According to Tickle, fundamental changes to the world and religion follow a five-hundred year pattern: the Reformation occurred approximately five hundred years ago; back another cycle is the Great Schism which separated Greek Orthodoxy from Roman Catholicism; and another five hundred years brings the fall of Rome and the rise of monasticism, five hundred years after the life of Christ. Furthermore, each cycle has a general structure. First there is a hundred-year period of adjustment to the changes. Next there are two hundred and fifty years of relative peace and stability in this new worldview and form of religion. Finally, there is another hundred and fifty years in which this construct falls apart again before the next revolution occurs. She believes that we are nearing the end of this part of the cycle and beginning something new.

Tickle’s descriptive interpretation of the past hundred-fifty years is both scholarly and readable, touching on many major changes without becoming bogged down in details. Examining the past century and a half, she formulates four pressing questions which she claims are driving the Great Emergence and need to be addressed by Christianity:

• Where is the authority?2

• What is human consciousness?

• What is the relationship of all religions to one another?3

• What now is society’s basic or fundamental unit?4

While she succeeds in establishing the importance of these questions in North American society and the need for any religion to deal with them, she focuses on the intellectual issues and outward problems and patterns of the Church, rather than on inner life. Although important, these are not the main business of Christians or the Church, which is to become more like Christ and to spread the gospel. Tickle has an unfortunate tendency to portray the Church as a passive reactor to changes happening in the world of society, economics, and culture. Moreover, she writes as if these reactions are progress — and therefore automatically good, often implying that new, non-traditional answers will become standard for these questions. For example, as she discusses her fourth question in terms of family structure, she inserts this comment about the introduction of the pill and its effect on gender roles: “There is, again, nothing inherently right or wrong in these changes. There is only change itself.”5 Throughout, she ignores the objections of various groups of Christians, neither refuting them nor justifying the goodness of the changes, but presenting the most non-traditional form of Christianity as the form that is going to prevail doctrinally in the Great Emergence.

So far, Tickle only notes an emerging response to her first essential question: authority lies in “Scripture and the community.”6 Theological discussion outside of traditional religion and exchange of ideas replace the more traditional hierarchical forms of authority. Tickle predicts that mysticism, emphasizing experience and paradox, will become much more prominent, as well as interest in pre-Constantine Christianity. Codified doctrine, which assumed a much greater role in Christianity after Constantine and was closely associated with temporal authority, will decline in its importance in unifying communities. What is emerging through these changes is not Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox, but rather something new that comes out of conversation and the mixing of all forms of Christianity. Appropriately, then, Tickle calls the new form of Christianity “emergent Christianity.” The Church is a network rather than a building, a fixed set of beliefs, or a tradition inherited from the family. Tickle’s clearest description of the nature of this new form of Christianity is that “‘emergent’ Christianity is fundamentally a body of people, a conversation, if you will.”7

While emergent Christianity puts more emphasis on community and less on doctrine and theory, this change is not reflected in The Great Emergence. The influences on history mentioned in the book are almost exclusively intellectual and theoretical social issues. As Tickle discusses the origins of the Great Emergence, she focuses on intellectuals, such as Einstein and Freud, and social trends, such as the automobile and the rise of women in the workplace, in order to explain the increased importance of community. Even worse, there is no hint of an active God in any of these changes. Her perspective and presentation of the matter tries to absolve the Christian of any blame in the state of affairs, taking away any responsibility for action on the part of the Church. The system of cycles slips into a kind of history where there is no actual progress or regress, only change. Ideas are portrayed as becoming outdated, with little explanation of why they are outdated or why the changes are good. With this perspective, guilt is “neither appropriate, justified, nor productive,”8 and history takes care of itself. Both those who choose to remain in traditional settings and those who embrace change are given similar gentle approval, which dilutes any enthusiasm for the work of God, personal action, or leadership.

Through all of this, Tickle does not define Christianity, either what essentials should remain through all the changes,or what does in fact remain the same. While she claims to include every form of Christianity, her lack of opinion, judgment, or any central doctrine leaves many Christians out of the conversation that is her “Great Emergence.” Arguing that Christianity is reacting to societal changes, Tickle misses out on the grandeur of saying that God is doing a new thing.

[1] The Great Emergence, p. 28

[2] 45

[3] 73

[4] 112

[5] 114

[6] 151

[8] 104

[10] 42

Jennifer Delurey ’12 is a History and Literature concentrator in Winthrop House.

Theology seeks the particulars of how God works in the world and who He is, how the Infinite interacts with we the limited. Aesthetics pursues a strikingly similar aim: how the Whole, the All, the Eternal manifests itself in the fragment to create beauty. In the fusion of these two similar and yet disparate disciplines can be found incredible and important insights. Yet both theology and aesthetics are huge, diverse fields of thought, with canons too massive for mere piqued interest. For a simple start, The Portal of Beauty introduces a few key thinkers who tie together the two fields. Bruno Forte, in his concise, dense, and gorgeous work on the theology of aesthetics, draws us to a deeper understanding of the Holy One, through an exploration of the many links between studying beauty and theology. These links are reminders of vital, inescapable truths — truths we would do well to apply in our own relationships, lives, and art.

Forte’s knowledgeable, well-read guidance at times forsakes clarity in favor of poetic and eloquent mental acrobatics. All in all, though, his work is an enlivening beginning to an area that merits much further examination. He often stops at summarizing thinkers’ viewpoints, not carrying forward their ideas into practical applications relevant to daily life. And yet his work provides the first stepping stones in a path that we must take. Indeed, through his window into aesthetics shines impassioning clarity about the importance of beauty to the world, and specifically to the lives and missions of believers in Messiah.

Beauty, as Forte defines it, is “an event; beauty happens when the Whole offers itself in the fragment, and when this self-giving transcends infinite distance.”1 The Infinite Whole gives of itself in tiny fragments of its fullness through form and splendor. Beauty as form suggests that a fragment becomes a proportional analogy of the harmony of the Whole, a dwelling-place for the Eternal. Beauty as splendor describes the Infinite breaking forth, shining out of the intimate fragment and giving itself into the finite.

Seen in such light, what event is more beautiful than that of the Holy One offering to manifest Himself as Jesus, a frail, human fragment to His unfathomable entirety? Jesus embodies the exact perfection and nature of God — He is the image and form of the Infinite. At the same time, the power and radiantly loving heart of the Father shines forth from Jesus’ deeds and personality, a splendor unmatched by any other human being in history. Indeed, the incarnation of Jesus is perhaps the most complete and obvious example we have of an event of beauty. Thus suddenly the entire, vast body of understanding of beauty through the ages — aesthetics — unexpectedly reveals the personality and love of God. In examining beauty, one shortly comes to wonder at that strange melancholy that seems to haunt the truly beautiful, the twinge of death that entwines with joy to pierce the heart in aesthetic arrest. Forte puts his finger on the importance of that strange sadness, our need for despair in tandem and contrast with beauty.

