Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding
Chad Harbach’s debut novel, The Art of Fielding, records the rise of college shortstop Henry Skrimshander, along with his near-derailment by performance anxiety. Henry’s struggle stands in as a metaphor for both “What am I supposed to do after college?” panic and, well, the Human Condition. For an example, take the following passage in which Henry reflects on the promise of the structured, purpose-filled world of athletic training:  “Henry knew better than to want freedom. The only life worth living was the unfree life, the life Schwartzy had taught him, the life in which you were chained to your one true wish, the wish to be simple and perfect. Then the days were sky-blue spaces you moved through with ease. You made sacrifices and the sacrifices made sense.” Henry doesn’t have to bear the burden of metaphorical meaning-making alone: the supporting cast of characters, including the Westish College president, all wrestle with vocation and calling. Melville, chronicler of obsessive quests for perfection and meaning, as well the despair of those lacking such a quest, haunts the pages of The Art of Fielding, but knowledge of Moby-Dick isn’t any more essential than knowledge of baseball (I certainly have very little of the latter) for appreciating the novel. Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot has received a little more attention as THE college/post-college novel of 2011, and I enjoyed the portions of it relating to semiotics, but for my money, The Art of Fielding has more interesting characters and themes.

Lev Grossman, The Magician King
Lev Grossman’s The Magician King, sequel to 2009’s The Magicians, may be somewhat uneven—not to mention troubling—but it still ranks as one of my top five novels of the year, in part because it’s one about which I’ve had the most fruitful and interesting conversations with fellow readers. Grossman’s Harry-Potter-meets-Narnia world could easily be dismissed as derivative, as dressed-up fan-fiction, but I’m more inclined to read the novels as realistic college/post-college novels that just happen to be partially set in other people’s fictional universes. Like The Art of Fielding and The Marriage Plot, The Magician King plumbs the depths of post-college angst, exploring the failure of both formal schooling and the school of hard knocks to prepare one for life in the real (Real?) world. The difference is that, in this case, the real world involves satyrs and talking sloths.  (If you’re interested in a book on the failure of higher education in a world in which sloths remain speechless, check out Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.)

Colson Whitehead, Zone One
I’ve been a fan of Colson Whitehead’s fiction (especially his 1999 novel The Intuitionist) for a few years, and I was particularly interested to see his newest novel, Zone One, billed as a new exemplar of the marriage between literary and genre fiction (the genre, in this case, being the zombie novel). As Glen Duncan’s controversial NYT review indicated, the novel is unlikely to find a following among those looking for a limb-chomping lark through postapocalyptic terrain. There’s limb-chomping aplenty, but the novel is primarily a portrait of the consciousness of protagonist Mark Spitz (almost everyone goes by nicknames in the New World Non-Order). Through Mark Spitz’s eyes, we see how post-zombie life really isn’t all that different from pre-zombie late modernity. Barricades to keep the right people in and the wrong people out? Check. Zone One itself isn’t so dissimilar from the New York City it once was. Setting the novel several years after the initial zombie outbreak allows Whitehead to skewer inane political rhetoric of optimism: the provisional government, centered in Buffalo, has an official theme song entitled “Stop! Can You Hear the Eagle Roar? (Theme from Reconstruction).” Because Zone One occurs primarily in Mark Spitz’s mind, with flashbacks to both recent and more distant events, the novel is admittedly sometimes difficult to follow. But if you find that The Walking Dead features too little reflection on the hermeneutics of the everyday, then Zone One is likely to be your cup of tea. (Though I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, Kenneth Warren’s What Was African American Literature?, which argues that African American literature, as defined by the Jim Crow era, has come to an end, would be my companion pick for Zone One: both Whitehead and Mark Spitz are black, and though race receives very little explicit mention in the novel, race and the hotly debated discourse of post-blackness loom large as a subtext.)

Meg Wolitzer, The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman
In the category of children’s and YA fiction, my pick this year is Meg Wolitzer’s The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman, a light read targeted at the 8-12 age range. The novel plunges us into the world of competitive youth Scrabble, and the result is something like a cross between Ellen Raskin (The Westing Game) and the documentary Spellbound. Like Spellbound, The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman focuses on several protagonists to give us an idea of the range of reasons why kids would be drawn to a competition involving lettered tiles on a board. The titular Duncan Dorfman had never played Scrabble until a cafeteria incident revealed his special power of reading with his fingers, but now he sees the chance to be known at school for something other than having lunch meat stuck to his back. Nate Saviano is the more stereotypical kid who competes only because of parental pressure. April Blunt, my personal favorite, simply loves Scrabble, but she also wants to do well at the national tournament to prove to her sports-loving family that Scrabble is an endeavor as worthy as soccer. We meet several other teams along the way, including the Evangelical Scrabblers, who are portrayed as well-adjusted competitors with quirks no less charming than anyone else’s. The novel introduces a rather unnecessary antagonist, but most of the seemingly extraneous details turn out to play a pivotal role in the book’s plot, and that attention to structure is appealing. (Runner-up in this category: Rachel Neumeier’s The Floating Islands, which breathes some new life into coming-of-age fantasy clichés.)

Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture
Princeton historian Daniel T. Rodgers’s Age of Fracture has already received laudatory reviews from many publications, including Books & Culture, but I’ve selected it as my best nonfiction book of the year for Christ and Pop Culture because the book surveys American intellectual and cultural history of the 1970s through the 1990s (with a brief epilogue addressing the post-9/11 era). Rodgers selects “The Age of Fracture” as his moniker for late-twentieth-century America because of the disintegration of communal identities and the rise of a “self” (quote marks mandatory to indicate its constructed nature) characterized by “choice, provisionality, and impermanence; a sense of the diffuse and penetrating yet unstable powers of culture; an impatience with the backward pull of history.” Age of Fracture draws startling connections between political punditry (both right and left) and the rise of theory in academia as it devotes chapters to presidential rhetoric, economics, class, race, gender, and concepts of the public good. Such a totalizing portrait of an era surely goes against the key tenets of the Age of Fracture, but it makes for head-nodding, highlighter-wielding reading. I have to admit that my head nodded more in restlessness than in affirmation during the economics chapter, but, since Rodgers’s thesis is that free-market economic language both reflected and contributed to “visions of society as a spontaneous, naturally acting array of choices and affinities,” it’s worth slogging through. (And if “slogging” describes your approach to any book these days, you might pick up Alan Jacobs’s The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, an engaging—and brief!—ramble through reading-and-technology-related topics.)

This question seems to be weighing particularly on our cultural consciousness right now with regard to Narnia. Last December, when I saw the movie version of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (which I didn’t have the heart to review for Christ and Pop Culture—it was that bad), the only moment that felt sincere in the whole film was Lucy’s heartbreak when Aslan sends her away from Narnia—for good—at the end. His assurance that she’ll find him by his other name in her own world? Cold comfort. Her grief is what’s real.

Similarly, anger and despair at being expelled or excluded from some idyllic world (or at least a world that’s perceived to be idyllic) are what haunt me about the characters in Grossman’s novels.

The Magician King picks up where The Magicians left off, with perpetually dissatisfied Quentin and his friends ruling as the four Kings and Queens of Fillory. Quentin, on the surface, is inhabiting the perfect world, but we’ve seen him in perfect worlds before, and we aren’t surprised that he retains his restlessness and his hope that Meaning and Significance lie just beyond the horizon. So he goes on a quest—a quest bearing no small resemblance to The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (in fact, this aspect of The Magician King parallels the movie version in that the quest involves seven MacGuffins—the difference being that both Grossman and Quentin will deliberately refer to their MacGuffiny status during the novel . . . making them meta-MacGuffins?). Accompanying Quentin on board the good ship Muntjac is Julia, now one of the Queens of Fillory, but formerly Quentin’s high school classmate. As we learn in a series of flashbacks interspersed with Quentin’s present-day quest, Julia took the entrance exam to Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy but was denied admission. The standard Brakebills memory-wipe failed to work on Julia, and she becomes obsessed with the world of magic, the world she caught a glimpse of, the world that she feels should have been hers. What plunges Julia into depression is that she knows that this world is real: “it wasn’t a dream or a psychotic hallucination—but they weren’t going to let her have it. There was a place out there that was so perfect and magical that it had made even Quentin happy. . . But Julia wasn’t. She was out in the cold. Hogwarts was fully subscribed, and her eligibility had lapsed. Hagrid’s motorcycle would never rumble outside her front door. No creamy-enveloped letters would ever come flooding down her chimney.”

So Julia learns magic on her own, the hard way, trading sex for spell recipes, racking up as many levels as she can on the “hedge magic” circuit. It’s never enough, though, because she knows that she’s still cut off from the true world of magic. She mourns her expulsion from an Eden she saw for only a few hours.

In Grossman’s world, if you’re kicked out of Eden, you can either try to fight your way back to it, or you can seek out some sort of consolation in human community. Julia experiences something of the latter with an online support group called Free Trader Beowulf, whose members she eventually meets and lives with at Murs, on the coast of France. Everyone in Free Trader Beowulf is seeking the same access to magic that Julia is, but for many of them this is no mere Promethean power-grab. Even if you’ve never had much sympathy for Faust, you do feel pity for the Free Trader who reveals that he wants to call down a god to earth, not to boost his magical capabilities, but because he has to take such a high dose of Nardil (the last-ditch effort medication when other antidepressants haven’t  worked) that it isn’t sustainable in the long term, and he wants the god to take him “home.”  All the Free Traders have similar, if less extreme, brain chemistry: depression figures here as a kind of exile from Eden, but it’s also what binds the exiles together.

Julia only belatedly realizes that, with the Free Traders, she has finally found a satisfying substitute for Brakebills. “She came to Murs looking for magic, but she was also looking for a new home, and a new family, and she’d found them all, all three, and it was enough. She was content: she didn’t need anything else, least of all more power. Her quest had ended and she hadn’t even known it till this moment. She didn’t want to become a goddess. All she wanted was to become human, and here at Murs it had finally happened.”

And then the community at Murs is completely and totally destroyed.

If we long for the Eden we’ve lost, we seek solace in human community, but that community is so precarious: once it becomes Eden to us, Grossman suggests, some higher power takes it away. (And I feel I should mention that that’s not all that’s taken away from Julia. Rape is one of those plot points that many sensitive readers want to know about beforehand, spoilers or no, and rape by a god might belong in a special category all its own.)

You may notice that I haven’t mentioned Quentin much so far. Many reviewers have noted that Julia’s plotline in The Magician King is more compelling than Quentin’s, and I suspect that this is at least somewhat intentional on Grossman’s part: as Quentin muses at one point, “Everyone wanted to be the hero of their own story. Nobody wanted to be comic relief.”

