tutor was right to challenge my reading of King Lear, but is it possible to embrace the fullness of this tragedy and yet see in its darkness an echo of the divine self-emptying? I think so.

For von Balthasar the resurrection is not “in any way a fifth act with a happy ending” but a mysterious affirmation of a love that can bear tragedy to the end. That is why, in the forty days that followed it, Christ was not magically made whole but bore the marks of his passion, and would not rest until we placed our hands—and our hearts—inside them."

 

as accessed 10/26/13

Catholic without the revelation-but we need to experience grief, and we ought to grieve

Movie Review of The Counselor

www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2013/october-web-only/counselor.html

Alissa Wilkinson, Christianity Today's chief film critic

"It's vanity, in McCarthy's view, to think that we've got a new breed of evil today. It's the same old evil, only now it has bigger guns. And it still strikes at random. This is what The Counselor is about.

The story in a McCarthy tale is secondary to what the story is driving at, which is always the same two points. One, the world is older than it ever has been, and might be ending at any time; two, in the meantime, it's often a very bad place to live, full of random, senseless evil. There is no victory in a Cormac McCarthy novel. The best anyone can hope for is to survive the apocalypse, or hope his son will survive. McCarthy is not a religious man in the traditional sense of the word, but he was raised Catholic, and religion crops up in this film frequently as a topic of discussion. (I've read his worldview described as "Catholic without the revelation.")" ...

"But that hint of hope [in McCarthy's screenplay] is nowhere to be found in the film, nor a number of the original monologues, apparently removed to get the story to track better with viewers.
It's a shame, because there is still something very important at the heart of this film, and at the heart of all of McCarthy's work. This world is broken, broken beyond repair. Christians believe that after history's tragedies end, hope will be fulfilled—but our too-common mistake is to skip over the tragedy as fast as possible in our eagerness to get to the "redemption" part. (Gregory Wolfe writes of this beautifully in his Image editorial "The Tragic Sense of Life.") Anyone who has experienced genuine, senseless tragedy is familiar with the glib statements people make to smooth things over and keep on living.

But we need to experience grief, and we ought to grieve. We should to look around and spend time with the brokenness, feeling the difficulty of human embodiedness, allowing the sadness to take its time with us. This is not how things ought to be. Even Jesus wept, moments before raising Lazarus from the dead.

McCarthy's world holds little hope for redemption at all, but what he gets exactly right is that our existence seems senselessly tragic, and we're right to chafe. Near the film's end, we watch the Counselor gradually realize the full extent of the loss that evil is inflicting on him, and for a moment, we believe it's because of his wrongdoing. Certainly, the penalty outweighs the crime—the brutality is not excusable—but he still did a bad thing. He deserves to pay.

But then The Counselor becomes a McCarthy story, not a simple morality tale: he walks out into the street and right into the middle of a vigil that a number of the city's weeping residents are holding in memory of their own lost loved ones. He wanders through their midst with a look of wonder. It's Ellis's point in No Country: Whatcha got ain't nothin new. The Counselor is paying for his sins, but plenty of people lose their loved ones brutally without having engaged in illegal drug trafficking. Correlation does not imply causation. Evil is in us, but also bigger than us.

So that is why we need Cormac McCarthy alongside Victor Hugo and Shakespeare and Dickens: he reminds us (with a particularly American sensibility) that this world is broken and tragic and not fair, and that pushing past that fact too fast is an error we can't afford to make, for the good of our souls. Even if you believe in a final restoration, you need to feel why it's necessary.

Blessed, after all, are those who mourn." ...

"The film is rated R for "graphic violence, some grisly images, strong sexual content and language," which should surprise exactly nobody—but it's rough, even for McCarthy, and it would be difficult to recommend that most people see the movie."

as accessed 10/26/13

"This tension [between Christ and the church] takes us out of ourselves continuously."

quotes from Pope Francis:

“The Society of Jesus is an institution in tension,” the pope replied, “always fundamentally in tension. A Jesuit is a person who is not centered in himself. The Society itself also looks to a center outside itself; its center is Christ and his church. So if the Society centers itself in Christ and the church, it has two fundamental points of reference for its balance and for being able to live on the margins, on the frontier. If it looks too much in upon itself, it puts itself at the center as a very solid, very well ‘armed’ structure, but then it runs the risk of feeling safe and self-sufficient.