“A Christianity deprived of beauty would risk being nothing other than a faith that has never known the darkness of despair, and so being an empty, tranquilizing ‘established Christianity’…True sacrifice requires love, and we only truly love a beauty that has stolen us from ourselves. And so there is a special strength and dignity in despair, attained only by those who have fallen in love with beauty, and absent from a this-worldly Christianity which has compromised with the calculations and comforts of this present age.”2

Forte turns to Soren Kierkegaard to elucidate the interplay between beauty and misery. Kierkegaard intimately investigates various models of how one might stray into pursuing penultimate beauty, all of which lead to abject despair in the dissatisfaction with the merely reflective beauty of this world while the heart continues to long for the true Beauty of the coming Kingdom. Beauty draws us to need desperately, and at some point of the dark night of despair our desperation drives us out of our prejudices, lusts, mediocrity and false comfort into a relationship with the One who is equally desperate to hold us in His arms and fill us with His Comfort. A faith without such passion at its heart is dry, shallow, and cannot but be co-opted by the forces against the Kingdom—quotidian apathy, satisfaction with mediocrity, fleeting pleasures to dull the pain of existing instead of living. Without beauty and therefore despair, we subscribe to a comfortable, controlled religion that places the Infinite One in a box built of our own fears, urges, and mundane routines and will not allow Him to fully reign over our lives. And yet beauty in the world has a way of entrancing its pursuers, never quite fulfilling their inherent longing for the Infinite at its heart. We stop at aesthetically pleasing moments and begin to pursue the pleasure they lend us, rather than the Truth that shines through such beauty and indeed is at its very core. There is a harsh tension between the acknowledgment of the Infinite revealed by real beauty and the desperate yearning for something more that beauty seems to highlight within us.

Forte, in his exploration of and departure from the base of Augustine’s aesthetic theology, elucidates the nature of this tension. “God is…Beauty, original and final; so it is that this worldly beauty, echoing its divine origin and pointing towards its fulfillment in the homeland, is the way that leads to him if, following this way, we do not halt at what is penultimate, but let ourselves be attracted towards supreme delight.”3. In Augustine’s treatment of beauty, we are granted permission to perpetually wish for another moment of beauty, so long as we remain conscious that in our pursuit of that more, what calls to our hearts is not the pleasure of experiencing beauty, but rather the Infinite within the beautiful fragment. The choice to run after the penultimate beauty rather than the Source of all Beauty is a snare, a doorway into the abject pain of grasping at what cannot ever fulfill — skeptics have been entirely correct in fearing beauty’s fickle allure. But because of this snare, it seems that for far too long much of the worldwide Body of believers in Messiah has shied away from pursuing beauty, branding it ‘worldly’ and ‘vain.’ We worry, because the corruption of something so profound as Beauty can so pull the heart from its quest for intimacy with its Creator. And yet in such fear, the Body risks practicing exactly what Forte (and indeed Jesus) warns against — a passionless, dry, “established” religion. Just as beauty corrupted is a fearful thing, so Beauty redeemed strikes terror in the hearts of the adversaries of the Kingdom. Further drawing us to the urgency of our need for beauty, Hans Urs von Balthasar suggests that “…in a world that no longer has enough confidence in itself to affirm the beautiful, the proofs of the truth have lost their cogency.”4

So much of our knowledge of the Holy One is through His creation; what proofs exist of His truth are in His beauty. Augustine speaks to this in a parable, questioning creation. “I looked at the creatures, and asked [about my God]; their beauty was their answer.”5 Should we choose to ignore the vital importance of beauty in drawing the human heart toward God, we risk not only missing vital truths about His nature, but misusing our own creative natures. We as the living Body of Jesus have a mandate to live in His image: an image that yearns for the beautiful, that embodies the beautiful, that creates, mimicking the actions of the Creator.

We have been granted “…salvation of history, and not salvation from history…The more man is man, the more he is an image, an icon of God.”6 This idea is from the Russian Orthodox thinker Evdokimov, a philosopher wrestling with the concept of the icon. In salvation does not come removal from our true selves, but rather growth toward who and what we were made to be. In exploring what it is to truly walk in His image, as we were designed to live, it is impossible to escape the mandate to create. Indeed, the first thing God asks of the human race in the Bible is that we “be fruitful and multiply.”7 We were made to create: our choice is not whether or not we will be creators, but whether or that draws us to first know God, that helps us understand the Infinite from our finite perspective through its form and splendor, that comforts us and agitates us and yet always pulls us deeper into the mystery of Reality. And we find ourselves with a commission to act in His image, creating and interacting with beauty in this world as a tool for drawing every person we meet into the coming Kingdom alongside us.

Forte’s book, densely packed with many more nuanced revelations and philosophies, still manages to leave the reader at a simple, convicting place. It is an invitation to begin a life of Beauty, not a set of spoon-fed conclusions applicable immediately to life. But the invitation is one that returns to the very core of our beliefs. The Eternal, Infinite One manifested Himself in fragmented humanity, took on death, and conquered despair — this core truth is the heart of all Beauty. All beauty in the world is in some way an echo of the Truth in the realization of the Eternal within the finite. And as beauty creates desperate hunger for Beauty, so by daily creating in the image of our Beautiful Creator, we advance His Kingdom and draw closer to Him.

[1] Bruno Forte, The Portal of Beauty, p. vii.

[2] Bruno Forte, The Portal of Beauty, p. 29.

[3] Bruno Forte, The Portal of Beauty, p. 12.

As it ultimately does with so many Hollywood norms, Gran Torino toys with our expectations of self-aggrandizement: the sore, handsome thumb is still there, but it’s weathered and wrinkled almost, but not quite, past recognition. That thumb (all right, time to stop calling it a thumb) is Clint Eastwood, who produced and directed the film and stars in it as Walt Kowalski, an embittered widower and Korean War veteran whose Detroit neighborhood has changed beyond his ability to keep up.

This, of course, is a formula we all know and love: members of two vastly different cultures, initially separated by fear of and prejudice against one another, break down the barriers that divide them in a series of lighthearted moments. They realize they aren’t so different after all just in time to confront some evil that has been menacing them both. Said evil is defeated, and everyone else lives happily and harmoniously ever after.

Not everyone is living happily ever after at the end of Gran Torino, but the arc is unmistakable. Walt’s increasing interest and involvement in the lives of the Van Lor family — brother Thao (Bee Vang) and sister Sue (Ahney Her), their mother and grandmother and assorted relatives — takes all the expected routes: bitterness and antagonism give way to grudging acceptance and eventual emotional investment as food is exchanged, work is shared, and Walt continually bails the Vang Lors out of trouble, usually by being crankier and more intimidating than their antagonists.

The film’s interactions with Christianity at first seem as trite and superficial as everything else it has going on. Walt battles young the Father Janovich (Christopher Carley) intermittently, refusing to go to Confession despite his late wife’s pleas and insulting the priest repeatedly to his face. Eventually, thanks to Janovich’s persistence, the two wind up sharing a beer and a conversation, and Walt finally agrees to confess. The grumpy old man gets less grumpy and finds God all at once.

It’s certainly nothing new, but the sheer force of Eastwood’s presence carries us through even the baldest of clichés. We may chuckle at the dialogue every now and then, but we still believe it; we still believe the man on the screen, which is all we have to do, because all this, as it turns out, is only rising action, buildup to a climax that wrenches the movie into an entirely new direction and the audience into an entirely different frame of mind.

As Walt gets to know the Vang Lors he also gets to know their enemies, a gang of thugs led by Spider (Doua Moua), whose behavior toward his “cousins” borders on the sociopathic. Despite Walt’s best and increasing efforts to protect his neighbors, Spider’s gang tortures them continually, beating up Thao and eventually (and somewhat inexplicably) shooting up the family’s home and raping Sue. The crimes, and the close-up shots of a bloodied Sue that announce them, cry for action: Someone clearly needs to do something.