Quentin does get to be a hero, though, in a sense, as does Julia. Heroism is nothing like what they expected. Facing yet another Eden-expulsion at the end of his quest, Quentin realizes that “this was hard in a way he hadn’t counted on. You couldn’t kill it with a sword or fix it with a spell. You couldn’t fight it. You just had to endure it, and you didn’t look good or noble or heroic doing it.”

Quentin initially thinks that a hero’s quest is to find something, as heroes have done in countless tales. Readers of The Lord of the Rings (and Quentin would be one of them) are familiar with a hero’s quest to lose something. Heroism, in The Magician King, is neither finding nor losing, but rather enduring all that the gods take away from you.

All of this makes it rather ironic when Quentin, thinking bitterly of Ember the ram god’s apparent lack of power, asks himself, “What kind of god wasn’t at the top of the food chain in His own world?” Quentin doesn’t want a god who can suffer, because it strikes him as weakness (and, in Ember’s case, this seems to be true). The world of The Magician King is devoid of a God who would who would choose to exile himself from heaven and suffer as a human. Grossman’s cosmology makes room for apotheosis, but not incarnation.

Despite all their hyper-referential snark, Grossman’s novels strike me as genuinely longing for a lost Eden. They reflect a zeitgeist in which we know we can’t build the perfect society. We know that heaven can’t be earned, only granted—but, entitlement-prone generation that we are, we feel that it ought to be granted to all of us, as our rightful inheritance. To those with this mindset, what the gods choose to give and take away seems purely random. As Grossman wrote recently in an essay about his inspiration for The Magician King, “sometimes when you open a wardrobe you get to go to Narnia. And sometimes you just get busted for snooping and sent back to London to watch the bombs fall.”

My takeaway lessons from this experience were: (1) it’s apparently really hard not to be derivative in relation to The Hunger Games (which, in part, may be because The Hunger Games series bears a lot of similarity to other works like Battle Royale—or so I’ve heard); (2) if you’re writing young adult fiction and deliberately avoiding reading recent works for fear of contagious influence, it’s still important to have friends—or editors!—who have read them.

These two points came to mind repeatedly as I read Veronica Roth’s young adult novel Divergent, just released in May 2011. Divergent is set in a future dystopian Chicago, which is divided into five factions, each dedicated to celebrating and cultivating a single character trait: Abnegation (ascetics), Amity (Hufflepuff), Candor (tell-it-like-it-is folks), Dauntless (punks and goths), and Erudite (Ravenclaw). (Is it all too plain that I would be Erudite if I point out that some of those words are nouns and some are adjectives, and it would be much nicer if they were parallel?) On a set day, all the sixteen-year-olds in all the factions must come together and put on the Sorting Hat—I’m sorry, I mean “take a test involving computerized simulations”—to determine the faction to which they will belong for the rest of their lives (transferring from your birth faction to another faction at age sixteen is somewhat frowned upon, but fairly common). Beatrice Prior, like Harry Potter, receives an inconclusive result on the test—this makes her . . . wait for it . . . divergent!—and thus has to choose her faction. Though from Abnegation, she selects Dauntless.

From this point on, Divergent abandons all similarity to Harry Potter and begins to look more like The Hunger Games. Beatrice (now renamed “Tris”), along with other Dauntless initiates, must prove that she belongs: only the top ten initiates will be received as members. They must show their mettle through beating each other in brutal physical combat and through overcoming their fears with the aid of more computerized simulations. Like The Hunger Games’s Katniss, Tris is smaller than her competition and must find strategies to compensate.  Luckily—and quite unethically, I might add—she has some help from one of the Dauntless members responsible for training initiates, the mysterious eighteen-year-old named Four, who quickly becomes a romantic interest. Unsurprisingly, Tris also begins to discover that there are bigger threats and larger issues than her acceptance into the faction.

Divergent is the first book of a planned series. Like The Hunger Games series, it is narrated in first-person present tense, a device that began to show its wear even in Suzanne Collins’s writing. The prose in Divergent is fully functional, with none of the awkward flights of overworked metaphor that often characterize first novels (and Roth is only 22, so this is indeed an accomplishment). Roth shows promise: her style is always in service of the plot. In fact, if she has a cardinal flaw, it’s that the preconceived plot seems to drive everything, regardless of the internal plausibility of a character’s behavior.

This becomes particularly noticeable in the last third of the novel, when the action starts to pick up its pace.  Towards the end of the novel, our young lovers undergo a challenge more than slightly reminiscent of Peeta’s character arc in Mockingjay (and I’ll leave that fairly vague, in order to avoid spoiling either series). In The Hunger Games series, what happens to Peeta is devastating, since (a) Peeta is a saint; and (b) we’ve have two previous books in which to know and love his character.  Four, however, is less endearing, and his relationship to Tris is somewhat disturbing; the same plot points feel hollow, rushed, and obligatory without the emotional investment earned by Collins’s characters. Moreover, in Divergent, character deaths tend to feel both wholly expected and wholly unnecessary. They’re just marks ticked off according to the needs of the plot (which one could say is also true of The Hunger Games, but that is sort of a necessary function of the twenty-four-people-fight-to-the-death plot construction).

A perhaps less predictable aspect of Divergent occurs on the Acknowledgments page at the end of the book, where the first sentence reads, “Thank you, God, for your Son and for blessing me beyond comprehension.” Yes, Veronica Roth is one of us: on her blog, she describes herself as “a graduate of Northwestern University, a Chicago-suburb resident, a Christian, and A Tall Person, among other things.” If Divergent is imitative, at least it’s not imitative in the “I’m going to write a Christianized version of The Hunger Games” sort of way. The novel is published by an imprint of HarperCollins (full disclosure: my husband is employed by a different division of HarperCollins), not by a “Christian” publisher. Only a couple of explicit references to religion occur within Divergent: in one, Tris’s family gives thanks to God at the table, though she mentions that “not every Abnegation family is religious.” In another, Tris sees that Four has painted the words “Fear God Alone” on the walls of his room. Beyond that, there are few overt hints that Divergent’s author is a Christian. I get the feeling, however, that it might become more apparent in later books, since at the end of Divergent, Tris and Four go into hiding accompanied, for no apparent reason, by Four’s abusive father and Tris’s archenemy, a boy who participated in a mild sexual assault against her. It’s looking like a forgiveness setup is to come, and one that, as a reader, I’m not entirely comfortable with. I ardently hope that, in future books, Roth doesn’t turn the to-be-forgiven archenemy into part of a love triangle.

If anything, Roth’s Christian author status probably shows up most in her devotion to the gritty. There’s something of “proving I’m one of the cool kids, too” in the way that young Christian writers published by mainstream presses go about writing violence, in particular (for this trend, my husband blames the adulation of Flannery O’Connor by Christian writers who lack her skill or humor). In comparison to The Hunger Games, in which the actual depiction of violence is very restrained, Divergent is quite visceral.

Many of us here at Christ and Pop Culture have spent time criticizing Christian products that simply aim to baptize a popular secular trend. It’s heartening to see that Divergent doesn’t follow this pattern. Yet it is, if not evangelical-subculture-derivative, still derivative—and, for this, I’m more likely to hold the editor(s) to blame, since I consider it entirely possible that, like my friend, Veronica Roth had no intention of borrowing plot elements from Harry Potter or The Hunger Games series.

There’s also a bigger question here, the question of how desirable—or even achievable—the elusive quality of originality is for any writer, Christian or not. That’s a question that requires a more in-depth answer than I can give here, but here’s the short version: I don’t believe that Christians should embrace a Romantic model of artistic creativity, seeing the writer as a grand figure solely responsible for bringing his or her work into being. As the poet Richard Wilbur writes in “Lying,” “In the strict sense, of course / We invent nothing, merely bearing witness / To what each morning brings again to light.” I sometimes fear that, in reaction to the copycat works that have dominated evangelical subculture, newly liberated Christian artists will rush to the opposite extreme, making individual creativity into an idol. It’s simply not possible to create a wholly original work of art; nor does creativity happen in a vacuum. To the extent that a writer does possess a unique stamp, it is in part due to the community of influences that surround her.  These include the writers she has read, those who have shaped her style, whether she is aware of it or not. It also includes the people who read her manuscript, who have the responsibility to let her know if her work is too similar to others. Of course, both Hollywood and the publishing industry are all too eager to find the perfect formula that will create a failsafe bestseller, and so this responsibility falls by the wayside in favor of other interests. And this is a shame, because it impedes the development of young writers like Veronica Roth. But at least that problem is not unique to Christian culture.

Carissa Smith recently conducted an email interview with Susannah Clements (Associate Professor of English, Regent University), author of The Vampire Defanged: How the Embodiment of Evil Became a Romantic Hero (Brazos Press, which kindly sent us a review copy). The book traces the vampire’s evolution in pop culture, from its Christian roots in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, through its postmodern iteration in Buffy, and finally to the sparkly undead of Twilight.

Carissa: What, beyond the current omnipresence of vampires in pop culture, led you to write The Vampire Defanged?

Susannah: The book was primarily prompted by reflections and questions about how the portrait of the vampire has changed in the last hundred years. I had recently reread Stoker’s Dracula and was thinking about how different that vampire was from most of the vampires we see in popular culture now. Since I’ve long been a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I thought there might be a way to do a Christian analysis of a culturally relevant phenomenon and also write about a number of texts I really love.

I think of Brazos as a press that straddles the divide between academic and non-academic audiences well. What sort of audience did you envision as you were writing and marketing the book?

I had originally envisioned it as more of an academic project, but my editor at Brazos wisely encouraged me to make it more accessible for non-academics, who might also find the book of interest. I’d only written the first chapter when that shift was made, so I rewrote the first chapter and then wrote the rest of it as a “crossover” book. It’s being marketed to both an academic and non-academic audience. The chapters are still pretty heavy on literary analysis, so it’s not necessarily a quick or easy read for non-academics. But I think it’s definitely accessible to anyone who is interested in vampire stories and enjoys thinking through the issues deeply.

In the introduction to the book, you say, “More than anyone else, Christians should know how to read and view well. And we should read the culture around us as deeply and thoughtfully as we read canonical literature.” Obviously, for Christ and Pop Culture (and for me personally, as a literature professor at a Christian institution), that statement rings true. What, in your opinion, best equips Christians to read culture well?

I think there are skills in analysis and interpretation that we can learn through education and/or practice that will help us read culture well, but I think the main thing we need to do is take the culture around us seriously. It’s easy for us to believe that, since a book is just for fun and isn’t real “literature,” we can just read it mindlessly without it affecting us in any significant way. Or we want to think that most movies and television are just for entertainment, so the messages they are expressing aren’t really important. But the stories we tell ourselves have power over us, whether we recognize it or not. So I think the first step is to “read” culture with our minds on so we can start to understand what these texts are really saying.

