Posts tagged "Christmas Carol"
The Twelve Days of Christmas (Movies)
Christmas / Film / Humor / Year In Review

The Twelve Days of Christmas (Movies)

by R-J Heijmen on Dec 11, 2012 • 8 Comments

With Christmas only 2 weeks away (wait, what?!), I thought it high time to unveil my own personal top 12 list of Holiday faves. Here goes nothing:

12. Arthur Christmas

Just saw this for the first time last week and was hooked in the first five minutes by a powerful Gospel moment. An elf, delivering presents on Christmas Eve with the help of a “naughty-or-nice-o-meter”, comes across a boy who has been a bit too naughty to deserve anything. The elf frowns, promptly turns the device on himself and imputes to the boy the presents that the elf deserves. Sold!

11. Love Actually

A…

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Michael Caine Has a Thankul Heart (and an Impressive Voice)
Children / Film / Music

Michael Caine Has a Thankul Heart (and an Impressive Voice)

by David Zahl on Nov 22, 2010 • 3 Comments

With Thanksgiving week upon us, what better time to revisit the brilliance of The Muppet Christmas Carol? Filmed a few years after Jim Henson’s death, it is a remarkably faithful version of Dickens’ classic, superbly funny/clever in its Muppet-ness yet also unflinching when it comes to the more religious aspects of the story. Of course, gratitude as a response to grace will never have a better poster-boy than Scrooge, played here by Michael Caine; a forgiven heart is a thankful heart, and a thankful heart is a generous heart – exorbitantly and spontaneously so. There’s no “should” or “how” here,…

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T.S. Eliot’s “The Elder Statesman” Part 2 – Sins of the Past
Literature / Poetry / Psychology

T.S. Eliot’s “The Elder Statesman” Part 2 – Sins of the Past

by Todd Brewer on Sep 2, 2010 • 4 Comments

The following comes from T.S. Eliot’s play “The Elder Statesman.” It’s part 2 of 4. For the previous post go here.

Those who flee from their past will always lose the race,
I know this from experience. When you reach your goal,
Your imagined paradise of success and grandeur,
You will find your past failures waiting there to greet you.

The entire play can be seen as a demonstration of the truth these words spoken by Lord Claverton to his son Michael. Claverton has lived a mildly successful political life, yet the sins of youth have now greeted him in his old age.

Like Scrooge of…

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When Dostoevsky Met Dickens
Books / Literature / Psychology

When Dostoevsky Met Dickens

by David Zahl on Dec 24, 2009 • 5 Comments

As an incredibly cool aside to our Dickens-inspired “Whole Duty Of Man” series, there was a great piece in the Washington Post entitled “Christmas Carol: Dickens’s Gift Keeps On Giving”. The whole article is worth your time, but I was especially struck by the final paragraph. [Update 11/8/11: A few extra lines of Dostoevsky's impressions were published in The NY Times' "Being Charles Dickens." I've included them below]:

In his book, [Dickens' biographer Michael] Slater records Fyodor Dostoevsky’s report of meeting [Charles] Dickens. The Russian novelist wrote that Dickens, “told me that all the good simple people in his novels… are…

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