What Walt ultimately decides to do is the film’s real statement about Christianity, an affirmation of Christ and a challenge to Christians. Walt doesn’t save the neighborhood by killing the bad guys. He saves it by letting the bad guys kill him. He doesn’t save his friends by fighting for them; he saves them by dying for them. Standing face to face with pure evil, Walt reaches into his coat for a gun he does not have and falls in a hail of bullets. The shots bring the police, who arrest the murderers: the only possible true victory, won by losing.

The worst part is, we feel set up, bait-and-switched. We’re angry; we need our righteous vengeance; we want and expect old Clint Eastwood to open up a can of you-know-what on those you-know-whos. It’s a reasonable expectation: after all, that same Clint Eastwood made a career out of opening said cans on said individuals. It’s a part of our tradition.

But tradition can blind us to reality. The apostles, even as they walked side by side with Christ, expected a conqueror, a Messiah who would vanquish their enemies. What they got was the very picture of humility, a bewildering paradox who rode into Jerusalem like a king only to be led out like a criminal. The gun everyone thought was in his pocket turned out to be a Zippo.

We know the story so well we have a hard time recognizing it. What Gran Torino does in one sense is put us in the shoes of Christ’s friends, setting up an inevitable confrontation between the ultimate good and the ultimate evil and giving victory to good by letting evil win.

But even at its best moment, the moment it’s been building to for two hours, the moment it finally flips the clichés it’s been built on thus far on their ears, Gran Torino can’t seem to help itself. Walt falls to the ground with his arms spread, cruciform. It’s a powerful image, but the Christ-like death scene is, like Eastwood himself, at a point in its life where it only barely escapes self-parody. A moving gesture, yes, but Tony Montana died that way too.

But no matter how Gran Torino goes about making its point, it’s a point worth making. It’s a reminder of the beautiful contradiction at the heart of Christianity, of God’s strength perfected in apparent human weakness. It’s a call to sacrifice, an example of self-denial running parallel to that offered by Jesus on the cross. It’s an affirmation of the Christ who told us “Greater love hath no man than this, than to lay down his life for his friends,” and then showed us exactly what he meant.

At least, I hope so.

Because at this point, I was thrown for yet another loop. The warning bells that usually accompany movies like Gran Torino in my mind, so easily silenced by the rest of the film, were set ringing again by the sound of Eastwood’s aged, brittle voice singing the movie’s theme over its final sequence, an ego trip if ever I’ve heard one.

Maybe it’s some kind of meta-cliché; maybe Eastwood is just toying with us one last time, reminding us, his tongue firmly in his cheek, that it’s his movie and no one else’s. The problem is, there’s no way to tell. Gran Torino might be an exercise in the manipulation of standard Hollywood motifs, in the manipulation of manipulation. But it might, just as likely, be the product of the ego of one old man.

I have nothing against Clint Eastwood, so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. But I can’t shake the feeling that maybe, just maybe, Gran Torino arrives at its best moments by accident.
________________________________________________________________________

Jim Shirey ‘11 is a Government concentrator living in Kirkland House.

When indie folk artist Elliott Smith committed suicide in 2003, his restless ghost stayed behind. A vacancy opened in music, awaiting a new poet-savant of introspection.

In life, Smith’s imprint on acoustic music was unique. On record, his most memorable contribution was his Oscar-nominated song “Miss Misery”, which appeared in 1997’s Good Will Hunting. His five LP’s have achieved an impressive following for their beauty of emotional depiction. Those that have appreciated the authenticity of his music have also felt its burdens of melancholy, particularly striking in his 1997 release Either/Or. Tracks like “Speed Trials” are quiet reflections that, while subdued, carry surprising weight. Smith’s gift of emotional diagnosis allowed him to write powerfully moving songs, true — but that emotion had a very real source. Smith was plagued by a lifetime of depression, which eventually led him to take his own life.

Several artists tried and failed to fill the vacancy left by Elliott Smith’s death. Damien Rice was too transparently sentimental — Damien Jurado, too withdrawn. Older folk artists, like Nick Drake, lacked the freshness that invigorates independent music of our generation.

The year following Elliott Smith’s suicide, relative newcomer Sufjan Stevens released Seven Swans on his independent label Asthmatic Kitty. The record was a gentler, stripped-down successor to the broadly praised Greetings From Michigan, released the previous year.

In a hushed voice reminiscent of Elliott Smith, Stevens begins Seven Swans with the memento mori, “If I am alive this time next year…” — a strange recognition of death. He returns to the same meditation later in “We Won’t Need Legs To Stand”, beginning a stanza with “When we are dead…”

In many ways, we witness Elliott Smith’s reincarnation in Sufjan Stevens. Both in its solemn meditation and its aesthetic quality, Seven Swans evokes the memory of the deceased artist. The record is delicate and honest, unadulterated by studio doctoring. Both artists play a full range of instruments — adding that special sonic cohesion achieved when voice and hands belong to the same person. “The Dress Looks Nice on You”, the second track on Seven Swans, carries the same touch of personality, the same eccentricity of narrative present in so much of Either/Or.

From the very beginning, however, Stevens takes on a different, perhaps surprising, character. Unexpectedly, his first line takes a sharp turn when “If I am alive this time next year…” is followed by “will I have arrived in time to share?” An indelibly spiritual message begins to emerge. The subject of the first track, “All of the Trees of the Field Will Clap Their Hands”, is in fact a direct reference to Isaiah 55:12: “For you will go out with joy and be led forth with peace; The mountains and the hills will break forth into shouts of joy before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands.”

The reference to the gospel is clear, but what else can we learn about Stevens from this song? As in much of Seven Swans, Stevens’s introspective honesty shines through his music. We are intimate spectators to a man questioning his own standing with the Lord. “Will I be invited to the sound?” he asks. In a superposition of self on scripture, he places himself in the context of Isaiah. What is required to be admitted to the festival that was promised?

His interesting scriptural connotations appear again and again throughout the record. “Abraham” is a hushed, meditative song in which Stevens fashions a link between the Father of Nations and the Messiah. In “He Woke Me Up Again”, he thankfully acknowledges the love of a father — in some ways reminiscent of Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays”. “To Be Alone With You” is a couched reflection on the personal life of Jesus. “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” is based on Flannery O’Connor’s short story of the same name; Stevens assumes the role of a character who has abandoned a life in Christ. He explores the difficulties of judgment and the residual effects of a past life as “the good Christian”.

In May 2004, Spin Magazine likened Seven Swans to “Elliot Smith after ten years of Sunday School.” While candid and endearing, the appraisal may not cast Sufjan Stevens’ purposes fairly. Seven Swans contains none of the sweeping religiosity of the church, and it seeks to alienate no one. Instead, it offers an introspective set of personal meditations. One might even say his statements are merely reflections on his own spiritual development — his uncertainties, his struggles. Nowhere does Stevens proselytize or profess to have transcendental knowledge. He offers instead his honest doubts, his bright hopes, his sincere convictions. One can imagine visions of divine procession in Stevens’s mind, musically manifest in gradual crescendos of organ, percussion, and vocal harmonies.

There is, however, an element of truth to the comparison. While Sufjan Stevens’s ability to paint emotion bears a striking similarity to his predecessor, he recasts his introspective challenges into spiritual lessons, a step that Elliott Smith in his melancholy was unable or unwilling to do.

The closing track to Seven Swans, titled “The Transfiguration”, begins with the sound of Sufjan Stevens’s characteristic banjo. Simply orchestrated but elegantly written, the song swells to a chorus of joy. “Consider what’s to come,” sings Stevens. While the intent of this lyric may elude us, it is this sense of expectancy that enlivens all of his music, replacing Elliott Smith’s melancholy with driving optimism.