In your analysis of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), you argue that the titular vampire represents sin–not only the seven deadly ones, but also the infectiousness of sin and the impossibility of conquering it without God’s grace. In the next major vampire novel, Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976), the vampire is no longer “a representation of sin and sin’s consequences–rather, the vampire provides a picture of guilt.” I found this point particularly insightful because, even for Christians, it’s easy to confuse sin–a condition–and shame–a feeling. Do you have any theories about what cultural changes might have led to this shift in the vampire’s symbolic significance?

I think the change in the vampire reflects a general shift in cultural worldview that has moved away from belief in the genuine condition of sin. Our culture often thinks in psychological terms of “deviance” or “disorder” rather than acknowledging sin as a spiritual reality. But even if we remove the reality of sin from our understanding of the world, the consequences of sin still exist for us. One of those consequences is guilt.  Vampire stories like Anne Rice’s present a really compelling portrait of the bewildering nature of guilt—and its endlessness—in a worldview that doesn’t affirm sin as giving meaning to guilt or that doesn’t offer Christ as an answer to it.

In your chapter on Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), you say that “the show actually goes deeper into the theological themes of grace, forgiveness, sacrifice, and free will than Stoker tackled,” but, at the same time, the show is secularized, “because of the way it refuses to affirm any definite spiritual reality but instead points toward many of them.” How do you define “the secular”? If a work is addressing theological themes at a deep level, how important is it for the Christian reader/viewer to label it as “religious” or “secular”?

I don’t think it’s necessarily important for us to label stories as “religious” or “secular.” Certainly, that can lead to artificial distinctions or compartmentalized thinking. But I do think it’s important to recognize that stories that explore religious or theological themes might be using them to draw conclusions that are neither religious nor theological. Christians are sometimes tempted to “baptize” texts that seem to deal with our pet themes—temptation, sacrifice, salvation, etc.—even when, at times, these themes are used to express entirely irreligious messages. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t value or find meaning in stories that don’t have Christian or even spiritual purpose. I think Buffy explores rich, complex theological issues better and more thoughtfully than most “Christian” fiction I’ve read. But I would be seriously misreading the show and significantly skewing the artistic expression of its creators if I claimed that—because sin and sacrifice are prominent themes—the show’s ultimate conclusions are theological or religious. The Christian themes in certain storylines and episodes are in service of the show’s larger message, which is about being human and living in the world. They aren’t exploring a relationship with God (any god) or a spiritual reality. Recognizing this doesn’t make Buffy any less meaningful to Christians, but I think we do need to recognize and acknowledge it if we are going to be good readers of the show.

That question also brings us to Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga (2005-2008), of which you say, “As the vampire has become an idealized romantic superhero, he has lost his potential for spiritual and theological reflection.” However, the main themes you draw out in the Twilight Saga–the power of free will and the idealized nature of romantic and familial love–seem to me to be fairly consistent with a Mormon worldview (albeit at a shallow level). To what extent do you think vampires can be successfully co-opted by other religious traditions?

Well, vampires can mean what we want them to mean—which is one of the reasons they’ve been so popular for so long. So certainly other religious traditions can “co-opt” them and shape them into something else. Once the vampire loses his traditional characteristics, which were grounded in the Christian tradition, however, he becomes less and less recognizable and I would say less and less powerful as a metaphor. In many cases, I think storytellers would do better to call the super-human creature something other than “vampire” and thus be freer to tell the story they want to tell. I’ve read a couple of good studies of the Twilight Saga, highlighting how the novels reflect a Mormon worldview. I definitely think there’s something there, particularly in the last half of the last book in the series. But, for most of the Twilight Saga, I think the vampire, embodied in Edward, is primarily shaped by conventions of romantic fiction rather than theological or spiritual issues, either Christian or Mormon.

In the conclusion, you say that Christians are somewhat to blame for the secularization of the vampire, partly due to the knee-jerk “vampires are demonic” response and partly due to apathy. On the hopeful side, you argue that “If Christians can understand the vampire better, we can discuss, create, and inspire a respiritualized figure of the vampire. In doing so, we can help return the vampire tradition to the power it once had. We can give vampires their fangs again.” Why is it so important to rehabilitate the vampire tradition? If Dracula already did it so well, why do we need new, re-sanctified vampire books and movies?

We tell ourselves the same stories over and over again—sometimes because the stories are true and sometimes because we believe them to be true. Jane Austen wrote fantastic love stories, but that doesn’t mean we have no need to tell good love stories today. In the same way, we could be using the vampire artistically to tell ourselves stories we need to hear—true stories about sin, sacrifice, salvation and grace. Right now, because of the ubiquity of vampire romances, one of the main things vampire stories are telling us is that love and sex are most “hot” when they’re dangerous and forbidden and that a women’s existence is given value by the love of a powerful man. These stories simply aren’t true, but they’re being told through the figure of the vampire over and over again. There are so many “true” stories the vampire could allow us to tell, it would be a shame for Christians not to take advantage of it.

I was waiting for The Count from Sesame Street to make an appearance in your book, but he never did. Any comments on his cultural significance?

Well, I guess The Count is probably another example of the domestication of the vampire in our culture—we can laugh at the vampire now, not just be scared of him—although honestly I can’t speak intelligently on that character, as I haven’t watched Sesame Street in twenty-five years!

What new projects do you have in the pipeline?

I’m working on a Christian companion to British literature that could be used for a supplemental text in British lit survey courses at Christian colleges. I also have a werewolf book in the back of my mind, although I haven’t actually done anything with it yet.

Especially in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death, it would be far too easy to politicize Of Gods and Men, to turn its message, as some reviewers have done, into a movie primarily expressing either (a) the hope for brotherhood between Christians and Muslims or (b) as movieguide.org says, “a wake-up call to western civilization” (and I don’t think they mean a wake-up call to take up our crosses and suffer with Christ). Political issues are indeed addressed in the film, as they should be: these are French monks dwelling in a former French colony, though part of their intended mission is to repair the wounds of history. In the film’s admission that, in the fallen world, spiritual life can never be completely extricated from the messiness of the temporal—especially because of Christians’ historical participation in European colonialism—it bears comparison to The Mission (one of my favorite films). Nor does the film shy away from depicting the ugly reality of the terrorists’ violence. Yet Of Gods and Men is also, in a deep way, about spiritual discernment. It’s about the voice of God, speaking to men—through Word, liturgy, sacrament, communal life, and even “secular” music.

As tensions grow during the Algerian Civil War, as reports flow in of women killed for refusing to wear the hijab, of Europeans killed for being Europeans, the monks face the difficult decision of whether to stay or leave. They debate their potentially life-and-death decision together only twice—in the first of these meetings, they are divided between different opinions. Because Of Gods and Men isn’t an exposition-heavy movie, some viewers may be left wondering why they can’t just pack up and pray elsewhere (Roger Ebert even calls it “egotism to believe their help must take place in this specific monastery”). Trappists, with other monastic orders, take a vow of stability, a commitment not only to the community of people but to geographical place, in the belief that God works spiritual transformation—true conversion of life—through this kind of deep rooting. It’s a sacred vow. For the monks to even consider leaving their monastery, the situation must be dire.

Of Gods and Men does not portray the monks as perfect individuals. During the discernment process, each individual’s weakness surfaces. Brother Christian at first unequivocally refuses military protection from the Algerian government, without first consulting his brothers—an oversight for which they call him to task. The film shows a hardness to Brother Christian that suggests his motivation may involve some stubborn pride or even a bit of a martyr complex. Another monk struggles with the nagging doubt that, if they are martyred, it will be for nothing. Even a man who has already given up everything for Christ can sometimes still fear death. Yet, despite their initial disagreement over their course of action, the monks continue the rhythm of their daily life together, going about their tasks in the garden or in the community medical clinic, punctuating the hours with sung liturgy and prayer.

Within a few weeks, when the monks again meet together to vote on staying or leaving, they are of a single mind. What has led them to such unity? Certainly not rational discussion of the pros and cons of each side. Instead, they work together. They sing together and take the Eucharist together. They listen together. And through these daily activities they are each nudged toward the same decision. More than any movie I can think of, Of Gods and Men is a testament to the importance of worship to a community—worship as a vehicle through which God works to form his people in his image.

The filmmakers wisely chose to have the actors playing the monks, instead of a trained choir, sing in the film. The actors themselves, in interviews, expressed that the experience of singing bound them together. “To chant psalms is to breathe together, to share the Breath of Life,” says Olivier Rabourdin, who plays Brother Christophe. In the movie itself, the psalms give voice to the whole range of human emotions—in a way, allowing the monks to “act” out fear, anger, confidence, and praise, no matter what they actually happen to be feeling at the moment. And God speaks to each in these moments of song and in the silences in between. Though we as viewers do not hear God’s literal voice in the film, we see the monks expressing gratitude for the wisdom they have been given: one monk looks joyfully up to the sky as it pours down rain on his face, another whispers “You surround me” to God in the middle of the night, another contemplates a poster of the crucified Jesus on the wall, putting his fingers on the spear wound in his side.

Given that the monks’ life is structured by sacred music, it’s interesting that one of the film’s most transcendent moments occurs when one monk plays a recording of the main theme from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. It’s clearly a moment of rare aesthetic indulgence, and the monks truly have something to celebrate: their life together as a community. As the music plays and they drink wine together, the camera lingers on each of their faces in turn (in a way, it reminds me of a similar shared-meal scene in Babette’s Feast, another of my favorite films), showing fear, relief, and, most importantly, love for each other. (Incidentally, this moment probably works best if you aren’t used to hearing the Swan Lake theme in horror movies. I’ve discovered after many arguments that, while the Swan Lake theme represents mystery, longing, and great beauty to me—and apparently to the monks in Of Gods and Men—lots of people hear it as sinister and creepy. This may be because it was used in the 1931 film version of Dracula and subsequently in a lot of Saturday morning cartoons.)

What happens after this moment matters little: the tension of the plot does not revolve around whether the monks will live or die. Of Gods and Men has, instead, achieved the far more difficult task of dramatizing spiritual discernment. The monks, through God’s divine nudging, have been led, each in his own way, to a decision. And they are at peace. As one monk, Brother Luc, declares, “I’m not scared of terrorists, even less of the army. And I’m not scared of death. I’m a free man.” Free men all, the monks know that their freedom in Christ calls them to radical obedience to the will of God. And the revelation of that will, through their mundane routines, is a miracle.

This week I have for your consideration a literal vegetable, the South American “superfood” quinoa, readily available to U.S. consumers in the upscale supermarket of your choice. Quinoa, which resembles something like a nuttier, crunchier couscous in flavor and texture, is easily mistaken for a grain but, as I learned from this article, it “is actually a chenopod, related to species like beets and spinach.” Its claim to fame, particularly for vegetarians like me, is that it’s one of the most complete proteins available from a plant source. It’s also popular among the growing population of gluten-intolerant folks.

