Update: and by the way this is an interesting note too.

This one really should have been a hit.

Seems I should get tired of these--but they're just so very well done, especially the acting. As we were discussing in the comments on some other post recently, most of the characters are truly believable as real people, and this is partly because they aren't Hollywood-beautiful. Frequently the women in American productions who are playing supposedly tough action-oriented characters somehow manage to convey to me the sense that they're way more concerned with how they look than with being the character. 

Anyway, I have four to recommend:

Happy Valley, which really exemplifies what I was just talking about. This is not a mystery, but a cop show. The cop is a middle-aged woman, Catherine Cawood, played by Sarah Lancashire. and she is utterly convincing, as is another important character, Catherine's sister Clare (Siobhan Finneran). The valley of the title is, as you might expect, not at all happy; it's a rather depressed area of Yorkshire. There are two series of six episodes each, and each series is a complete story. My only hesitation about recommending it is that the subject matter is pretty grim. There's not much explicit violence, but there's disturbing psychological stuff.

Shetland and Vera are both based on mystery novels by Ann Cleeves. I knew nothing about Cleeves until my wife read one of the novels featuring Deputy Chief Inspector Vera Stanhope and found out there was a BBC series featuring her. Vera is a female variant of the traditional gruff-but-basically-kind-hearted cop, a rather dumpy, plain, and unfashionable middle-aged woman who is of course brilliant at solving crimes. She's a great character, wonderfully portrayed by Brenda Blethyn.

Shetland is almost as good. The biggest difference is that the detective, Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez (Douglas Henshall), is not as vivid a character as Vera. It's set in the Shetland Islands, which means you get many glimpses of great scenery. (Vera, set on the coast of Northumberland, also gives you a good bit of that.) And by the way if you wonder about "Perez", as I did: Spanish Armada.

Endeavour is the somewhat unlikely attempt to portray Inspector Morse, of the famous novels and late-'80s/early-'90s TV series, as a young man. In my opinion it works very well for the most part. Shaun Evans plays the young Morse. It's a lot to ask of a young actor to play a role in which he's expected to resemble one (John Thaw) playing an older version of the same character, but Evans is at least plausible. I notice that he uses a certain pained grimace-smile that Thaw often used. The series is set in the mid-1960s, and of course for someone my age that's interesting. Also interesting for fans of the old series are the characters who are the younger versions of characters from the old series. I especially like young Max, the pathologist (James Bradshaw). Also of interest to fans of the old series is that John Thaw's daughter, Abigail, has a small but recurring role as a journalist. 

Also worthy of mention, I think, so far, is The Tunnel, although I don't like it as well as the others. It's currently being broadcast on PBS. We're about halfway through ten episodes. Like Happy Valley it's one long story, and the individual episodes are only forty minutes or so long. It's a joint Anglo-French production, featuring a beautiful and eccentric (mildly autistic, or something of that sort) young French policewoman played by Clémence Poésy. I thought she looked slightly familiar: turns out she played  Fleur Delacour in one of the Harry Potter movies. It's very well done (as usual), but be warned that it is much more grim, violent, and generally disturbing than any of the others. It's based on a Swedish series called The Bridge, which I have not seen.

And be advised that I don't really care that much about the plausibility and coherence of plots in crime stories. That's definitely a fault in some of these, especially I think some of the Endeavour episodes. But it's the characters and the way their moral choices play out that keep me interested--in addition, of course, to the basic what-will-happen-next appeal of a good story.

All of these except The Tunnel and probably the current season of Endeavour are available on Netflix.

It's hard to figure out how to start this post because I am writing about a movie that is bad in so many ways. Most of the characters are very stiff. The leading man is an Englishman playing the part of Japanese and the leading woman is an American playing the part of a Russian Jewish immigrant. Neither of these portrayals works 100% of the time. The Japanese houseboy, played by Marc Marno, who you will think is Bobby Darin, is an outrageous parody along the lines of Jose Jimenez, or more like Jerry Lewis in Still Laughing. (I'm not against all ethnic humour; I just think these are insulting and over-the-top). In so many ways the movie just does not work.