In Seven Swans, we recapture some of the emotional depth that was lost with the passing of Elliott Smith. Stevens too engages his deepest doubts in his music, only with one pronounced change: he appeals to his guiding faith for reassurance, instilling in his inherited style a new quality of purpose.

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Andrew Chen ‘11 is an Organismic and Evolutionary Biology concentrator living in Quincy House.

“Doubt and belief are each on the rise,” claims Dr. Timothy Keller, author of The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism.[1] As the title suggests, Keller’s new book is an open invitation for rational dialogue on Christianity-both to the faithful and to the skeptical. As the chasm between doubters and believers continues to widen substantially, Keller recognizes the need to communicate clearly, coherently, and calmly. Believers and nonbelievers alike, Keller suggests, have an equal burden of proof and a fundamental obligation to examine their beliefs and doubts critically and rigorously.

Nevertheless, Keller does not endorse a strict rationalist approach to understanding God. Just as a belief in the existence of God requires a leap of faith, so too does a doubt of the existence of God. According to Keller, faith is inevitable, whether one chooses to believe or disbelieve. Belief and disbelief in the existence of God both require a suspension of strong rationalism. Neither God’s presence nor absence in this universe can be conclusively proven through the culturally hegemonic scientific method. Responding to contemporary atheist scholars like Richard Dawkins, Keller aptly notes, “If there is a God, he wouldn’t be another object in the universe that could be put in a lab and analyzed with empirical methods.”[2]

The Reason for God is organized very much like a rebuttal speech in a debate round. For the first half of the book, Keller systematically addresses seven of the most salient contemporary arguments against Christianity. Founder of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, Keller sprinkles his prose with pithy anecdotes and quotations raising fundamental questions about the truth of Christian faith, the goodness of God, and the tension between Christianity and science. For the second half of the book, he embarks on a critically rationalist enterprise to “examine the reasons underlying Christian beliefs.”[3] That is, he offers concrete arguments for the existence of God and the profound implications of such an existence.

Never polemical but always firm, Keller offers an honest examination of Christianity and its tenets. From the very outset of his book, Keller concedes that religion-Christianity included-possesses tremendous positive and negative potential in our world. In fact, he admits that religion “can certainly be one of the major threats to world peace.”[4] In a world ever polarized by passionate doubts and beliefs, Keller recognizes the need for intellectually honest civil discourse. Seeking intellectual integrity in both our beliefs and doubts is indispensable for individual, social, intellectual, and spiritual progress.

Keller never claims to offer “conclusive proof” of God’s existence.[5] As he explains, such conclusive proof is just as impossible to attain in religion as it is in science. In fact, The Reason for God continually challenges us to be skeptical of our own beliefs as well as our doubts. Only when we apply a fair and equal standard of skepticism to both our beliefs and doubts, Keller argues, can we honestly seek the truth of God’s (as well as our own) existence. According to Keller, reasonability should be our ultimate standard: “No view of God can be proven, but that does not mean that we cannot sift and weigh the grounds for various religious beliefs and find that some or even one is the most reasonable.”[6]

Of the seven chapters systematically addressing the most salient contemporary arguments against Christianity, the chapter on human freedom quintessentially represents the intellectual curiosity and rigor of The Reason for God. In this chapter, Keller tackles the argument that Christianity-and its fundamental claim on absolute truth-is the “enemy of freedom.”[7] Canvassing a wide spectrum of modern intellects, including Michel Foucault and C.S. Lewis, Keller contends that truth-claims are unavoidable: “If you say all truth-claims are power plays, then so is your statement. If you say (like Freud) that all truth-claims about religion and God are just psychological projections to deal with your guilt and insecurity, then so is your statement. To see through everything is not to see.”[8]

Not only does Keller challenge the moral relativism of the status quo, but he also challenges the simplistic Western conception of freedom as “the absence of confinement and constraint.”[9] Essentially, he argues that negative liberty is a chimera of true freedom found in God. As he paradoxically explains, “freedom is not so much the absence of restrictions as finding the right ones, the liberating restrictions.”[10] Such a restricting and liberating framework of freedom can only be found in the presence of love. Why is love “the most liberating freedom-loss of all”?[11] Keller explains that the operating principle of love is that we must “lose independence to attain greater intimacy.”[12] In a relationship of love, we constantly limit our freedoms in order to experience a more transcendent freedom in love.

Whereas nonbelievers may view Christianity as a straitjacket imposed by a legalistic God, Keller views Christianity as a self-imposed straitjacket. Why would Christians straitjacket themselves? Because they love-they love God. Once we realize that God himself straitjacketed himself with human flesh (through his one and only son Jesus) and sacrificed his divine freedom because he loves us, our only natural response is to respond to his love in complete surrender of our own freedom. Keller poignantly explains: “Once you realize how Jesus changed for you and gave himself for you, you aren’t afraid of giving up your freedom and therefore finding your freedom in him.”[13]

For many Christians, the second half of Keller’s book may seem like a critical study and rigorous interpretation of the gospel message. Tackling fundamental doctrines of sin, death, and resurrection, Keller presents the case for belief in God. Although his book is titled The Reason for God, Keller seems to be advancing a thesis for the knowledge of God in the status quo. In the second half of his book, he boldly claims that “people in our culture know unavoidably that there is a God, but they are repressing what they know.”[14] Our inherent sense of moral values and moral obligation, Keller contends, is meaningless without the existence of God. Our powerful sense of morality essentially intimates the existence of a higher law-an external and absolute standard of justice.

Keller’s fundamental understanding of Christianity is certainly challenging but also refreshing in a society that relativizes truth and morality and caricatures the fundamental tenets of Christianity. His emphasis on reason holds appeal to both believers and nonbelievers, but he certainly recognizes the limits of reason. Reason alone cannot conclusively prove God’s existence, but it can help us to refine and purify our doubts and beliefs. Ultimately, Keller contends that by honestly examining our doubts and beliefs in the context of God’s grace and love, “we will be enabled to move out toward others as Jesus has moved toward us.”[15]

Anger. Hatred. Bloodshed. Violence. Perversion. Corruption. The true nature of evil. Innocence defiled, tossed to the ground and trampled by those who should know better. A broken childhood, no time to appreciate the sun streaming through the trees, no spirit to laugh and sing. Only death and attempted escape from its clawed grasp. This is the life of a warchild, a child whose youth is callously snatched from him by militants conscripting expendable lives to fight in a violent conflict. This was the childhood of rap artist Emmanuel Jal, who was a child soldier in the Sudanese civil war. He was only able to escape the war through the help of a British aid worker who adopted him and raised him as her own. After his escape, he turned to music to speak out against the violence in Africa and the terrors of the life of a child warrior.

Emmanuel Jal is a rap artist who came to Christ in spite of all the hatred and blind rage of the war he lived through. His mission now is to touch hearts and minds, and to show people the truth of the world around them. Jal speaks with hope and sincerity, which lie in stark and tangible contrast to those in the rap industry who profi t from songs full of shallow lyrics and recycled rhymes about promiscuous sex, glorified guns, drugs and murder. Jal stands above and beyond these artists. He has a meaningful message because his heart is fully engaged in eradicating the superfi cial image carried by rap artists and popular culture, and reawakening people to the truth that violence is happening all around us, that there is more to life than the tawdry and hyperbolic untruths sold to an eager and easily deceived audience. We sell ourselves short by believing such lies, and instead should open our eyes to the humanity around us, in the full depths of our emotions, both the beautiful and the ugly.