Unfortunately, there’s a downside to the rising popularity of quinoa: common people in its native Bolivia can no longer afford to eat it. The situation doesn’t have the scope of the corn crisis in Mexico a few years ago, but the issues are somewhat similar. Here’s the sobering statistic: “While quinoa prices have almost tripled over the past five years, Bolivia’s consumption of the staple fell 34 percent over the same period, according to the country’s agricultural ministry.” This means that Bolivians are turning to cheaper, but less nutritious, foods like rice and pasta.

Lest you immediately swear off all quinoa, there’s also this to keep in mind:

The focus on foreign markets has altered life in isolated places like Salinas de Garcí Mendoza, a community on the edge of the salt flats in southern Bolivia where much of the country’s quinoa is produced. Agricultural leaders claim that rising exports of the plant have lifted living standards there and in other quinoa-growing areas.

“Before quinoa was at the price it is now, people went to Argentina and Chile to work,” said Miguel Choque Llanos, commercial director of the National Association of Quinoa Producers. Now, he said, rising quinoa prices have also encouraged city dwellers to return to their plots in the countryside during planting and harvest seasons.

This is the kind of quandary that could paralyze one. No food in this fallen world is free of suffering—and yet food remains God’s gift to us. Certainly, in this situation, an individual consumer boycott of quinoa would accomplish nothing except making the boycotter feel holier-than-thou (which, sadly, is often the true purpose of individual boycotts). My takeaway from this article is that the promotion of any food as a “superfood” can be harmful, since it causes us to forget about the need for variety and moderation in our diets. Now, at quinoa’s current price in the U.S., I doubt many of us are going to be consuming it in anything beyond moderation. However, food fads here can have disastrous consequences elsewhere in the world: many Bolivian famers, having reorganized their lives around quinoa production during its popularity, will suffer once quinoa falls into disgrace or oblivion in the U.S.—as most superfoods inevitably do. It doesn’t sound very exciting as a plan, but I think the best course of action is to eat a variety of foods—including, occasionally, quinoa or pomegranates or coconut water—and be thankful.

When a fit of curmudgeonliness comes upon me, I try to resist as much as possible, trading the mini-Nicholas Carr in my brain for a mini-Clay Shirky. Try as I might, though, I can only come up with one and a half cheers for the radical democracy of the Web. Tremendous potential, yes, but it holds little hope as long as people have no idea how to use free knowledge-building wisely. I don’t think that Google is making us stupid, but I do believe that we are using it stupidly, failing to pay attention to the ways in which daily actions form and shape us as people.

More helpful to me than the predictions of Carr, Shirky, and company are the visions of the future presented in novels and movies. Three recent works in particular—M. T. Anderson’s YA novel Feed (2002), Mike Judge’s film Idiocracy (2006), and Gary Shteyngart’s novel Super Sad True Love Story (2010) all paint bleakly stupid futures for us, yet at the same time hold out a smidgen of optimism that people will still desire deep connection with others, even if they don’t know how to achieve it.

In Idiocracy, natural selection, rather than the internet, is to blame for the rise in stupidity. The intelligent few hold off on reproduction, while the stupid masses go forth and multiply. While the premise is uncomfortably reminiscent of early 20^th-century eugenics, the movie is more insightful—and shares more in common with Feed and Super Sad True Love Story—in its depiction of the diminishing of language as a result of the stupocalypse. Somehow, the scene in which a store greeter intones, “Welcome to Costco. I love you,” strikes me as perfectly representative of a future in which all the rich nuances of language have been lost. A whole range of emotional expression has been whittled down to two options: “I love you” (in which “love” is meaningless) or “F— you” (which, in Idiocracy, is what an ATM says to you when it won’t give you your money).

It’s even more difficult to represent the post-stupocalyptic loss of linguistic nuance on the printed page, especially since Feed and Super Sad True Love Story are both narrated in first-person. This feat is particularly impressive in Feed, since the style is the polar opposite of M. T. Anderson’s hyper-literate pseudo-18^th-century narration in The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing. The huge challenge of narrating through the voice of the post-stupocalyptic individual is getting readers to care about these characters through their shallow, self-absorbed, illiterate exteriors.

Super Sad True Love Story, for me, achieves this task more effectively than Feed, perhaps because the shallow, self-absorbed narration of 39-year-old Lenny Abramov alternates with the shallow, self-absorbed narration of 24-year-old Eunice Park. Lenny is just enough older than Eunice that he belongs to a different world, though he still desperately tries to find acceptance among the younger generations (in an attempt to ward off death, as the book rather unsubtly suggests). He still reads books—books, whose noxious smell so offends the youthful nose that Lenny has to spray them with Lysol. Eunice’s narration occurs through chats and emails sent through her GlobalTeens (read: Facebook) account and is full of slang, misspellings, and brand names: yet, as many reviewers have noted, her narration is more compelling than Lenny’s, possibly because we pity her for living her whole life in a diminished world. She is a digital native, rather than a digital immigrant.

One of the most poignant scenes in the novel occurs when Eunice asks Lenny to read to her. He complies, hopeful that they will be able to connect over the shared experience of the text. However, when he asks Eunice if she’s understanding, she collapses in a confused, self-hating muddle. “I’ve never really learned how to read texts,” Eunice confesses. “Just to scan them for info.” As someone who spends much of the daytime trying to convince students that reading a SparkNotes summary of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is not the same experience as reading the novel itself, I felt that this scene captured the future that I often fear we’re heading toward: a future in which information is substituted for full, incarnate experience.

This last point is also related to the way human sexuality is portrayed in post-stupocalyptic literature and film. After their failed reading venture, Eunice tries to connect with Lenny through sex, because it’s the only form of intimacy with another human being that is still available to her. Yet, in Super Sad True Love Story, as in Feed and Idiocracy, the future is over-sexualized to the point that it’s actually rather asexual. In Shteyngart’s novel, brand names for women’s clothing include TotalSurrender (and other, less printable options), and the most coveted fashion items are see-through, “onionskin” jeans. Shteyngart once again makes Eunice more sympathetic than Lenny by showing, through her obsession with pleasing men with her appearance, that women are the true victims of a society that falsely bills uninhibited expression of sexuality as “freedom.” This freedom, however, is really enslavement to definitions promoted by corporate marketing.

Feed, Super Sad True Love Story, and Idiocracy all envision a future in which corporate labels substitute for any sense of selfhood. In Feed, one character gets a “speech tattoo,” which results in the word “Nike” appearing in every sentence he speaks. (This incident springs to mind every time a company invites me to “like” it on Facebook in order to receive a discount or free shipping. Yes, I’m fond of discounts, but I fear the slippery slope towards soul-selling.) In Idiocracy, corporate slogans are so dominant that rational problem-solving becomes impossible. In one of the best scenes of the movie, Joe Bauers (Luke Wilson), as the newly appointed Secretary of the Interior, tries to convince the other members of the Cabinet that crops aren’t growing because they’re being watered with “Brawndo” (read: Gatorade) rather than water. In response, the Cabinet can only repeat variations on the phrase “Brawndo’s got electrolytes. It’s got what plants crave.”

Of these three prophets of the stupocalypse, Idiocracy is the most hopeful about the possibility of starting anew (though, as previously mentioned, it’s also the most troubling of the three in its suggestion that the stupocalypse is due to genetics rather than to the choice of habits that make us stupid). Super Sad True Love Story convincingly portrays a human longing for connection that persists into the stupid future. Feed is the most dismal in its outlook—Titus’ last act in the novel is to consume—which is perhaps surprising, given that M. T. Anderson is in reality very optimistic about the youth of today. In his acceptance speech for the Printz Honor award for Octavian Nothing, Anderson stated,

“I realized yet again how often I underestimate teens – how often we all underestimate them. . . . [T]eenagers are not the bland, banal, perfected ciphers we see sleazing around the groves of So-Cal on HD-TV. Those are the teens created by panels of writers terrified to alienate any potential viewers. In reality, teens are conspicuously the opposite of bland and blank: They are incredibly eccentric, deeply impassioned about their interests, fantastically – even exhaustingly – knowledgeable on the subject of topics like, say, drum and bugle corps, or horse-riding, or the United Nations, or submarine warfare. Their commitment to complexity of thought is, if anything, fiercer than an adult’s – because they have to fight so fiercely to defend it.”

This is the perspective we need to hold in tension with the dire scenarios regarding the future of our youth. At their best, the prophets of the stupocalypse remind us that what is at stake is not really intellect but rather the malformation of the soul. This is particularly important to keep in mind, since any attempt to reduce humanity to its intellectual potential is not only un-Christian but also extremely insensitive to those with mental disabilities. While my vocation as an English professor requires me to judge the skills of students in reading and interpreting texts, Jesus calls me to love and respect them all, regardless of the skills they may or may not possess. What concerns me about the future is less the diminishing of intellectual capability—though that would, of course, make my job more difficult—but rather the ways in which we are complacently allowing ourselves to be formed by technology use, without reflecting on its influence.

I’m not advocating Ludditism, but even a small gesture—a small symbolic withholding of our allegiance from the forces so dominant in our society, along the lines of Henry David Thoreau’s refusal to pay his poll tax—can make us more aware of the effects of the technologies in which we do choose to participate. I refuse to own a cell phone, partly because I relish solitude and partly because I don’t like the ways in which cell phones have made it culturally acceptable to be late (think about it—how many times have you failed to plan ahead enough to be on time, because you could simply call en route and let someone know you’re going to be late?). Yes, I use Gmail chat and Facebook and sometimes even Skype—my withdrawal from contemporary communications is not absolute—but my personal cell phone ban makes me more aware of how I use other technologies. I hear similar reports from individuals who have banned Facebook from their lives. It’s not so much what you choose to abstain from as it is that the symbolic gesture of abstention makes you a more critical, conscious participant in, rather than consumer of, technology.

Thoreau believed that individual acts of civil disobedience could end slavery; is it possible that small acts of resistance could prevent our indentured servitude to technology?

The release of a new film version of Jane Eyre makes this a perfect time to reread—or encounter for the first time—Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel of a “plain” governess who asserts her right to love and be loved. And I speak as someone who doesn’t really like Jane Eyre—or anything written by any Brontë—but who has developed an appreciation for it through the readings of others.

Part of the reason Jane Eyre never really appealed to me was that it was initially billed to me by a friend, when we were both in high school, as “so romantic.” This was never a big selling point for me, but my friend insisted that I read it anyway. I spent most of the book wanting to kick Mr. Rochester—and, by extension, Jane, for not kicking Mr. Rochester herself. Then there was the novel’s relentless lack of humor. The only good bits were the Gothic elements, especially the . . . well, I won’t say what, because I have a long track record of spoiling the plot of Jane Eyre for people (in large part, I assigned it in my Literary Criticism class so that I could talk about certain plot points freely without spoiling the uninitiated).