So, I've been asking myself why this is one of my favorite movies--one of the few that I own?

Well, one thing is that it is in places hysterically funny. There's one line from the movie (which I will not divulge) that regularly comes up in family conversations. And then, the stars of the movie are Alec Guinness and Rosalind Russell, and despite the fact that their accents are occasionally a bit jarring and that Alec Guinness just looks a bit strange, the chemistry between the two is wonderful. I'm not talking about romance, although there is that, it's more like the feeling you get when you meet someone with whom you can really communicate. They really hear what you are saying. They understand your jokes. They care about the things you care about.

As good as Alec Guiness is, the star of this movie is Rosalind Russell. Her character, Bertha Jacoby is wise; she is funny; and she knows who she is, and what her place is in this world. All my adult life I have wished that I knew some wise, older woman who I could go to for advice, and I have never found anyone to fill that role. I think this woman might. And as ably as Ms. Russell portrays the serious side of Bertha Jacoby, she truly excels in the humorous side. Her comedic timing is impeccable--from the few scenes that approach slapstick to the more numerous scenes where the humor is more subtle.

Bertha is a widow whose son was killed by the Japanese in World War II. She lives alone in an apartment in New York City, where she appears to be very content. As the movie begins, we find her awaiting the visit of her daughter, Alice, and son-in-law, Jerry, who is a member of the U. S. Foreign Service. She knows they have an announcement to make, and she is sure that the announcement is the one that every mother of a young married person awaits—but she is far off the mark. She finds that Jerry has been assigned to the U. S. Embassy in Japan to help with negotiations for a trade agreement with that country. Still bitter over the death of her son, she cannot at first accept the situation at all.

Gradually, however, she comes to see that this is an advantageous position for Jerry. She accepts the fact that they are going to what she sees as an enemy land, and then receives a further surprise. Alice wants her mother to come with them. Neither Jerry nor her mother thinks that Bertha could be happy in Japan, but gradually their objections are overcome and off to Japan they all go.

Once aboard the ocean liner, they meet Mr. Koichi Asano, a Japanese businessman who will be taking part in the negotiations that Jerry will be helping to conduct. Mr. Asano attempts to befriend Mrs. Jacoby, but she is very cold. Eventually, though, after finding out a bit more about Mr. Asano and his life, she comes to see him as an individual who could be a friend, rather than as an embodiment of the enemy who killed her son.

A Majority of One was released in 1962, and was based on a Broadway hit starring Gertrude Berg, and Cedric Hardwicke that opened in 1959. I would guess that at this time there were still many people in the United States who had the same feelings toward the Japanese as Mrs. Jacoby did. Perhaps, this was considered a daring movie. I don't know. It dealt with racial prejudice—although not the sort that we are most accustomed to—in a time when that was not a popular topic. It does not however, sink under the weight of the topic, or become so preachy as to be tedious. The story, not the lesson, always drives the movie.

One thing I really enjoy about the movie is the discussions where Mr. Asano and Mrs. Jacoby compare their different cultural/religious traditions. There is a certain amount of similarity which comes, I think, from the fact that we are all human and the tools that we have to express our traditions are the same for us all: beauty, nature, our inward desires and search for meaning—many similar things. Different cultures and religions inform these basic similarities, but it's natural that we would come to some common expressions of what is most important to us. The movie doesn't downplay the differences, however. In fact there is one scene where Mr. Asano talks about how difficult those differences can be.

It would seem that Mrs. Berg, who won the Tony Award for best actress in the role of Bertha Jacoby, would have been perfect for the movie version, but Jack Warner did not want her, and offered the role to Rosalind Russell, who was shocked. This exchange is found on the TMC website. 