The Society must always have before itself the Deus semper maior, the always-greater God, and the pursuit of the ever greater glory of God, the church as true bride of Christ our Lord, Christ the king who conquers us and to whom we offer our whole person and all our hard work, even if we are clay pots, inadequate.

This tension takes us out of ourselves continuously. The tool that makes the Society of Jesus not centered in itself, really strong, is, then, the account of conscience, which is at the same time paternal and fraternal, because it helps the Society to fulfill its mission better.”

 

The pope is referring to the requirement in the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus that the Jesuit must “manifest his conscience,” that is, his inner spiritual situation, so that the superior can be more conscious and knowledgeable about sending a person on mission.

 

~ Pope Francis, Sept. 2013
http://www.americamagazine.org/pope-interview

Discernment - "I am always wary of ... the first thing that comes to my mind"

quotes from Pope Francis:

“Discernment is one of the things that worked inside St. Ignatius. For him it is an instrument of struggle in order to know the Lord and follow him more closely. I was always struck by a saying that describes the vision of Ignatius: non coerceri a maximo, sed contineri a minimo divinum est (“not to be limited by the greatest and yet to be contained in the tiniest—this is the divine”).
...
Thanks to magnanimity, we can always look at the horizon from the position where we are. That means being able to do the little things of every day with a big heart open to God and to others. That means being able to appreciate the small things inside large horizons, those of the kingdom of God.

“This motto,” the pope continues, “offers parameters to assume a correct position for discernment, in order to hear the things of God from God’s ‘point of view.’

...

Discernment is always done in the presence of the Lord, looking at the signs, listening to the things that happen, the feeling of the people, especially the poor. My choices, including those related to the day-to-day aspects of life, like the use of a modest car, are related to a spiritual discernment that responds to a need that arises from looking at things, at people and from reading the signs of the times. Discernment in the Lord guides me in my way of governing.

 

But I am always wary of decisions made hastily. I am always wary of the first decision, that is, the first thing that comes to my mind if I have to make a decision. This is usually the wrong thing. I have to wait and assess, looking deep into myself, taking the necessary time. The wisdom of discernment redeems the necessary ambiguity of life and helps us find the most appropriate means, which do not always coincide with what looks great and strong.”

~ Pope Francis, Sept. 2013
http://www.americamagazine.org/pope-interview

to venture into the darkness without losing the way

quote from Pope Francis:

"The church must warm the hearts of men and women. ...
"Thorough and adequate formation" is key, he said, because religious and lay Catholic communicators need to be able to venture into the darkness of indifference without losing their way; "to listen to (people's) dreams without being seduced; to share their disappointments without becoming despondent; to sympathize with those whose lives are falling apart without losing our own strength and identity," he said.

God is in every person’s life

"I have a dogmatic certainty: God is in every person’s life. God is in everyone’s life. Even if the life of a person has been a disaster, even if it is destroyed by vices, drugs or anything else—God is in this person’s life.
You can, you must try to seek God in every human life. Although the life of a person is a land full of thorns and weeds, there is always a space in which the good seed can grow.
You have to trust God."
~ Pope Francis, Sept. 2013
http://www.americamagazine.org/pope-interview

See everything; turn a blind eye to much; correct a little

“See everything; turn a blind eye to much; correct a little.”
~ Pope Francis, Sept. 2013

The audacity to question God: An interview with Greg Boyd

The audacity to question God: An interview with Greg Boyd
Jonathan Merritt, Sept 19, 2013
http://jonathanmerritt.religionnews.com/2013/09/19/audacity-question-god-interview-greg-boyd/

quoted excerpt:

Bestselling author Greg Boyd rejects the idea that faith is rooted in certainty and is the opposite of doubt.
Pastor Gregory Boyd (Ph.D., Princeton Theological Seminary) made a name for himself years ago when he penned the best-selling Gold Medallion Award-winner Letters from a Skeptic, a collection of letters with his agnostic father that address tough questions non-Christians people have about the faith. But Boyd quickly became a lightning rod of controversy when he became a proponent of “open theism”, a view claiming that the future is not pre-determined and therefore God knows the future as possibilities and not fact (for more, see his book God of the Possible).