Jane Eyre as romance never worked for me. However, my students have convinced me to appreciate it as an expression of evangelical confidence in the believer’s right to interpret God’s will for her own life. Many of my students resonated with the part of the novel in which a certain character tries to convince Jane that it is her calling to be a missionary’s wife in India, and that any resistance to this path is selfish disobedience. This character uses scripture repeatedly in his guilt trips against Jane and tells her that he is praying for her—the ultimate tool of the manipulative Christian—because her spirit is willing, but her flesh is weak. To this, Jane replies, “My spirit is willing to do what it right; and my flesh, I hope, is strong enough to accomplish the will of Heaven, when once that will is distinctly known to me. “

Jane stands her ground against spiritual manipulation, instead waiting to hear directly from God. As it turns out, God does use a supernatural occurrence to make his will known to Jane, and that will is very different from that suggested for her by others.

The question of discerning God’s will is, of course, a complex one, but few are the novels that even begin to address it. The Jane Eyre that is about spiritual discernment is far more interesting than the swooning-on-the-moors Jane Eyre, and I’m grateful to my students for introducing me to this Jane.

My suspicion is that the new film will gloss over the discernment theme in Jane Eyre, though it does apparently give more screen time than previous films to the character who claims to know God’s will for Jane. The movie may not be opening outside of New York and Los Angeles for a while—I know it’s not opening in Charleston for another month—but that gives you plenty of time to read the novel beforehand. If you’re into audiobooks, the free download of Jane Eyre on librivox.org is decently read (with a faux British accent). And, once you’ve read Jane Eyre, you can then start in on Jasper Fforde’s hilarious novel The Eyre Affair, which supplies all the humor that the original lacks.

As a child raised primarily on classical music (with a healthy dose of Broadway musicals and Simon & Garfunkel), I loved Handel’s Messiah from an early age. (Family legend states, perhaps somewhat hyperbolically, that I first raised myself to a standing position to the strains of the “Hallelujah Chorus.”) Later, around age eleven, when I first heard the story that Handel had a vision of God while writing the piece, I was so fascinated that I wrote a school project from the perspective of one of Handel’s servants.

Lots of legends, personal and historical, surround Handel’s Messiah, and David Martin’s Books & Culture essay “The Handel Revolution” considers both the Handel beloved of devout Christians and the more recent reappropriation of Handel as a secular composer, through the lens of the recently published Cambridge Handel Encyclopedia.

What I found most interesting about the essay is that, while it mentions evidence for and against Handel’s personal religious piety, it is more interested in his position in regard to Wesleyanism. Referring to one of the encyclopedia contributors, Martin writes:

“In her work on Handel’s texts, Smith has discussed the idea that there is some intrinsic link between Handelian Oratorio and the Evangelical Revival, which is often dated, at least by Methodists, to the conversion experiences of the Wesley brothers in 1738. Handel described how he saw ‘the great God Himself’ while composing Messiah some three years later, and so some people have inferred a shared movement of the Spirit. Smith is not impressed by this idea, and argues that the kind of personal relationship to Christ found in evangelicalism (and Pietism for that matter) is not to be found in Handel.”

However, Martin continues,

“Perhaps one can set Messiah in the broader context of religion caught rather than taught by singing rather than talking. That movement began in the psalms and hymns of Protestantism, was promoted by the Pietist and Evangelical Revivals as they stepped westward from Halle and Hernnhut to England and North America, and has ended up in global Pentecostalism.”

This, I would say, has been my experience with Messiah and with oratorio in general, at least as a performer. Singing scripture makes me slow down and pay attention, to contemplate. Singing a long series of merry melismata to the text of “All we like sheep have gone astray,” followed by a single repetition of “And the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all,” in which each word gets a single, heavy note, makes me experience the contrast between thoughtless sin and the burden borne by Christ.

Singing in—and, I hope, listening to—oratorios can be a powerful form of lectio divina (meditation upon scripture). Though often performed in December, Messiah was actually originally intended to be performed in Lent, so the next few weeks are the perfect opportunity to listen to it as a way of celebrating Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, as well as the resurrection at the Last Day. Whether the composer was a perfectly observant Christian or not, Messiah can lead us to worship anew Christ as suffering servant and triumphant king.

For our first nutritious and edifying offering, we have the fiction of Anthony Trollope, Victorian novelist and gentle satirist of Anglican church politics.

Trollope is posthumously making his way around the artsy Christian blogosphere this week, due to Image editor Gregory Wolfe’s essay “Religious but Not Spiritual,” in which he praises Trollope’s The Warden for “striking deep social and political resonances upon the gossamer strings of . . . comedy.” Wolfe focuses much of his attention on The Warden‘s protagonist, the Rev. Septimus Harding, whose “faith is played out in the minutiae of liturgy and music rather than the grand thoughts of preaching and theological exposition.”

Wolfe connects his reading of The Warden to his reflections on the phrase “I’m spiritual but not religious”: “the Reverend Harding,” Wolfe writes,  “makes me think that I’m religious but not spiritual.”

This is where Trollope’s genius lies in The Warden. For in making Septimus Harding a liturgist he emphasizes that the quintessential activity of a religious community is not the purveying of doctrines and ideas but the worship of the presence that has called the community into being. In common prayer and song we lay aside the burden of self-consciousness; we recount the story of the encounter that brought us together. In worship we become participants, living members of a body, rather than observers and connoisseurs.

While the “I’m spiritual but not religious” phrase irks me as much as it does Wolfe, I’m not sure that reversing the phrase solves the problem. What is most endearing about Septimus Harding is that religion is what enables his spirituality–a fact that the reforming evangelicals of his day fail to understand in their zeal for making all clergymen in their own image.

Quibbles with Wolfe aside, his praise of Trollope is just. Trollope’s novels, especially Barchester Towers (sequel to The Warden, but fine as a stand-alone work), are worth reading not only for their comedy but also for their portrayal of good and faithful men and women persisting even in the midst of the money-and-power struggles of the church. If you’re short on time, you can get condensed Trollope exposure through the 1982 BBC miniseries Barchester Towers (which actually combines The Warden and Barchester Towers). The picture and sound quality are as terrible as only early 80s British TV can be, but the acting talent includes Nigel Hawthorne as the irascible Archdeacon Grantly and a very young Alan Rickman as the unctuous Reverend Obadiah Snape–I mean, Slope.

“Even if gourmets’ rejection of factory farms and fast food is largely motivated by their traditional elitism, it has left them, for the first time in the history of their community, feeling more moral, spiritual even, than the man on the street. Food writing reflects the change. Since the late 1990s, the guilty smirkiness that once marked its default style has been losing ever more ground to pomposity and sermonizing. References to cooks as ‘gods,’ to restaurants as ‘temples,’ to biting into ‘heaven,’ etc., used to be meant as jokes, even if the compulsive recourse to religious language always betrayed a certain guilt about the stomach-driven life. Now the equation of eating with worship is often made with a straight face. The mood at a dinner table depends on the quality of food served; if culinary perfection is achieved, the meal becomes downright holy—as we learned from Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), in which a pork dinner is described as feeling ‘like a ceremony … a secular seder.’”

Myers continues to recount chilling examples of foodies mocking and otherwise disparaging those with actual religious or ethical taboos against eating certain foods. Then he ponders the tendency of foodies to elevate “foodways” and “tradition” to a pedestal—as long as tradition isn’t asking you to abstain from anything.

“Most of us consider it a virtue to maintain our principles in the face of social pressure, but in the involuted world of gourmet morals, constancy is rudeness. One must never spoil a dinner party for mere religious or ethical reasons. Pollan says he sides with the French in regarding ‘any personal dietary prohibition as bad manners.’ (The American foodie is forever projecting his own barbarism onto France.) Bourdain writes, ‘Taking your belief system on the road—or to other people’s houses—makes me angry.’ The sight of vegetarian tourists waving away a Vietnamese pho vendor fills him with ‘spluttering indignation.’

That’s right: guests have a greater obligation to please their host—and passersby to please a vendor—than vice versa. Is there any civilized value that foodies cannot turn on its head?”

Foodies, according to Myers, have also turned the vice of gluttony wrong way round. Gluttony, for the foodie, involves bingeing on processed foods, especially those containing the dreaded HFCS. As Myers points out, though,

“In fact the Catholic Church’s criticism has always been directed against an inordinate preoccupation with food—against foodie-ism, in other words—which we encounter as often among thin people as among fat ones.”

Food, like any good gift from God, can become an idol in a variety of ways. The greatest danger lies in pointing out our neighbor’s form of food-idolatry without recognizing our own.

This Week: Two years ago, Carissa Smith had high expectations for the Oscars, and was let down.

I watch the Oscars every year, beginning to end. I love the things that bore many to tears: the dresses, the film clips, the self-deprecating humor (when it works), and sometimes even the montages. And yet last night, even though I was tremendously pleased with Slumdog Millionaire’s eight wins, the ceremony felt duller and more narcissistic than usual. Is it the economy?

The Academy definitely let its ratings-desperation show. In an acknowledgment that most normal people (i.e., people who do not blog about entertainment) have seen exactly none of the films nominated for Best Picture, the show producers decided to throw the plebeians a bone by including montages of popular 2008 movies, grouped according to theme: romance, comedy, action, etc. Seriously, how condescending is that? Do they really think that Joe the Plumber is going to tune in for four hours of Oscars telecast because they included a three-second snippet from Hancock?

Instead, the Academy seems to have given up all hope of familiarizing the TV-viewer with the nominated films. Back in the old days before the Internet existed (okay, it existed, but there wasn’t much on it, nor did I have access to it), I used the Oscars to figure out what movies I was interested in seeing. See a snippet of Jodie Foster playing a woman taught to speak by a stroke victim, and you might decide to give Nell a chance. (Or not—the acting snippets could also help me determine what I didn’t want to see.)

With the 81st Academy Awards, gone are the acting clips. Instead, five past winners in each category came out to speak to the nominees individually and tell them how wonderful their performances were. I’m sorry, but I have no interest in hearing what Shirley MacLaine thinks of Anne Hathaway. This is the woman who talks to aliens, after all. With the new format, instead of being given the opportunity to judge for ourselves, we’re forced to the position of outsiders, watching Hollywood clap itself on its collective back.

The telecast did include clips from the Best Picture nominees, but they were clumped together at the end rather than spread out through the ceremony, and they were spliced with footage from other, similarly themed historic films. In other words, they told us even less about the nominated films than usual.

Are things just too far gone for us to hope that the Oscars could actually help average moviegoers to make informed decisions? Am I too much of a populist in dreaming that the Oscars could actually make quality films appealing on a wider basis?

