Posts tagged "family"
Looking Tobey Maguire Dead in the Eye: Heroes and Villains and Brothers
Film / Law / Relationships / Suffering / Theology

Looking Tobey Maguire Dead in the Eye: Heroes and Villains and Brothers

by Addie on Aug 30, 2011 • 1 Comment

The latest installment of our “Mockingbird at the Movies” column comes to us from Addie Jenkins:

“Grace knows I would do anything to get back to her.”

These are the first words spoken by Captain Sam Cahill, played by Tobey Maguire in the 2009 wartime psychological drama, Brothers. Though referring to his wife, the line might also strike a chord in grace-parched hearts, or with those held captive by law for God knows how long, be it martial or spiritual. Based on a 2005 Danish film by the same name, Jim Sheridan’s adaptation drops its viewers into the pit of the painfully…

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Mockingbird at the Movies: Junebug
Church / Film / Relationships

Mockingbird at the Movies: Junebug

by Mockingbird on Aug 5, 2011 • 4 Comments

A reflection/review from Mbird friend Russ Masterson (with maybe a little help from DZ). If you haven’t grabbed Russ’ new e-book 40 Days Without Food, what’s stopping you?

While attending the Mockingbird Conference in NYC last spring, a fellow attendee rattled off all the under-the-radar movies he thought I should see. I remembered a few and added Junebug to my Netflix queue that night. A few months later the DVD arrived, only to be placed in our cabinet and forgotten for another month. Then, last weekend, we dusted it off and hit play.

The film begins with soft-spoken George (Alessandro Nivola) meeting…

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2011 NYC Conference Book Table
Books / Conferences / Theology

2011 NYC Conference Book Table

by David Zahl on Apr 6, 2011 • No Comments

Recordings will all be available on Monday (on the new site!). Until then, here’s this year’s book table, with a couple of embarrassing omissions rectified. Every year it’s a little different, depending on speaker and theme, but overall, it’s safe to say that it doubles as something of a “Mockingbird Reading List.” Enjoy:

NON-FICTION

Alcoholics Anonymous – Big Book (little version)Bayer, Oswald – Justification and SanctificationBrewer, Todd & Zahl, David – The Gospel According to PixarBrooks, David – The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and AchievementCapon, Robert Farrar – Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage, and Vindication in the Parables…

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Sexting and Identity
Children / Identity / Relationships

Sexting and Identity

by Ethan Richardson on Mar 30, 2011 • No Comments

In the looking-for-love-in-all-wrong-places department, a rich article was released on Sunday about the growing presence of “sexting” amongst teenagers across the nation, and the implications it has not only on law and justice, but social development, popular culture, and the modern family. An article written with an arresting understanding that things don’t come from nowhere, it sympathetically centers on Margarite as the confluence of teenage identity crisis, which basically comes down to social-relational confusion and basic, human love-hunger. 

Adults face a hard truth. For teenagers, who have ready access to technology and are growing up in a culture that…

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Tim Ferriss and the 4-Hour Soul
Identity / Psychology

Tim Ferriss and the 4-Hour Soul

by David Zahl on Mar 29, 2011 • 2 Comments

A moderately interesting look at 4-hour phenomenon Tim Ferriss in the NY Times. One gets the sense that although there’s clearly some energy here – it’s hard not to respect someone who goes to such lengths – all the optimization and efficiency talk is actually code for self-justification (and a very inflated anthropology). It sounds as though Ferris has simply replaced his own identity-driven obsession with business with a similar one with self – which strikes this blogger as different versions of the same thing. Plus, does anyone else think that the urgency/anxiety about time is a tad contradictory? Meaning,…

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Part X and the Death and Resurrection of Hollywood
Art / Celebrity / Law / Psychology / Suffering

Part X and the Death and Resurrection of Hollywood

by David Zahl on Mar 21, 2011 • No Comments

Lots of interesting connections and disconnections to be found in the New Yorker profile of Barry Michels, therapist to the stars. Michels is an interesting conglomeration of Jungian psychoanalyst, self-help guru, and Alcoholic Anonymous-style breakdown-inducing tough love. You have to slog through a fair amount of nonsense, but the stuff about judgment as it relates to creativity is particularly relevant, not to mention Michels’ insights at the end about death and rebirth. One can’t help but wonder how much Michels picked up from close family friend Rod Serling?! ht RJH:

One recent afternoon, Michels put on his glasses, pulled out a…

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Why I Am Coming to NYC
Conferences / Testimony / Theology

Why I Am Coming to NYC

by Jeff Hual on Mar 14, 2011 • 3 Comments

Each year it seems like such an undertaking: spending money on travel for myself that could have been used for a family vacation; enduring crowded flights and dreary layovers; trudging to and fro on subway lines and unfamiliar avenues, a stranger in a strange land – all to spend a few fleeting days at a religious conference. Is it worth it, you may ask? Well, I wrote what follows after last year’s conference, and it sums up the reason why I intend to make this annual pilgrimage to New York City as long as there is a Mockingbird…