His newest album, Warchild, is an uncertain mix of rap, reggae, and spoken word. The CD took a couple of listens before I warmed to it. His flow is often choppy, and some of the words fall awkwardly on the beats. His beats are good but not spectacular, and the musical catalogue of instruments is the standard, rather uninventive and unimaginative arrangement-drums, guitars, bass, and keyboard. This did surprise me, since I had expected him to retain the musical styling of his previous CD. Fortunately, Jal overcomes these weaknesses through the strength of his story and intentions. His raw, unrefi ned, and pure message courses throughout this album, knocking aside any question of rhythm and fl ow. His lyrics are unedited for palatability, or for the listening comfort of the audience-his message is meant to jar the audience out of complacency, and he relies upon truth to touch the heart.

There simply is not enough space to discuss in depth the message of each song, so I encourage you to go online or look in the liner notes to read an explanation of each song. I would, however, like to discuss a few of his songs that made a particularly strong impression.

“50 Cent” was written in the memory of Jal’s cousin in London who had stabbed a white boy because he wanted to be a member of the gang G-Unit. Through the song, Jal speaks out against a cultural disrespect for life and pop-culture’s fl ippant portrayals of violence. Despite the many voices condemning the glamorization of violence in the media, violence remains a very popular and pervasive component of pop culture, reaching extremes that border on a caricature and parody of itself. Rappers boast about the men they stab or shoot, the women they slap, the anger and abuse they have meted out to the world for trivial reasons. But perhaps they should take a turn in the Sudanese civil war. There they would have the truth of murder, of taking the life of another human being who had a home, a family, brothers, sisters, likes and dislikes, good days and bad days-someone who was complete, who was alive. Murder and violence are not glamorous. They are symptoms of the corrosive power of sin and destroy both the murdered and the murderer. One wonders if the rappers who talk about violence so gleefully would sound the same if they had fought in a war. The people whom we mindlessly kill are also loved by God and have souls and purposes in this world. To glorify violence in song and dance is to trivialize it, to make it permissible, and to yield to its influence.

The most moving song is “Forced to Sin”. It depicts Jal’s life as a child soldier from the age of seven to thirteen. During one point in the war, his best friend Luai died of starvation right next to him. Jal’s hunger was so great and his emptiness so deep that he was tempted to eat his friend’s long dead flesh. Circumstance and desperation can force us to sin, to violate the natural rules so intrinsic in our hearts. But most importantly, this song conveys the message that even though the twin specters of failure and death may wait at the door, we must remember our humanity, hold firm to it and never capitulate to forces that threaten to destroy us.

If this message had come from a man who had risen through the industry by bluster and false bravado, this song would be chalked up to meaningless, supersaccharine platitudes, lipservice, ridiculous clichés used to elicit a fleeting feel-good moment. But Jal has gone through hell and back. He has seen men and children die around him, their bodies reduced to rotten husks to be devoured by carrion birds. He has seen innocence destroyed as his African brothers killed one another for a long-forgotten cause in the service of power and greed. Taken from his family at the age of seven, he fought with an AK-47 that was taller than him and killed many. There was no glory in it; for a child soldier, war is a fi ght to survive. If there is anyone more justified in claiming that there is no God, that life has no meaning, that it is better to give up, to give in, to curse the heavens and seek oblivion, it is a man who has seen death and destruction every day of his childhood, and who has participated in the continued desecration of life, the annihilation of his very humanity.

The wonder of it all is that Jal does not curse the heavens. In fact, he praises God for his life, for the opportunity Jesus Christ has given him to live again and spread the good news of hope and grace to those who would listen. This is the power of Christ in us! To heal a child murderer who never knew childhood, who knew only the burn of violence and the fear that death might tap you on the shoulder and take you away at any moment. Nothing but Jesus Christ could have saved someone who was in the depths of darkness Jal experienced.

Final word: Emmanuel Jal is well on his way to becoming a very popular recording artist. His rhymes need some cleaning up, and I would have liked if he had retained the musical style of his first album, Gua; his music lost some of its distinctive character and beauty when he cut out the Sudanese language and musical textures for his sophomore effort. However, his message is profound and stands apart from the manufactured, commercialized rappers and hip-hop artists whose subject matter is the overused, the cliché, and the self-aggrandizing. Jal’s music speaks of a hope that people desperately need and carries an unforgettable argument for the love and grace of God, the changes He wrought in one man’s life, and His power to heal all.

There are many things wrong with this world of ours. Licentious sex and violence are seen as great entertainment, time for eating and sleeping is swallowed up by time spent working, and personal success, defined by fortune or fame, takes precedence over the well-being of the community. As Christians, we are called to be salt and light for the world, to transform the culture around us, but where do we start, given the brokenness of our environment? What can we do? In his book Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling, Andy Crouch casts a compelling vision of how Christians can change the culture around them.

What exactly is culture? Is it Culture with a capital C, an amorphous, mysterious ether that flows out of intellectual towers like Harvard and fashion centers like Hollywood? This definition misses the central fact that culture must be contained in specific rituals or artifacts in order to have any impact. Ideals are certainly part of culture, but even a strong ideal such as justice would have no practical effect on lives without being embodied in books which can be shared or laws which can be carried out. Culture must involve cultural goods, concrete objects or actions which not only convey our idea of what the world is or should be like (our worldview) but also change what the world is, in fact, like. For example, e-mail expresses how our culture values speed and convenience, but it also enables some things which weren’t possible before it was invented-cheap communication with people halfway around the globe, spam mail, and the easy sharing of Youtube videos, to name just a few. New cultural goods not only make new things possible; they also make old things impossible, or at least much more difficult. For example, while the invention of e-mail has made instant communication possible, it has made it much harder to keep up a viable correspondence through the post. This definition of culture, as a discrete set of concrete goods rather than as a unified mass of impressions, enables all of us, not just those with power and authority, to influence culture tangibly because we all have contact with the objects and actions of everyday life.

Crouch outlines four common attitudes that Christians often hold towards culture. First, there is condemning culture-drawing away from culture because it is tainted by sin. This is a necessary response towards certain areas of culture (for example, pornography), but if carried out to its fullest extent it creates a Christian enclave that has no commerce with the world around it. We cannot love others or bring about concrete change in society if we have no contact with a large part of that society.

A second common attitude is critiquing culture. This is a profoundly important way of dealing with culture in which one seeks to understand the assumptions that undergird every cultural good. However, all too often, “critiquing culture” entails merely thinking about it. Such analysis can stagnate without ever motivating change. If we are to transform the world around us, we must not only understand it, but also act.

A third attitude is copying culture, which takes prevalent forms of secular culture and molds them in a Christian way-for example, writing songs in the same form as secular music, but with Christian lyrics. A problem with this approach is that the resulting cultural product is too often a weak, insipid imitation that simply overlays a Christian skin on cultural goods that do not reflect Christian understandings of the world.

The last common attitude is consuming culture, which involves wholeheartedly accepting what culture gives us on its own terms. This is valid for many cultural goods (for example, buttered toast), but disastrous for others, because in the end many assumptions of a Christian worldview are not the same as those of a secular worldview. Notions of which cultural goods ought to be used and what things should be made possible or impossible often differ across the two worldviews.