The irony in this whole scenario is that, since Slumdog Millionaire has been sweeping away awards left and right, it has become fashionable among the cinemarati to deride the movie as “crowd-pleasing” and “popular.” I can count on one hand the number of real-life (as in, “encountered in the flesh and not on the Internet”) acquaintances who have seen Slumdog Millionaire. I can count on two hands the number of acquaintances who know anything about it beyond the title. Yet, as my “feelm”-hating, Slumdog-liking husband points out, it’s a movie that actually would have a chance with audiences who know little about cinema. And the Oscars are not helping to introduce it to them.

I know the Oscars are basically the equivalent of a high school popularity contest, only with obscene amounts of money spent on publicity campaigns. This fact does not faze me. I still think they have the potential to familiarize viewers with films that might not have come under their radar previously. Oscars producers just need their heads pulled out of their navels long enough to figure this out. Surely there’s a balance to be found between “high church” and “seeker-sensitive” in the effort to tell viewers the good news about movies.

While I recognize the great benefit psychotherapy has truly brought in many people’s lives, I’m wary of a film that seems to reinforce the cultural myth that talking about our feelings is the great panacea. It can help some problems–and no doubt there are some individuals who need to be doing more of it–but talking can’t cure all ills.

Having already reached this conclusion about The King’s Speech, I was glad to see a piece by Jonah Lehrer–himself a stutterer–in The Wall Street Journal that confirms that, in fact, there is no correlation between stuttering and emotional trauma. The true causes of stuttering are a mystery, but it seems to have more to do with pesky neurological words like “ganglia.” As Lehrer points out,

Such research, of course, doesn’t lend itself to dramatic narratives. After all, “The King’s Speech” would be a rather tedious piece of entertainment if the climactic scene involved Logue telling the monarch that his primary motor cortex was to blame. And yet, I worry that the good intentions of the movie will be undone by its antiquated model of stuttering and the way it exaggerated the role of catharsis in fixing the problem. The King didn’t get better because he confessed to Logue about his inner pain – he got better because he found, with Logue’s help, a way to calm and distract his overexcited brain, practicing his consonants until they became easier to express. Modern science has moved far beyond Freud’s description of Frau Emmy, in which the disorder is caused by the repression of early childhood trauma. It’s time for Hollywood to move on as well.

According to James Davison Hunter’s To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World, American Christianity’s relationship to culture, high and low, in the past fifty years has been almost exclusively cerebral (without necessarily being intellectual). In essence, American evangelicals have been repeating the word “brain” over and over, without attention to how culture—and how spiritual formation of the human person—happens. Hunter argues that Christians have almost uniformly adopted the view that “the essence of culture is found in the hearts and minds of individuals”—or the “values” or the “worldviews.” Whatever the vocabulary used, the basic assumption has been that, if you want to change the culture, you must change each individual’s mind until a majority comes to adopt more Christlike ideas.

As Hunter boldly argues, “This account is almost wholly mistaken.”

First, the “hearts and minds” approach relies too much on an Enlightenment notion of disembodied ideas as the forces shaping culture. (Hunter is not alone in this argument, as it also forms the backbone of James K. A. Smith’s 2009 book Desiring the Kingdom. Again, neither Hunter nor Smith is advocating anti-intellectualism: in fact, they’re drawing on the best of postmodern theory to critique Enlightenment idealism and the church’s complicity with it.) Second, culture does not operate by the rule of the majority: it is, in fact, “eerily independent of majority opinions.” Instead, Hunter insists, cultures change from the top down, and those initiating change are elites with significant cultural capital. Any attempt to change culture through popular opinion is woefully naïve.

So, if Christians want to change culture, that means that we should simply work to get people into the highest positions of power, right? Stop focusing our attempts on subculture-centric efforts and instead work to dominate Capitol Hill, the Ivy Leagues, and Hollywood.

Not so fast. As those influenced by the Anabaptist tradition (or, as Hunter calls it, the “Neo-Anabaptist” tradition of John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas), cultural dominance isn’t what Jesus enjoined his followers to seek. In fact, Jesus was strangely unconcerned about cultural dominance, as were early Christians until Constantine accomplished the unholy marriage of Christianity and empire.

At Wheaton, through no fault of the college itself (I love Wheaton and remain extremely grateful for my education there), I had absorbed deep into my being the belief that I had to achieve excellence in, well, everything, in order to be a good witness for Jesus. As a young graduate student, I read Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus for the first time. That was when it hit me: I didn’t have to win everything for Jesus (and, in fact, thinking that I could do so was a bit prideful). Voluntary relinquishment of power and prestige could honor him, too. For a high-achieving perfectionist, this idea was liberating. Given the influence of the Neo-Anabaptists in my own faith, I was particularly curious to see what Hunter would have to say about them.

In Hunter’s view, the Neo-Anabaptists do provide some valuable correctives to both conservative and liberal Christians who seek to dominate culture through political means (Hunter takes to task equally James Dobson and Jim Wallis). However, the Neo-Anabaptists have an insufficient theology of culture, particularly as regards work or vocation. Furthermore, the Neo-Anabaptist allergy to power shares with the Christian Right and the Christian Left the false emphasis on politics as the only significant public realm.

Power is inevitable; even in seeking to avoid it, we re-acknowledge its importance. Hunter seems to suggest that Christians should neither especially seek cultural power nor seek to reject it: instead, we should participate in culture in response to God’s creation mandate, regardless of the influence of our work. At all levels of culture, from the popular to the elite, Christians should be living out “faithful presence,” which entails “a recognition that the vocation of the church is to bear witness to and to be the embodiment of the coming Kingdom of God.”

An appropriate subtitle for To Change the World would probably be “Never Mind. You Have Better Reasons for Participating in Culture.” The actual subtitle, “The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World,” is partially explained in passages like this one:

“The tragedy is that in the name of resisting the internal deterioration of faith and the corruption of the world around them, many Christians—and Christian conservatives most significantly—unwittingly embrace some of the most corrosive aspects of the cultural disintegration they decry. By nurturing its resentments, sustaining them through a discourse of negation toward outsiders, and in cases, pursuing their will to power, they become functional Nietzcheans, participating in the very cultural breakdown they so ardently strive to resist.”

There’s the tragedy and the irony. What about the possibility? My husband, who also read the book, got a little frustrated with the fact that a good three-quarters of it focus on showing why current Christian models of culture are all wrong. As an academic and a person by nature overly fond of analysis and critique, I didn’t mind this emphasis. However, if you’re looking for a practical how-to guide for enacting faithful presence, To Change the World probably isn’t the book for you.

While Hunter does offer a few practical examples of faithful presence lived out, my imagination was more captured by his use of Jeremiah 29:4-7—you know, the passage that would actually give some context for that oft-quoted Jeremiah 29:11. Hunter implies that this passage has relevance for how Christians should live in the pluralistic, late modern world:

“The premise of Jeremiah’s message was that the exiles would be in Babylon for several generations . . . The Israelites would simply need to come to terms with this fact. It was toward this end that Jeremiah counseled his community not to be nostalgic for the past, for the past could not be recovered. Nor did he advise them to plan for insurrection, for there was no promise of their restoration to Jerusalem, at least not any time soon. Nor yet was the community’s survival tied to the remnant that remained in Jerusalem (Jer. 24:5-10). For Jeremiah, exile did not mean that God had abandoned Israel. Rather, exile was the place where God was at work.”

Hunter continues:

“Jeremiah’s guidance was even more counterintuitive than it might first seem. If God’s purposes really were being realized through these circumstances, then the welfare of the Babylonian conquerors was linked to their own welfare. To this end, Jeremiah instructs the Jews in exile to ‘seek the welfare’ of their captors, to pray for the very people who destroyed their homeland, for the welfare of the exiles and the captors were bound together. As they pursued the shalom of Babylon, God would provide shalom for his people.”

In other words, instead of bemoaning the mythical past of a supposedly Christian nation, we should buck up, realize that we’re in exile, and get on with honoring God by working toward the common good.

I would love to see other writers take this idea of culture-making in exile and run with it. As it is, To Change the World offers just enough of a hint of the possibility of Christianity in the late modern world that readers won’t be left mired in the tragedy and irony.

both books come around to a similar argument: this month’s ubiquitous carols and crèches notwithstanding, believing Christians are no longer what they once were — an overwhelming majority in a self-consciously Christian nation. The question is whether they can become a creative and attractive minority in a different sort of culture, where they’re competing not only with rival faiths but with a host of pseudo-Christian spiritualities, and where the idea of a single religious truth seems increasingly passé.

Or to put it another way, Christians need to find a way to thrive in a society that looks less and less like any sort of Christendom — and more and more like the diverse and complicated Roman Empire where their religion had its beginning, 2,000 years ago this week.

With some series, I’m able to refrain from forming any definite expectations about how the series should end: my reading experience may go better if I leave the author free to surprise me. With the Hunger Games trilogy, though, I had a smallish grocery list of things I hoped Mockingjay would accomplish: (1) A more realistic depiction of the devastating emotional consequences of the Hunger Games for Katniss and perhaps Peeta. Up to this point, because everything in the books moves at a lightning pace, Katniss doesn’t seem to have really had time to process the horror of the Games. We’re told that she has screaming nightmares, but she seems far more blasé about some of the things she witnessed—and did—than seems plausible. (On the other hand, perhaps it is plausible for someone raised watching the Hunger Games on television every year.) Some of the victors from previous years have turned to alcohol or madness in an attempt to get away from the memory of the arena. If the experience is one some people never heal from, I wanted to see it take more of a toll on Katniss. (2) Some true moral dilemmas. Most of Katniss’s choices have been determined from outside—either by the Gamemakers, the Capitol, or by Suzanne Collins herself rescuing her protagonist from having to kill anybody without a good excuse. (3) Some sort of victory through losing. Just because that’s what I hope for in every book I read.

I mostly got my wish with (1). Mockingjay is more emotionally brutal than previous books in the series, not just for Katniss but for the reader as well. Of course, Katniss’s home, District 12, has been bombed off the map, and only a few survivors made it to the supposedly non-existent District 13, but the true devastation is what happens to Peeta. Even though we know from the end of Catching Fire that Peeta is being held captive—and no doubt tortured—by the Capitol, things begin to look pretty grim for him when Collins introduces a District 12 folk song called “The Hanging Tree,” which turns out to be sung from the viewpoint of a man hanged for some crime, asking his lover to join him at the tree, presumably in death. Downer of a song? Macabre? Yep. The specter of double-suicide has haunted Katniss and Peeta since the end of The Hunger Games, when they were willing to take the risk of both eating poisonous berries, rather than one killing the other to be crowned victor. While I didn’t think Collins would off her first-person protagonist, I could easily see her dooming Peeta to a noble, sacrificial death—which, by the way, is the only plausible path by which Katniss could end up with Gale.