"You've been drinking," she told Warner according to her 1977 autobiography Life Is a Banquet. "What would I be doing playing this Jewish lady from Brooklyn? I'm a little Irish girl from Waterbury, Connecticut. Use Gertrude Berg, it's her part," she said.

"We'll never use Gertrude Berg," replied Warner. "She made a picture over at Paramount years ago, and it was a disaster."

"But that has nothing to do with this," said Russell. "You'd be crazy to put me in that part, and I'd be crazy to take it."

However, when Jack Warner suggested that she could possibly co-star with Sir Alec Guinness, Russell reconsidered. "Well, that's another cup of chicken soup," she told him. "I'll think about that little item."

Earlier, I mentioned the stiffness of some of the characters, and, indeed, there is a sort of stiffness in several of the scenes, and I wonder if that can be attributed to the fact that the movie is derived from a play. In fact, it frequently has the feel of a play. I can think of certain scenes in the movie that were probably staged in the exact same way as those in the theater.

Unfortunately, this movie is difficult to find. It is occasionally on TMC, and probably elsewhere on cable. If you want to watch it soon, though, you will probably have to buy it, or you can come to my house or go wrest my other copy from my granddaughter in San Juan.

—Janet Cupo has been commenting on this blog for about as long as it's existed, and has her own excellent blog at The Three Prayers.

At First Things. "The doors of our churches remain open."

If it wasn't for supernatural hope, I wouldn't have no hope at all.

Louder than last week's:

From James Piereson's review of The Fractured Republic by Yuval Levin, in the June issue The New Criterion:

Mr. Levin views the post-war era—roughly the period running from 1945 to the year 2000—as following a coherent trajectory that has left us in a situation in which it is impossible to put into place the grand designs of either liberals or conservatives. As he writes, “In our cultural, economic, political, and social life, this has been a trajectory of increasing individualism, diversity, dynamism, and liberalization. And it has come at a cost of dwindling solidarity, cohesion, stability, authority, and social order.” This is what he means by the “fractured” republic. Over the course of these decades, Americans lived through a cultural revolution that promoted greater freedom and liberation from social norms and a market revolution that promoted dynamism and innovation while destroying the private sector unions and corporate oligopolies that dominated economic life from the 1940s to the 1980s. Conservative attempts to restore social consensus and liberal attempts to restore a managed economy are both bound to fail due to the liberating effects of these twin revolutions.

Seems pretty accurate to me. The book sounds worthwhile, although I probably won't read it just because I have so much other reading I want and need to do. A bit more about Levin's assessment of that post-war era:

The main problem...is that Americans across the political spectrum are caught in a “nostalgia trap.” They assess the current situation in terms of social and economic standards that were established in the immediate post-war decades....

As a consequence, the two political parties are exceptionally backward looking, albeit in quite different ways. Republicans and Democrats long to restore different elements of the post-war order. Liberals and Democrats, for example, wish to restore the corporatist economic structure of the 1950s and 1960s, characterized by powerful labor unions negotiating with corporate oligopolies, while also reigniting the spirit of liberation and rebellion that burned during the 1960s. Conservatives, meanwhile, tend to assess the present in relation to recollections of the social stability and shared values of the 1950s and take their economic and political bearings from the 1980s when, under Ronald Reagan’s leadership, they restored the nation’s economic dynamism following the inflation and slow growth of the 1970s while presiding over a military build-up that helped to win the Cold War. Each side looks back to the post-war period as a kind of golden age and seeks to restore a piece of it without acknowledging how far away we have since moved from the conditions of that era.

Perhaps it's just a matter of what I've happened to see and read, but it seems to me that liberal affection for the 1950s is a fairly new thing. I've been accustomed since the late '60s to hearing the '50s vilified as everything from merely conformist to quasi-fascist. But then I've probably been more exposed to the cultural revolutionaries than to old-line liberals.

Robert Osborne of Turner Classic Movies, introducing this film, says it’s his favorite film noir, and one of the best. I agree. In preparation for writing this note, I’ve just watched it for the third time, and liked it even better. I’d have to say now that it’s one of my favorite movies, period.