All of these approaches to dealing with culture are sometimes valid and sometimes not, but they are by no means a comprehensive set of ways in which we ought to deal with culture, because they are all reactive. They all rely on a broader secular culture to supply a set of cultural goods that we, as Christians, must respond to. In light of this, Crouch suggests an additional way of dealing with culture: creation. This is a vitally important way of dealing with culture, because it is only in this way that we can shape the realm of possibility for our society. There are no holes in culture; our actions only bring about change when one cultural good supplants another. Before the invention of the television, people didn’t sit around and do nothing for hours. When they began to watch television, they gave up activities that had previously filled up their time. If we want to change what is possible for our society-if we want to offer people a life which is not full of stress, or build strong communities, for example-we must offer new cultural goods which will replace what is now available.

The good news for us here at Harvard is that we are already surrounded by a certain culture which we can change. We need not fall prey to the idea that our lives only start after college, nor to the idea that culture is vast and beyond our control. We should not be disappointed that the cultural goods we produce cannot reach everyone in the world; we should instead find confidence in the fact that we can dramatically change the lives of some whom we are able to reach. We are responsible for making positive contributions to the culture of Harvard, of our houses, of our dorm rooms. Culture is created locally, and so the world immediately around us deserves our attention first. We must critique the culture around us, and decide what areas of it we should condemn, copy, and consume. But we must also be culture makers, creators of new cultural goods that will provide fresh, attractive possibilities for the world around us.

What might this look like? One cultural contribution that Christians could make to Harvard is a serious dedication to the concept of the Sabbath. Throughout campus there is a consistent ethic of overwork. It seems that the most common answer to the question, “How are you?” is “Busy.” Taking five or six classes is common; it is almost embarrassing to be involved in only one extracurricular activity. Every free moment, without somewhere to go or something to do, seems a waste. This isn’t healthy. As the amount of work an ordinary person takes on accumulates, time for lingering over meals, reading for pleasure, going on leisurely walks, or just daydreaming is cut away completely. These times for relaxation and reflection are an important part of the human experience-important enough that the command to keep the Sabbath is one of the Ten Commandments, alongside “Thou shalt not murder”. Busyness is an inevitable feature of life at Harvard-after all, there are few places that offer so many good opportunities-and a Sabbath would not altogether change that. However, a weekly rest would loosen the grip that work and stress have on our lives. The Sabbath is a day on which no work is done-the homework and meetings that usually fill our time are set aside, leaving us room to enjoy the world, the people around us, rich ideas worthy of contemplation, and the felicitous surprises that we would never notice if work encompassed the whole week. Although it is a cultural good that flows out of the Bible and is consistent with a Christian worldview, it is not limited to Christians; a rhythm of rest is a universal human desire. If Christians at Harvard started to consistently keep the Sabbath, our non-Christian friends and roommates would notice. Imagine how surprising and attractive it would be to meet a pre-med who takes an afternoon to read for pleasure, or an Economics concentrator who puts down problem sets to spend time cooking with friends. The Sabbath is not just a command from the Bible, but a concrete cultural good that provides a way for us to truly participate in “culture making,” and in doing so give something good to the Harvard community around us.

Knocked Up, writer/director Judd Apatow’s follow-up to 2005′s wildly popular The 40 Year Old Virgin, was no disappointment. It opened this summer to box office success and, like its predecessor, delighted critics as much as fans. The success of both films can be attributed to Apatow’s fresh combination of the raunchy sex comedy with a delicate honesty that charms as often as it offends. Furthermore, both movies are culturally relevant. Apatow tackled the American debate over premarital sex in The 40 Year Old Virgin, defending virginity while making fun of the eponymous virgin, and tempering the burlesque of promiscuity with moments of chaste intimacy.

Knocked Up approaches abortion, pregnancy, and marriage just as fearlessly. The central plot point is the encounter between Ben Stone (Seth Rogen), an unemployed, overweight stoner, and Alison Scott (Katherine Heigl), a fit, blonde career woman, which begins over two bottles of Corona at a nightclub and ends in drunken intercourse that unexpectedly leaves Alison pregnant. Alison decides not to have an abortion, and she and Ben try to overcome their differences to prepare to raise their baby.

In any modern film about unexpected pregnancy, the question of abortion would be almost inevitable, yet Apatow settles the point fairly quickly and moves on. The obvious advantage to this approach is that too much material about such an emotionally charged issue could fatally ruin the comic mood. Moreover, the story relies completely on the baby and the developing pregnancy, so abortion is not really an option for Apatow’s characters.

Nevertheless, Apatow takes the time to frame the issue within the context of the cultural debate, giving each side a representative (and caricatured) spokesperson. Alison’s mother, who advises an abortion, is appallingly callous. Calling the pregnancy “a mistake,” she refuses to support Alison’s decision to carry the baby, a position that pushes her past pro-choice to being decidedly pro-abortion. In her most outrageous moment, she reminds Alison of her step-sister, who aborted her first pregnancy, and “now she has a real baby.” Ben’s father, who represents the pro-life side, is decidedly less extreme. His immediate reaction is paternal love and pride: “I’m gonna be a grandfather. I’m delighted…. This is a blessing.” However, his philosophy is perhaps too blithe and his love, effusive. When he tells Ben, “You’re the best thing that ever happened to me,” Ben quips, “Now I just feel bad for you.”

Apatow’s presentation of the abortion question is two-sided, if not even-handed, and although Alison’s mother is unsympathetic, the film avoids identifying itself as pro-life. It certainly affirms the pregnancy as a blessing: although problems arise from it, the ultimate good of the baby’s birth vindicates such a view. However, the film doesn’t overextend its project into arguing against abortion in general. It chooses instead to tell a very specific story in which abortion would have been a mistake. In this way, it avoids being preachy, striking a balance between accessibility for a wide audience and an edgy engagement with hot-button issues.

The two-sided, comparative model that is so apparent in Knocked Up’s approach to abortion prevails in the rest of the film as it deals with the topic of married life. Here, the two sides are not different arguments, but different social worlds. The cross-cutting editing pattern that introduces Ben and Alison sharply contrasts their backgrounds. While Alison works at a high-pressure TV studio, Ben smokes marijuana and watches pornography with his housemates. In terms of social interactions, the differences are gendered. Alison and her married sister Debbie gossip about Pete, Debbie’s husband, fulfilling stereotypical expectations of female interaction. Ben is equally stereotypical, telling a buddy at the nightclub, “I just wanna get shitfaced. I’ll jerk it later.”

This contrast between Alison’s world and Ben’s world is inherent to the film’s “odd couple” premise. The action following their meeting is largely concerned with how they attempt to cross that border. One strategy is to ignore it, which is only possible in a purely physical encounter. This is what happens on their first meeting. Aside from small talk, there is almost no conversation. When a friend of Ben’s leaves them alone to “let you two get to know each other,” Apatow immediately cuts to a sequence of Alison and Ben bumping, grinding, and drinking. The purely physical encounter continues into the subsequent sex scene, in which Alison tells Ben to “just stop talking.” The limitations of this kind of encounter are obvious; most emphasized in the film is regret, which Alison expresses the next morning when she surveys Ben’s fat, naked body in her bed, and which Ben admits at a later dinner.

The opposite tack, similarly limited, is to talk with complete and limitless candor, which is Ben’s strategy the morning after at breakfast. Returning from the restroom, he tells Alison, “I just yacked something nasty.” Not only is this an example of Ben’s crude honesty, but it is also an elegant metaphor for the strategy itself: “Better out than in,” Ben might say. He continues to disgorge excessive information about movie nudity, oral sex, and other “guy” topics throughout much of the relationship. Although this is apparently intended to bring Alison closer by opening the door to Ben’s world, Alison is usually mortified by what Ben tells her, and eventually she explicitly asks him not to “talk like that… for the sake of getting to know one another.”