What does happen to Peeta is both more wrenching and more satisfying. His torture at the hands of the Capitol has been largely psychological. In fact, they’ve used psychedelic chemicals—in conjunction with video footage from the Games—to recondition his brain to have a fear-based reaction to Katniss. The one thing that Katniss and the reader could count on—Peeta’s stability and good humor—vanishes. It’s a daring step on Collins’s part, too, since Peeta is by far the most likable character in the books. I read the book at a furious pace to find out if Peeta is restored, while at the same time dreading his almost certain demise—it really seemed as if his most likely fate was to come back to his old self just long enough to sacrifice his life for Katniss’s.

As it turns out, Peeta fares much better than Gale. What’s one way to resolve a love triangle? Have one of the suitors kill off the protagonist’s sister, of course. Okay, so Gale doesn’t intentionally kill Katniss’s sister, but he is responsible for her death through inventing the weapons technology that killed her, even if he wasn’t wielding it. Assigning Gale the role of sister-killer probably wasn’t necessary, since we already had enough evidence of Gale’s ends-justify-the-means thinking to discount him, but it does put the final nail in the Team Gale coffin pretty decidedly.  Peeta’s descent into partial madness, on the other hand, helps to even the field between him and Katniss: if he were left unchanged, he would ultimately be too good for Katniss.

What was most satisfying about Mockingjay was that its apparent total devastation of both Katniss and Peeta didn’t turn out to be final. Utilitarian wisdom would paint both of them as irreparably damaged, probably better off dead. Yet, without cheapening the cost of their wounds, the novel gives us flashes of healing. Peeta’s rehabilitation begins gradually, largely through playing a game in which he recounts a memory, and people around him confirm whether it’s something that actually happened or a chemically-induced invention of his brain. The game, christened “Real or Not Real?”, turns out to be one Katniss is in need of, too. After all the horror she’s witnessed, it’s easy to believe that humanity is totally and irreversibly corrupt, and that no goodness exists on the earth. When this belief threatens to overcome her, Katniss says in the epilogue,

“That’s when I make a list in my head of every act of goodness I’ve seen someone do. It’s like a game. Repetitive. Even a little tedious after more than twenty years.

But there are much worse games to play.”

One of the crucial reader debates surrounding Mockingjay has been whether Katniss undergoes any true character development in the course of the series. My husband and many other readers think not. Some are frustrated with how Katniss seems to remain a pawn of others throughout, never making any true decisions of her own, not even the decision of whom to love. Moreover, some would argue, she never really rises above the selfishness of a survival mentality. While I would agree that Katniss largely responds to the circumstances around her, I don’t see a problem with that: there’s no way in this life to completely escape complicity with the games of others. The best Katniss can do is to choose what kind of game to play, and who to play it with. Most of her development and growth occurs after the main events of the novel have concluded—again, a risky narrative strategy, as we usually like to see characters change during moments of crisis or extreme suffering.

I’m going to make the radical assertion, though, that people do not grow as a result of suffering. People grow through interpreting and making meaning of suffering. For some people, and for some kinds of suffering, this can actually occur while the suffering is taking place. For others, and especially, I would argue, for suffering that is mental and involves some distortion of the nature of the world, it’s only after the pain has started to recede that it’s possible to make sense of what has happened. Change, for Katniss, happens at the level of trying to survive after her physical survival is no longer endangered, in the mundane—“tedious,” as she says—choice to remind herself that not everything in the world is bleak. Stories of gradual healing are difficult to write well, though, and I think it’s wise of Collins to suggest it rather than to belabor the point. However, I think Mockingjay presents the relationship between suffering and character more realistically than many a young adult—or even adult—novel. For that reason, in spite of its flaws, the series is well worth reading.

Ah, the adolescent love triangle—in the post-Twilight world of YA fiction, we must now pledge our allegiance to Team Edward or Team Jacob, Team Peeta or Team Gale, in spite of the fact that it’s generally clear who will win the heroine’s affections in the end. As a reader who was drawn to the Hunger Games trilogy because of its portrait of civilized barbarism—a televised competition in which children fight to the death—rather than its romantic angle, I feared that Catching Fire, the second book in the series, would focus too much on the constant wavering of Katniss’s affections between Gale, her “best friend,” fellow subsistence hunter, and budding revolutionary; and Peeta, her steady, self-sacrificing fellow competitor in the Seventy-Fourth Hunger Games.

Catching Fire does have a lot more going for it than just romance. In between the Seventy-Fourth and the Seventy-Fifth Hunger Games, dissatisfaction has built in Panem. Several districts are on the verge of rebellion against the Capitol, and Katniss finds herself the unwitting symbol of revolution (one of my minor frustrations with the book was just how unwitting Katniss seems to be—her slowness to catch on to certain plot points seems more a matter of convenience for the author than a believable element of her character). Meanwhile, the horror of the Games continues unabated—and, in fact, intensified, as it’s the year of the Quarter Quell, occurring every twenty-five years, in which the Capitol adds some extra sick twist (beyond the usual sacrifice of twenty-four children) to remind the districts of its power over them. Like the first volume in the series, Catching Fire moves at a quick and gripping pace.

And then there’s that love triangle, which I expected to find problematic. For one thing, it’s hard to imagine how a reader could possibly fall into the Team Gale camp, since Gale has never been fully developed as a character. Katniss constantly tells us how much she likes Gale, but almost always in flashback. He seldom appears within the present-moment narration, and when he does, he’s generally cranky or unconscious. His greatest redeeming feature is that he calls Katniss “Catnip.” Stack this up against the common bond forged by Peeta and Katniss surviving the horrors of the Hunger Games—horrors that Gale can’t begin to comprehend—and there’s really no competition. Peeta is the one who comforts Katniss when she wakes up screaming from a nightmare about the Games, and he’s the one who, upon learning that Katniss’s show of love for him during the Games was at least partly feigned, still treats her with dignity and compassion in spite of his personal disappointment. Plus, Peeta bakes bread and utters lines like, “Frosting: the last defense of the dying.”

Ultimately, it seems as if Suzanne Collins herself wasn’t particularly interested in the love triangle per se. It’s useful for developing some tension in Katniss’s and Peeta’s relationship, but Collins as an author doesn’t seem committed to depicting Gale as much of a threat. Is this authorial laziness? Perhaps. I like to think, though, that Collins, through the love triangle, has some bigger goals in mind—goals that are connected to the series’ gritty political side. Yes, that’s right—I have to admit that the romance plot may not be a distraction from the dystopian drive of the series, but rather an integral part of it.

In Catching Fire, Katniss begins to realize that she will have to carry on her pretense of being madly in love with Peeta—a pretense begun when he confessed his love (genuine, as it turned out) on camera during the Games—even to the point of marrying him, in order to appease the Capitol’s President, who suspects that Katniss’s actions during the Games might be motivated not by youthful infatuation but rather by deliberate rebellion against the Capitol. Katniss reflects, “One of the few freedoms we have in District 12 is the right to marry who we want or not marry at all. And now even that has been taken away from me.” In fact, one of the first things we learned about Katniss in The Hunger Games is that she planned never to marry: if she did marry, there would likely be children, and children would be entered in the lottery each year for the Hunger Games. Better not to bring children into a world where they could be forced into such atrocity.

Pause. Rewind a few centuries, from fictional Panem to North America, as it was once known. Specifically, the United States—then, not entirely united—in the year 1861, when a former slave named Harriet Jacobs published a narrative called Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Jacobs’s narrative, like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin a decade earlier, was primarily written to elicit the sympathies of northern white women on behalf of the abolitionist cause. In Incidents, Jacobs reminds her free readers of the emotional burdens connected to marriage and motherhood for a slave. When a free black man proposes marriage to her, and her master refuses consent, Jacobs writes,

“Even if he could have obtained permission to marry me . . . the marriage would give him no power to protect me from my master. It would have made him miserable to witness the insults I should have been subjected to. And then, if we had children, I knew they must ‘follow the condition of the mother.’ What a terrible blight that would be on the heart of a free, intelligent father! For his sake, I felt that I ought not to link his fate with my own unhappy destiny.”

What Jacobs captured so brilliantly was that the very experiences held as the epitome of virtuous nineteenth-century femininity—marriage and motherhood—were denied her. Was she also denied basic human dignity and personhood? Yes, and she does mention these things. But she knew that there were readers who would be more effectively moved by the reminder that she, a slave, did not have the freedom to love.

In Catching Fire, as well as in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, romance becomes a political issue. Peeta, in particular, is able to use his “star-crossed lover” ethos to whip the superficial, melodrama-addicted Capitol audience into a frenzy of dissatisfaction with the Games. Even Katniss, though she resents the President’s mandate concerning her relationship with Peeta, realizes that that same romance can be the most powerful weapon in her anti-Capitol arsenal. One of the intriguing things about the Hunger Games trilogy is that, though Katniss wants the freedom to marry or not marry, it’s also clear that romance is never a purely individual choice.

Romance in literature, at its best, can be used as a powerful symbol to suggest what is wrong with the world. Of course, it can also represent what is, in spite of everything humans can do to mess it up, right with the world. There’s a reason that God chose marriage between Christ and the Church as the symbol of ultimate, eschatological hope (personally, I would have chosen frolicking puppies instead, but that’s just me and C. S. Lewis). Will romance also symbolize hope in the Hunger Games trilogy? For that, you’ll have to wait for the review of Mockingjay. Until then, I’ll unabashedly proclaim my Team Peeta allegiance.

I’m generally a sucker for the postapocalyptic, so I’m not sure why it’s taken me two years to get around to starting The Hunger Games, but I’m glad I have. The novel’s set-up—Panem consists of a wealthy Capitol that rules the twelve former rebel Districts with a rod of iron—is not breathtakingly original (see: Firefly), but it’s still compelling. In addition to the numbing poverty in which the Capitol keeps the Districts, it demands from each two “tributes”—a boy and a girl, between the ages of twelve and eighteen—to fight each year in the Hunger Games. Out of the twenty-four, the last one alive is declared the victor. Collins has cited the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur among her source material, but clearly reality shows like Survivor have been an inspiration too, since the Games are televised, and the tributes’ chances of success can be increased if they are audience-pleasing enough to attract sponsors. The Hunger Games aren’t merely a competition of brains and brawn—beauty and personality matter too.

Katniss Everdeen lands herself in the Games when her younger sister’s name is drawn and she volunteers to take her place. Katniss, since the death of her father, has been supporting her family by hunting game in the woods, so her skill with bow and arrow is her greatest asset going into the Games. In the area of on-screen charisma, though, she is woefully lacking in comparison to Peeta Mellark (yes, he has one of the stupidest names ever given to a character), the boy tribute from her District. Peeta is so instinctively talented in winning an audience with his candid demeanor that even Katniss never knows whether to believe what he says in front of the camera or not. Katniss, on the other hand, is reluctant to share the things that matter to her with the Capitol audience that she despises.