In his newest book, Benefit of the Doubt: Breaking the Idol of Certainty, Boyd has returned to his roots in a way by urging people to wrestle with the big questions of faith. He claims that modern Christians have come to accept a false belief that faith is rooted in certainty. He says that faith is instead being willing to commit to living a certain way despite not being certain. Here, we discuss the benefit of embracing doubt and why he believes we need even to question God.
quoted excerpt:

JM: Can you share a little bit of the story you share in Benefit of the Doubt that taught you the importance of being honest with God?

GB: I became a Christian at the age of 17 in a strict holiness Pentecostal Church. I was able to quit taking drugs and a host of other sinful behaviors, except for one – a f pornography addiction that I’d developed over the four years leading up to my conversion. Since this church taught that a person lost their salvation with every sin, I found I was getting “saved” and “unsaved” several times a week–if not each day–for the first two years of my Christian walk.
One night, I walked out of this holiness church in despair, believing I was never going to be able to kick my pornography habit. Believing at this point that I was destined to hell, I became “uncorked” in the church parking lot while sharing my despair with a friend. Like a volcano erupting, I unleashed anger and frustration toward God not just over my two years of unsuccessful struggling with porn, but going all the way back to abuse I had suffered for years as a child at the hands of an unloving, psychologically tormented, step-mother.
After I had spewed out my seething rage, I flopped my Bible on the hood of my friend’s truck and began reading it sarcastically. It “happened” to flop open to Romans 8:1, which read, “There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus.” This opened the door for me to begin to realize, for the first time in my life, that God loved me for free, despite my sin. It ultimately resulted in me finding a motivation of love I had never known before, and it was this motivation that eventually broke the stronghold of pornography in my life and completely revolutionized my life as a disciple.
One of the main lessons I glean from this night is that it is only when we are completely honest with God that we are able to receive a true revelation of what God is really like. Only when we are uncompromisingly “real” before God can we allow God to be uncompromisingly “real” with us.

quoted excerpt:
JM: In Benefit of the Doubt, you advise people to believe in the Bible because they believe in Jesus, not the other way around. What do you mean by this, and why do you feel it is important?

GB: The number one reason young people today are abandoning the Christian faith and why other people can’t take the Christian faith seriously has to do with problems they have with the Bible. For example, as most freshmen taking a course in “The Bible as Literature” at a secular college learn, the historical accuracy of some biblical stories are questioned by many scholars, and it’s hard to deny that the Bible contains some apparent contradictions and some material that seems to fly in the face of modern science. In Benefit of the Doubt, I argue that if we structured our faith the way the earliest Christians did, these problems with the Bible would pose no threat to our confidence in Jesus being Lord and even to our confidence that the Bible is the inspired Word of God.
The earliest disciples didn’t believe in Jesus because their scripture (Old Testament) proved to them that he was the Son of God. They were rather convinced by Jesus’ claims, his unique life of love, his distinctive authority, his unprecedented miracles, his self-sacrificial death, and especially his resurrection. Once they believed in Jesus, they looked for him and found him in their scripture. But they never would have been convinced that Jesus was Lord had they started with scripture alone.
Unfortunately, most evangelicals today are taught to do the opposite. They base their faith in Jesus’ Lordship (as well as everything else) on their belief that the Bible is the inspired Word of God. This is “unfortunate” because this way of structuring our faith leverages everything on the perfection of this book, forcing the Bible to carry more weight than it was ever meant to carry. Every single problem people find with scripture now threatens to undermine their faith.
As I flesh out in my book, I eventually came to the conclusion that the things about Jesus that convinced the earliest disciples that he was Lord continue to be compelling enough to convince open-minded people today that Jesus is Lord, and they do not presuppose the view that the Bible is the inspired Word of God. Once I was persuaded on the basis of historical, philosophical and personal arguments that Jesus was Lord, I was motivated to also embrace the Bible as God’s Word, for (among other things) this was clearly Jesus’ own view and it’s very hard to confess Jesus to be one’s Lord while correcting his theology, especially on such a fundamental matter. But notice, my reasons for believing in Scripture are now based entirely on my faith in Jesus, which is why my faith need not be threatened any longer by any historical inaccuracies or contradictions or scientific inaccuracies I may find in it.
I’m convinced that if young people today would structure their faith this way, we’d see far fewer loosing their faith.

etc.