Alison and Ben also attempt to make their relationship work by entering each into the other’s world. Ben plays with Debbie’s kids in the backyard and in the pool and eats breakfast with the family. Debbie even drafts him to help her find out if Pete is cheating on her, an enterprise reminiscent of Debbie’s gossip, thus incorporating Ben into the stereotypical femininity presented at the beginning. Similarly, Alison tries to enter Ben’s male world, to the point of helping his housemates find scenes of movie nudity. However, they discover the limitations of this strategy as well: in exposing themselves to the other’s world they discover qualities they can’t tolerate. Alison can’t be comfortable with the idea of Ben taking care of the baby “if [he's] always getting high,” while Ben considers Debbie a “pain in the ass” and sees her scheming as a betrayal of Pete.

The ultimate solution to the problem of incompatible backgrounds is the development of a third, independent social structure, which is the family. Ben and Alison do much of the family formation through shopping. Holding hands, they go out to buy baby books, clothes, a crib, and various other new objects which redefine who they are. Ben eventually moves out of his house and rents an apartment, which he stocks with these objects, setting up a literal space for the family. The scene that most intensely illustrates the independence of the new family is the birthing scene. When Debbie arrives in the delivery room, she pushes Ben out of the way to kiss Alison and tries to kick him out, but Ben refuses to leave, telling Debbie that it ‘s “my room” and the waiting room is “your area.” Similarly, when one of Ben’s housemates bumbles into the delivery room to help, Alison shrieks, “GET OUT!” Ben’s housemates join Debbie and Pete in the waiting room, demonstrating that the new family excludes the two other worlds.

However, the family structure does not eliminate conflict, and Knocked Up’s admission of this fact is one of its virtues, both in its honesty about married life and its promotion of healthy human relationships. Throughout the film, Pete and Debbie’s example proves that marriage isn’t a walk in the park. It’s imperfect from a sexualized, “male” perspective – when Pete asks Debbie if she wants to have sex, she groans, “Sounds awful…. I’m just really constipated” – and from a sentimental, “female” perspective – Debbie cries because Pete wants time away from her. The couple is constantly bickering in front of Ben and Alison, so that Alison is well aware toward the end that family life is “a daily struggle.” This is poignantly illustrated in the same scene when Ben angrily blames his fight with Alison on Pete’s poor example, calling him a “shitty husband.” Pete watches speechless as Ben storms away, then turns around and walks to the backyard with a cake in his hands, singing “Happy Birthday” to his daughter.

By displaying the inevitable struggle in maintaining a functional family life, Knocked Up avoids a sentimental view of marriage, aiming instead for Ben’s brand of brutal honesty. It also highlights the virtue of perseverance in spite of difficulty, which is daring in an American cultural context that subjugates all other concerns to the evasion of pain. The film valorizes sacrifice, not only in Ben’s abandonment of his stoner lifestyle and Alison’s surrender of a perfect body, but also as a perennial necessity of marriage. Ben and Alison’s acceptance of this continual self-abandonment is expressed in the final lines of the movie. Driving back from the hospital, Ben jokes that the rent for the apartment is so low, they have to decide whether they’ll be Bloods or Crips. Alison says, “Well, I look good in red,” and Ben counters, “I look good in blue.” The compromise: to dress in gold “and become Latin Kings.”

I must confess that I had absolutely no intention of liking Neon Bible. Indie rock, that non-genre with which the Montreal-based Arcade Fire is usually affiliated, often strikes me as self-important and musically uninteresting, and as such I was beyond skeptical of their critically acclaimed sophomore release. To make an indie rock album is to indulge oneself musically at the risk of alienating (Interpol), boring (Franz Ferdinand), or simply irritating (Bloc Party) the listener, and to make an indie rock album about religion, I thought, would be to heap pretense upon pretense. That said, I have another confession to make about Neon Bible: I loved it.

It took me, admittedly, quite awhile to get to that point. My first time through the album left me exhausted from what I can only call its aural assault and hopelessly adrift in its sea of allusion and metaphor. Unlike so much indie rock, however, Neon Bible was compelling enough to bring me back for another listen, and another after that. The more I listened, the more I realized how musically and lyrically subtle the album is. And the more I came to appreciate that subtlety, the more I came to appreciate the album itself. I sadly have not the space for its extraordinary musical nuance. But Arcade Fire’s lyrical subtleties are fascinating in their own right, in no small part because they are, at once fundamental and profound, unmistakably Christian.

As its title might suggest, Neon Bible teems with allusions, both occult and overt, to Christianity, quite a few of which are vehicles for criticism. The surprisingly gentle title track, which unfortunately stoops to cliché in adding a heartstring-tugging children’s choir beneath its chorus, references a risible golden calf, perhaps the perversion of religion practiced by those to whom singer Win Butler addresses the lines “You lost it but you don’t know how” and “It was wrong but you said it was right.” Who exactly these hypocrites are Butler does not say, but he is wary of their influence: “What I know,” he sings, “is what you know is right.” The song’s final lines are a glum appraisal of fire-and-brimstone Christianity: “Not much chance for survival / if the Neon Bible is true.”

The succeeding track, “Intervention,” offers an even more severe critique of Christianity, driven with ironic intent by churchly organ chords. Its second line, “The useless seed is sown,” is a bitter jab at Jesus’ parable of the Sower and the Seed (Mt. 13). Enraged like Jesus at those who would condemn others, the singer asks “Who’s gonna throw the very first stone?” Lines like “Working for the Church while your family dies” and “Every spark of friendship and love will die without a home” throw understatement to the wind in a direct attack on blind fanaticism. More unsettling by far is “Singing Halleluiah with the fear in your heart,” a line that exposes the hypocritical paradox of a theology requiring both love and terror.

But in the midst of all the song’s bile, Butler pleads with God to “Lift me up and take me out of here.” God is still present, even among the hypocrites who worship Him in vain. Like Job, the singer never doubts God’s existence, though he questions much about Him. He may distrust His forgiveness in the lines “The curse is never broken” from the opening track “Black Mirror” and “Some debts you’ll never pay” from “Intervention;” he may be tired of His so-called servants, prompting the line “I don’t want to live in my father’s house no more” in “Windowsill.” But he never forsakes God, or believes that God has forsaken him.

This basic faith imbues all of Neon Bible with a quiet hope, a hope found even in “Ocean of Noise,” which might be the lament of a soul in Hell. The song’s vision of damnation owes much to C.S. Lewis – its title is reminiscent of Screwtape’s cacophonous pit while another of its phrases, “this city of empty streets,” recalls the Hell of The Great Divorce, an ever-expanding city whose inhabitants move farther and farther apart – and the allusions seem appropriate. Lewis offered a hopeful vision of Christianity indeed, one that would allow a soul to admit, “All of the reasons I gave were just lies / to buy myself some time,” and still believe that “I’m gonna work it out.” Whether this belief is tragic or not is for others to debate, and Butler’s tone makes no comment, but the line keeps the album’s subtle hope alive.

That hope is first iterated in the album’s second track, “Keep The Car Running,” a mandolin-driven piece that is both an anticipatory vision of Heaven and a call to vigilance, the metaphor of its title reinforced by the line “they don’t know where and they don’t know when,” an allusion perhaps to Christ’s statement that “not even the angels in Heaven” know the hour of the Last Judgment (Mt. 24:36). It reaches its joyful climax in three songs in the album’s second half, the first of which, “The Well and the Lighthouse,” begins with no hope in sight. Based on a French fable about a wolf who, tempted by a fox, jumps down into a well thinking that the moon reflected in it is a wheel of cheese, the song is stark both musically and lyrically, building to the bleak statement “You always fall / for what you desire / or what you fear.” Its message is simple, and at its core Christian: our short-term actions have long-term consequences, and decisions made out of selfishness or led to by lies can be fatal.