Katniss’s struggle with trying to win over viewers without betraying herself is one of the more interesting aspects of The Hunger Games to me, perhaps since I teach rhetoric. How does a person appeal to an audience while staying true to his or her beliefs and values—and, if those beliefs and values actually end up shifting slightly in the process, is that necessarily a bad thing? (Obviously, these questions have relevance for evangelism, too.) The Hunger Games, to its credit, doesn’t give a simple answer; throughout the course of the novel, however, it seems that sincerity and crowd-pleasing are not mutually exclusive categories. Various characters do put on an act for the camera, but sometimes that act becomes reality. In other words, it’s not just a matter of whether a character’s words or actions are true to him- or herself—those words and actions, once performed, have the power to shape the self, at least to some degree. That’s a far more complex notion of identity than is found in most young adult entertainment.

Then there’s the question of whether one “wins” through actually winning the Games or by refusing to play by the Games’ cutthroat rules, by literally losing but showing oneself the moral victor. Katniss wants to show up the Capitol by proving that someone from one of the lowliest, most backward Districts (District 12, we learn, is what used to be Appalachia) can actually win the Games; however, she also fears that if, in order to win, she becomes a monster, then the Capitol wins. Here, too, I was powerfully reminded of various models of the Christian’s relationship to culture. Does a person serve as a better witness to Christ by rising to the top levels of politics, media, and business, striving for excellence—to impress and to affect the world for Christ’s sake? Or does one better represent Christ by refusing to play according to the world’s rules or according to its definition of success, seeking even martyrdom before power? For Katniss, as for the Christian, the answer isn’t easy.

I was a little disappointed that Collins has shied away from placing Katniss in some of the more wrenching ethical dilemmas that she would likely face during the course of the Games, but perhaps she’s saving some of these for later volumes in the trilogy, so that we can see some further character development. As a whole, The Hunger Games is well-paced—that is to say, hard to stop reading or listening to (incidentally, this was the first book I’ve “checked out” as an e-audiobook from my library, and I listened to it in the car over the course of a couple of weeks). There were moments when, having reached a tear-inducing or gut-punchingly horrific moment just as I arrived at the gym or at my doctor’s office, I had to take a moment to regain normal-person-unaffected-by-good-book composure.

Because of some of those horrifying moments in The Hunger Games, I probably wouldn’t recommend it to readers under the age of twelve—or to squeamish older readers, though most of the violence does occur off-screen, so to speak. Speaking of screens, The Hunger Games movie is in development, and there’s a lot of speculation about whether the film can show kid-on-kid brutality and still slide in with a PG-13 rating. The book, at least, never struck me as wallowing in gore. I’m looking forward to reading the other two volumes of the trilogy, and I hope they live up to the promise of the first installment.

Recently, Mohler wrote a courageous post condemning the importation of Yoga into the church. If a blog post was to be judged by its enemies, then Mohler is on the side of the angels. Some people who care nothing for the Bible, doctrine, or even Christian tradition have been livid. They are angry because they measure the worth of an idea only by whether it immediately helps them.

Yoga has done them some good, so it must be all good. This is fallacious, however. A system may be deeply evil, but still make trains run on time or improve education for serfs. Many of Mohler’s critics are wrong, and he is right to warn us: historic Yoga, as practiced for centuries, cannot be brought in totality into a Christian life.

But this does not mean that many insights of Yoga and all that is good in it, and there is some good, cannot be appropriated by the Church.

Mohler lacks imagination in this regard. The man who imagined that Southern could be returned to traditional Christianity should find faithful men and women who can appropriate what is good, true, and beautiful in Yoga and turn it to Christ. It was Christ who gave men of old the insight to do good through Yoga and devils that corrupted that insight into a false religion.

Can Southern purge the evil and bring out the good in Yoga? It is exactly what Christians did with the very notion of the academy when we created the modern university out of what was best of the philosophical academies.

Reynolds here advocates what Augustine, in De Doctrina Christiana, referred to as “stealing the gold out of Egypt.” Augustine, responding to the question of how Christians should use the writings of pagan philosophers, wrote:

Moreover, if those who are called philosophers, and especially the Platonists, have said aught that is true and in harmony with our faith, we are not only not to shrink from it, but to claim it for our own use from those who have unlawful possession of it. For, as the Egyptians had not only the idols and heavy burdens which the people of Israel hated and fled from, but also vessels and ornaments of gold and silver, and garments, which the same people when going out of Egypt appropriated to themselves, designing them for a better use, not doing this on their own authority, but by the command of God, the Egyptians themselves, in their ignorance, providing them with things which they themselves, were not making a good use of; in the same way all branches of heathen learning have not only false and superstitious fancies and heavy burdens of unnecessary toil, which every one of us, when going out under the leadership of Christ from the fellowship of the heathen, ought to abhor and avoid; but they contain also liberal instruction which is better adapted to the use of the truth, and some most excellent precepts of morality; and some truths in regard even to the worship of the One God are found among them. Now these are, so to speak, their gold and silver, which they did not create themselves, but dug out of the mines of God’s providence which are everywhere scattered abroad, and are perversely and unlawfully prostituting to the worship of devils. These, therefore, the Christian, when he separates himself in spirit from the miserable fellowship of these men, ought to take away from them, and to devote to their proper use in preaching the gospel. Their garments, also,–that is, human institutions such as are adapted to that intercourse with men which is indispensable in this life,–we must take and turn to a Christian use.

The Augustinian/Reynoldsian approach seems to me good and healthy and as anti-Gnostic as can be.

This Week: Son of Rambow is the rare brilliant movie that you’ve almost certainly never seen. Fortunately for you, it’s now available on Netflix Instant Watch. To celebrate the movie’s new availability, we feature Carissa’s plea on its’ behalf.

Summer is the time for big-budget movies; it’s also apparently the season when we, in the eyes of studios, should prefer to watch escapist fantasy (not that fantasy is necessarily escapist, but studios seem to think that’s its primary value). So how about taking an hour and a half this summer to celebrate the ultimate cinematic fantasy: the dream that a community will actually recognize and embrace the talent and vision of an obscure and unlikely moviemaker? Such is the dream at the center of Son of Rambow, the first film written by The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy director Garth Jennings (who also directs here). Son of Rambow is ultimately uneven in quality, veering off into melodrama by its end, but even with its visible seams, it’s by far preferable to most of summer’s film-by-numbers offerings.

Son of Rambow was released in the summer of 2008, but unless you live in Los Angeles or New York, you probably had no chance to see it until it was released on DVD. Set in 1980s Britain, the film focuses on two very different boys who become fascinated with First Blood, the movie that introduced the world to Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo. One of the boys, Lee Carter (Will Poulter, soon to be seen as Eustace Clarence Scrubb in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader), is the archetypal school troublemaker, though he also dreams of making a film and entering it in a young filmmakers’ competition. Will Proudfoot, on the other hand, is quiet and well-behaved; he belongs to a strict religious sect called “the Brethren” (it’s not really clear whether they’re supposed to be the Plymouth Brethren) that forbids its members from watching movies. The boys meet when Lee, forcibly expelled from his classroom by a teacher, lobs a tennis ball at Will, who has been sent into the hallway while the rest of his class watches a documentary. Despite this inauspicious beginning, Lee soon manages to recruit Will as an “extra” for his film.

It’s while Will is over at Lee’s house that he catches his first glimpses of video clips from First Blood. For some reason, either the character of Rambo or the new (to him) medium of film—or perhaps both—further inspires his own artistic endeavors: fanciful drawings covering his sketchbook and the walls of the boys’ bathroom. These drawings, under the influence of Rambo, begin to take on the frame of a story in which Will, as the son of “Rambow” (the misspelling presumably reflects Will’s ignorance of pop culture), tries to rescue his father from an evil scarecrow—with the assistance of a flying dog, no less. Lee agrees to use Will’s stories and artistic concepts as the basis for his film.

Son of Rambow could have easily become a film exploring the effect of violent movies on young boys, and perhaps that film would also have been interesting—but this is not that film. The real film takes for granted the boys’ assumption that Rambo is a worthy basis for their own cinematic masterpiece, and that’s fine. The real focus of the movie has to do with art and community. Lee and Will, despite their differences, are brought together into a partnership through their shared vision; that partnership is challenged when the boys disagree about whether their moviemaking should be opened up to the participation of a larger community. Didier, the popular French foreign-exchange student who swaggers through the school with a posse of English imitators in tow, discovers Will’s sketchbook and asks to be in the movie. Suddenly the two-person projects swells to a full cast and crew.

One of the most refreshing things about Son of Rambow is how Lee, Didier, and Didier’s followers all recognize Will’s giftedness and, despite his youth, his less-than-imposing physical stature, and his “weird” religious background, place themselves under his artistic leadership. Son of Rambow challenges us to remember the possibilities of childhood, rather than its pressures: especially the possibility that others will recognize talent and respect it accordingly. (The flipside is also presented in a later scene in the movie, in which we see Didier, who has been idolized by the English schoolboys, experiencing the utter scorn of his French schoolmates—popularity, Son of Rambow suggests, is largely an accident of circumstance, but talent has a chance of transcending circumstance.)

However, the film never really deals with the question of whether Will’s artistry is unique because of his strict religious background. The Brethren, for Will, seem to be defined by their prohibitions more than their faith-propositions—and that’s quite possibly the way a child would view such a sect. Whether it intends to or not, however, the film asks us to consider how Will’s lack of media exposure has shaped his art for the better. When he does discover film, the medium excites him and adds to his creativity, but it might not have been such an inspiration had movies been a part of his life from birth; even Rambo might have been merely flashing images and background noise to him.

Though Son of Rambow ultimately doesn’t wrestle enough with the questions of how Will’s faith community and his new artistic community should intersect—it’s implied that Will’s family will simply leave the Brethren, at least in part for his sake—I think it might be a particularly worthwhile film for those whose religious background restricted their participation in the arts, whether as observers or creators. Having never been in that position myself, I’m hesitant to judge how meaningful the film would be for others from a stricter upbringing, but I think it could help us all to remember that restrictions don’t always suppress our gifts; sometimes they call forth our gifts in new and unexpected ways. Again, I think Son of Rambow would be much more substantial and satisfying if it really explored the reasons that the Brethren opposed movies—and whether, in this particular community, they could somehow support their young brother without compromising the essentials of their faith. These are the tensions that we live out as Christians engaged in arts and pop culture, and these are the kind of questions some obscure summer movie near you (or, possibly, far from you) may be raising, even if they don’t always provide satisfactory answers.