Posts tagged "Les Miserables"
What’s Love Got To Do With It?
Music / Relationships / Theology

What’s Love Got To Do With It?

by Lynn MacDougall on Apr 25, 2013 • 1 Comment

“And I want love to change my friends to enemies, change My friends to enemies, and show me how its all my fault … And I won’t let love disrupt, corrupt, or interrupt me” – Jack White in “Love Interruption”

I’ve been struggling these past months, through and past Lent and into Eastertide, with what it means to love. There’s no hiddenness on the subject in Scripture–”By this we know love, that He laid down His life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers.” This among multiple other passages.

At the same time, we live with…

Read More »

Another Week Ends: Helpful Selves, Happy Meanings, Simple Saints, Good Bishops, Beloved Zombies and Portland Missionaries
Church / Film / Humor / Literature / Music / Philosophy / Psychology / Religion / TV / Week In Review

Another Week Ends: Helpful Selves, Happy Meanings, Simple Saints, Good Bishops, Beloved Zombies and Portland Missionaries

by David Zahl on Jan 11, 2013 • No Comments

1. Kathryn Schulz (of Being Wrong fame) wrote an article for New York Magazine that’ll get your motors running, “The Self in Self-Help.” It’s a bit of a conceptual quagmire to be honest, esp for those of us who consider God to be more than a metaphor, but it’s also pretty fun. Positively jammed with soundbites, a few of which include:

[The master theory of self-help] goes like this: Somewhere below or above or beyond the part of you that is struggling with weight loss or procrastination or whatever your particular problem might be, there is another part of you that…

Read More »

Another Year Ends: Evangelical Decline, more Les Mis, Tebow Absurdity, Anxious Parents, The Hobbit, Apatow in Crisis, Millenial Affirmations and A Muppet Family Christmas
Children / Christmas / Church / Film / Humor / Psychology / Relationships / Religion / Sports / Week In Review

Another Year Ends: Evangelical Decline, more Les Mis, Tebow Absurdity, Anxious Parents, The Hobbit, Apatow in Crisis, Millenial Affirmations and A Muppet Family Christmas

by David Zahl on Dec 21, 2012 • 2 Comments

1. An uncommonly insightful piece by John Dickerson appeared in The NY Times about “The Decline of Evangelical America.” Writing as an evangelical himself, Dickerson recites some jarring statistics before launching into a sympathetic and genuinely hopeful conclusion, ht SZ:

In 2007, the Institute for Jewish and Community Research, in a survey of 1,300 college professors, found that 3 percent held “unfavorable feelings” toward Jews, 22 percent toward Muslims and 53 percent toward evangelical Christians…

The core evangelical belief is that love and forgiveness are freely available to all who trust in Jesus Christ. This is the “good news” from which the…

Read More »

PZ’s Podcast: Now What?, Amberley Wildbrooks, Hotel Taft, Dissociated Chef d’Oeuvre, First Infinite Frost, and Victor Hugo
Film / Grace in Practice / Literature / Philosophy / Religion / Suffering

PZ’s Podcast: Now What?, Amberley Wildbrooks, Hotel Taft, Dissociated Chef d’Oeuvre, First Infinite Frost, and Victor Hugo

by Mockingbird on Dec 16, 2012 • No Comments

Episode 125: Now What?

You’ve got to see the Blu Ray of “The Egyptian” (1954). Not just because it displays a certain kind of ‘high water mark’ for the Hollywood studio system and its visual and musical artistry. But also because it enshrines a kind of deep insight that a person simply cannot shake after you’ve seen it.

Taking a leaf out of the J. Geils Band (“Looking for a Love”), ‘Sinuhe the Egyptian’ spends his entire life looking for something. Looking for a love? Looking for himself? Looking for an explanation? Looking for peace? He gets them all, in fact. He…

Read More »

The Return of Les Mis and The Return of The Return of Martin Guerre
Grace in Practice / Literature / Music / Religion

The Return of Les Mis and The Return of The Return of Martin Guerre

by David Zahl on Dec 13, 2012 • 4 Comments

It’s a good year to be Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schoenberg, the librettist and composer of Les Miserables. With the star-studded film adaptation about to hit theaters, Les Mis is everywhere–again; Susan Boyle almost seems like a distant memory, God bless her. Of course, for those of us who grew up with parents who were so taken with the musical that their kids dried themselves on Les Mis beach towels, it never went away. Now don’t get me wrong – as Lynn pointed out a few weeks ago, nothing in the Western canon surpasses Hugo’s masterpiece when it comes to…

Read More »

Coming Soon to Theaters: The Christmas Love of Les Mis
Christmas / Film / Forgiveness / Law / Literature / Music

Coming Soon to Theaters: The Christmas Love of Les Mis

by Lynn MacDougall on Nov 26, 2012 • 5 Comments

“Blessed are the merciful; for they shall obtain mercy” (Matt. 5:7).

In the MacDougall house we are waiting with bated breath for tickets to go on sale. No, we’re not Twihards. We’re talking Les Miserables. The new movie/musical comes out Christmas Day. We might spend the whole day in the theater and what better way to celebrate Christmas humility of “Love come down”?

Les Miserables is, of course, one of the finest literary works of all time, the greatest musical of all time (my opinion, also held by most rational people), and an extraordinary illustration of law and grace, not to mention…

Read More »

Terror and Deliverance in Les Miserables
Books / Children / Grace in Practice / Literature / Music / Suffering

Terror and Deliverance in Les Miserables

by David Zahl on Nov 15, 2010 • 2 Comments

From page 389-390 of the unabridged version of Victor Hugo’s unparalleled epic (ht DJ):

Forests are apocalypses; and a tiny soul’s beating wings make an agonizing sound beneath their monstrous vault.

Without being conscious of what she was experiencing, Cosette felt seized by this black enormity of nature. It was not merely terror that held her but something even more terrible. She shuddered. Words fail to express the peculiar strangeness of that shudder, which chilled her through and through. Her eyes had become wild. She felt that perhaps she would be compelled to return there at the same hour the next…

Read More »

Another Week Ends: Phil Spector, The Beatles, Les Mis, The Dark Knight, Bono
Music / News / Theology / Week In Review

Another Week Ends: Phil Spector, The Beatles, Les Mis, The Dark Knight, Bono

by David Zahl on Apr 17, 2009 • 5 Comments

1. That Phil Spector lost his case came as no surprise to many of us. Still, as a long-time Spector fan/fanatic, the whole thing has hit me rather hard. Let us not forget that in 2002 he told a reporter, “to all intents and purposes I would say I’m probably relatively insane, to an extent…I have devils inside that fight me. And I’m my own worst enemy.” The best segment I’ve seen on it is here.

1a. Oddly enough the news arrived the same week that the long-awaited Beatles reissues were announced (due 9/9/09) and one day before George Harrison finally…

Read More »

Les Mis
Literature

Les Mis

by David Browder on Jun 6, 2008 • No Comments

“He did not attempt to give his robe to the folds of Elijah’s mantle; he cast no ray of the future on the dark scroll of events; he did not seek to condense the glimmer of things into flame; he was nothing of the prophet and nothing of the magician. His humble soul loved, and that was enough.”

- from Les Miserables, describing Monseigneur Bienvenu

The art in this book is something to behold. It is absolutely one of the most beautifully written and profound works of art I have ever come across. Hugo was a Romantic and they get a bad…

Read More »