But then, abruptly, “The Well and the Lighthouse” undergoes a dramatic shift. Suddenly it is a waltz, the only waltz on the album. All at once it is Neon Bible’s most upbeat piece by far. And, just as quickly, its lyrics become a joyful affirmation of the risen Christ:

Resurrected,
Living in a lighthouse.
If you leave, them ships are gonna wreck.
Resurrected,
Living in a lighthouse
The lions and the lambs ain’t sleeping yet.

Here at last is resolution: the hope that was once barely audible is now shouted from the rooftops. God is alive and at work, and though the lion has not yet lain down with the lamb, Christ, without whom we are lost, has not left his post as our guide on the way. The battle between love and fear, so painfully apparent in “Intervention,” has been decided. Love is the victor, and in its triumph triumphs joy.
This joy carries through to the album’s penultimate track, “No Cars Go.” Almost a postmodern spiritual, “No Cars Go” is punctuated by shouts and culminates in the call, “Little babies . . . women and children . . . old folks / Let’s go!” Its most powerful line is “Us kids know,” perhaps an invocation of the Christ who said, “Unless you become like little children, you shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven” (Mt 18:2). The joy of love is no longer passive. We are no longer waiting – we are going where no cars or planes or subs or spaceships go.

Neon Bible‘s final track, “My Body Is A Cage,” with its muted, vaguely industrial beat, is one of its most complex and one of its best, providing a sobering but hopeful coda to the joy of “No Cars Go.” Its first verse, which begins “I’m standing on a stage / of fear and self-doubt,” recalls Macbeth’s “poor player / who struts and frets his hour upon the stage / and then is heard no more,” hardly a hopeful or a joyous image. Another verse, beginning “I’m living in an age / that calls darkness light,” seems an invitation to despair. The song’s refrain, “My body is a cage / that keeps me from dancing with the one I love / but my mind holds the key,” rings of Gnosticism, the heretical philosophy that considers all good to be in the spirit and all evil to be in the flesh. Beset by confusion from without and within, the singer offers one final plea to God: “Set my spirit free,” to which he adds at last, “Set my body free.” In the face of his wicked world and his own limitations, he refuses to surrender his hope: there is, despite it all, a God before whom he can stand in supplication. With this reassurance Neon Bible, attacker of Christianity and affirmer of Christ, comes to its close, having ultimately and definitively found God.

London, 2027: the world is a depressing place, devoid of the laughter of children. Everyone in the world has mysteriously become infertile; no babies have been born for eighteen years. When a young woman becomes pregnant, the protagonist must help her flee the country to keep her safe and save the human race. Children of Men does not makes its important point through its presentation of a futuristic dystopia; in fact, it’s not centrally about a future society. If the movie were actually focused on the perils of what society might be like in the future, there wouldn’t be too much to say that hasn’t been said and done many times before – an oppressive government, downtrodden masses, depressing background music, and so on.

Cuarón also places little emphasis on the science-fiction elements of the plot. We do not know exactly what caused the universal sterility or the miraculous birth as such traditionally crucial “why” and “how” questions don’t seem that important in the course of the film. These issues become dwarfed in their relevance next to the message of hope through life that the movie projects.

To say the least, the movie does not begin with an encouraging or hopeful tone. Clive Owen plays the protagonist, Theo, who agrees to help a young woman, Kee, leave the country at the request of his former girlfriend (and because of the large payoff he is promised). He does not realize that the woman is pregnant until he is about to leave the political group’s hideout in an effort to save his own life. That night, she calls him into the barn and reveals her secret. From this point on, Theo is determined to see Kee and her child safely out of Britain. One of the crucial elements of the movie is the contrast between Theo’s former, self-focused life and his later life of meaningful sacrifice. As the movie progresses he matures to the point where he can realize that keeping himself safe is less important than defending what can bring hope to the world. Theo knows that the cause is far greater than himself and worth sacrificing to preserve.

In the pivotal scene, Kee reveals her pregnant stomach to an awestruck Theo, who blurts out, “Jesus Christ!” Though the exclamation brings a lighter, more comic moment to the rather melancholy backdrop of the film, it also reveals another facet of the plot. The exclamation is not intended by Theo’s character as an allusion to Christ, but the nature of the plot reveals it as such. The woman is a poor refugee, belonging to a low social class that is looked down upon by society and seen as a social problem by the government. She gives birth to a child who will bring hope to the entire world for future life. In spite of the hope that resides in the child, the government threatens his life, so his mother and adoptive father must flee the country. This is essentially a Nativity story.

But there is no messenger angel, no virgin conception, no prophecy, no explanation given by God for this “miracle.” Many elements of the Biblical story are there, but the actual circumstances surrounding Kee’s pregnancy are absent of religious overtones. It is painstakingly clear throughout the movie that mankind is in desperate need of a miracle – a sign that science and the material world cannot provide. Most have given up hope for the human race, faced with the stark fact that with no new births, the population will continue to age and die off until no one is left. In the midst of all this, where is God? Where is faith? We see brief shots of religious zealots on the streets, proclaiming that infertility is God’s judgment for humanity’s sins. But it is evident that people have largely abandoned the search for an explanation. Rather, their hearts yearn for a saving miracle.

Even without angels and prophecies, the film is able to show us countless moments of divine experience. Every man and woman who lays eyes on Kee’s child is struck dumb in awe, transfixed by a sight no one has seen in eighteen years. What had been a commonplace occurrence – childbirth – now seemed otherworldly and sacred. In the middle of a fierce explosive battle between the government and rebel forces, refugees huddling in besieged buildings leave their safety zones to catch just a glimpse of the wailing baby and to touch with trembling hands the tiny bundle of hope. When Theo and Kee walk outside into a street lined with hostile soldiers, a dramatic hush falls over the entire battle scene. Guns stop firing, people stop fighting and killing. Everyone looks at the mother and child, and several soldiers make the sign of the cross on their bodies. The moment of surreal silence and peace lasts until the child passes them.

In that scene, we realize that the world instinctively responds to the greatness of human life, and the mysterious power that has enabled such (in our mind, everyday) miracles. Amid a vicious war in which lives are thoughtlessly terminated with machine guns and grenades, this source of new life is captivating in its grandeur and simplicity. We are reminded of the hypocrisies of mankind, and the lack of respect we sometimes give human life, which demands so much admiration as a gift to every one of us. We should also consider the parallel to the wonder and joy generated by the new life after death promised by Christ’s resurrection.

The film allows us to see and understand the significance of the birth of Christ over two thousand years ago. The shepherds’ worshipful looks of awe and wonder at the newborn Christ in his lowly manger are mirrored on the faces of downtrodden refugees and battle-hardened soldiers in the 21st century. The deep yearning in our hearts for a lasting hope and an encounter with the divine has remained throughout the millennia. Theo knew the child was the fulfillment of hope, and so he was willing to give up his own life to save the child. Hope is worth the sacrifice.

For those seeking the miraculous, the divine, and the source of life and hope, Children of Men will inevitably point viewers toward the ultimate bringer of salvation in the world – the greatest miracle from the past into the future – Jesus Christ.