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Humor / Religion

God Is My Co-Pilot

by David Zahl on Mar 10, 2011 • 2 Comments
David Brooks Gets Inside Your Head
Books / Psychology

David Brooks Gets Inside Your Head

by David Zahl on Mar 9, 2011 • 1 Comment

The final post in our neuroscience extravaganza should come as no surprise: David Brooks’ editorial in yesterday’s NY Times, “The New Humanism.” Building on the comments he made in last week’s interview with The Daily Beast, Brooks synthesizes some of the recent neuroscience findings in a characteristically digestible way, offering us another preview of his new book, which came out yesterday. Not much to add here, and less to subtract – I’ve reposted almost all of it – suffice it to say, you have to go out of your way not to be struck by how much Brooks’ insights jive…

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Conference Preview: Grace for Single Moms
Children / Church / Conferences / Gender

Conference Preview: Grace for Single Moms

by Aaron M. G. Zimmerman on Mar 8, 2011 • 1 Comment

From Andrea Zimmerman, who, with her husband Aaron, will lead one of our breakout sessions on Friday morning at the upcoming 2011 Mockingbird Conference.

“Am I allowed to come to Christmas services at your church with my boys?”

An unwed mother with two small children asked me this question a few days before Christmas. Her church did not allow her to participate in services because she had children out of wedlock. Even though she had already visited our church twice, she couldn’t believe that we would actually allow her to participate, much less at a “special” service. She is not alone.…

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Music

Thursday Afternoon Rock N Roll: Josh Ritter’s "To The Dogs Or Whoever"

by David Zahl on Mar 3, 2011 • No Comments

Robbie Robertson once said that “The Weight” was about the impossibility of sainthood. This song is too:

Oh bring me the love that can sweeten a sword
A boat that can love the rocks or the shore
The love of the iceberg reaching out for a wreck
Can you love me like the crosses love the nape of the neck?
Julie Schenecker And The Ties That Bind
Children / News

Julie Schenecker And The Ties That Bind

by David Zahl on Feb 16, 2011 • No Comments

Not for the faint of heart, a devastatingly honest editorial in this past Sunday’s Times, “The Parent Trapped,” in which mother and author Katherine Ellison writes of her reaction to the arrest of Julie Schenecker, the Floridian soccer-mom who was indicted last week on charges of first-degree murder of her two teenage children. While the majority of the responses have been eerily Onion-like, Mrs. Ellison courageously takes another route. The neverending refrain of ‘original sin’ seldom takes on such horrifying aspect:

And yet what haunts me even more than the terrible photos of [Mrs. Schenecker] being led off by the…

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How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love The Beach Boys: The Many Moods of Murry Wilson
Children / Law / Music

How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love The Beach Boys: The Many Moods of Murry Wilson

by David Zahl on Feb 2, 2011 • 3 Comments

Even if you don’t consider The Beach Boys to be the greatest American pop band of all time (and therefore the apex of Protestant expression in the 20th century – kaboom!), hear me out. The well is undeniably deep, and it’s high time we plumbed some of those depths. And while the group’s greatness may not have much to do with Murry Wilson, he’s as good a place to start as any, the ill-tempered patriarch of the Wilson clan and father of Brian, Dennis and Carl.

The story is not an altogether unfamiliar one: Murry was a frustrated songwriter himself, so…

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Joey Berglund Breaks Down
Literature

Joey Berglund Breaks Down

by David Zahl on Jan 27, 2011 • No Comments

The powerful bottoming-out moment of young Joey Berglund, one of the protagonists in Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom, who has just eloped with his girlfriend Connie after miraculously pulling off a lucrative but pretty underhanded deal to provide the US military with shoddy parts for some Cold War trucks they were using in Iraq:

The depression that for years had stalked the women nearest him seemed finally to have identified its rightful prey and sunk its teeth in him. The one thing he knew he absolutely had to do, which was to tell his family that he’d married Connie, he could…

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The Origin of Every Clash That Takes Place Between People
Grace in Practice / Law / Theology

The Origin of Every Clash That Takes Place Between People

by Mockingbird on Jan 19, 2011 • No Comments

A couple of never-been-bettered passages about the legal side of life from Paul Zahl’s Grace in Practice. As close as it gets to Mbird 101:

p. 6: But the law, no matter where it comes from, is always the law heard. I hear ‘you shall’ and ‘you shall not’ as adversarial. This is the key to understanding human psychology and human action. All ideals and all delineations of what is absolutely good are heard and understood as accusatory statements… Say what you will about its idealistic intent, about its being the ultimate ‘design manual’ for men and women, the…

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