I think any reasonable critic would agree that it’s at very least among the best of its kind. To pick a personal favorite from a list including other excellent examples (Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice, et.al.), is partly a matter of subjective preferences. The noir plot generally has near its center a bad romance, a man who is tough and perhaps somewhat shady, but usually fundamentally decent, and a beautiful but treacherous woman.

If you’re going to be emotionally involved in the story, you have to find that couple convincing and at least somewhat appealing. And for me that’s one of the things that distinguish Out of the Past from others: the couple are played by Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer, and both of them are to me both convincing and appealing. I’ve liked Mitchum for as long as I can remember watching movies. (If I saw Thunder Road soon after it was first released, which I think I must have, I was only ten or eleven.) As far as I can remember Out of the Past was the first time I’d seen Greer. What can I say except that she’s very beautiful, and in a way that happens to hit the mark for me? I’d certainly fall in love with her if I were sitting in a dim cantina in Acapulco and she walked in out of the sun.

But that gets ahead of the story. The second thing that makes Out of the Past so powerful for me is the cinematography, which seems to me superior to most similar films of its time. This is especially striking in the opening. We’re given a number of beautiful scenes of the Sierra Nevadas, then a road sign that sets the stage: Los Angeles that way, Lake Tahoe and Reno the other way, and just one mile away, Bridgeport.

Corruption this way, corruption that way. Or you could stop and hide in Bridgeport.

We see a man in a dark hat and a dark coat driving a dark car into Bridgeport. It’s a nice-looking little town, and in fact a real town, in which these scenes were filmed. The man isn't Mitchum’s character, but someone out of his past, Joe Stefano. Stefano is looking for Mitchum’s character, who is introduced first as Jeff Bailey but is actually named Jeff Markham, and who runs a garage in Bridgeport. (If you wonder why it’s called “Mono Motor Service”, it’s because Bridgeport is in Mono County.)

Stefano arrives at the garage.

These opening scenes are bright and crisp. It’s winter and the trees are bare, but the sun is bright, and lines are sharp. The town is quiet. Stefano arrives at Bailey’s garage, and learns from a deaf-mute boy who works there (referred to only as “the kid”, as far as I remember) that Bailey is not there. There is a bit here that I hadn’t noticed until I watched the opening again just now. We don’t yet know who these people are. But as Stefano is talking to the kid, a police car comes down the otherwise empty street. Stefano watches it come, which is natural. But then he turns to watch it go, with an interest which is not quite so natural. And the kid notices this, and doesn’t like it. We learn soon enough that his suspicion is justified.

Stefano walks across the street to Marny’s Cafe. Marny, friendly and chatty, tells us, and Stefano, a lot, and in passing utters a line that prefigures much of what is to come “Seems like everything people oughta know they don’t wanna hear.”

Big-city guy Stefano signals his disrupting presence in Bridgeport by cranking up loud jazz on the jukebox as soon as he sets foot in Marny's Cafe.

The kid has gone off into the mountains in search of Bailey, who is out fishing with a lovely local girl, Ann (Virginia Huston). If the town is pleasant, the fishing scene is idyllic, the winter sun glittering on the lake.

Talking about clouds, and the future, not realizing that this is noir.

There is a romantic conversation, and a brief kiss. Ann looks off into the distance. Over her shoulder Jeff sees the kid, who is signing to Jeff, and the idyll is disturbed.

Jeff: We’d better go.
Ann: Something the matter?
Jeff: Maybe not.

Not maybe, but maybe not: the perfect note for Jeff’s fatalistic but not hopeless attitude. And those two examples of the dialog illustrate another aspect of the film’s quality: the dialog is for the most part excellent, plain but with resonances, clever but not ostentatiously so, and happily lacking in the overdone wisecracks, labored slang, and macho posturing one often finds in crime dramas of this period. Well, okay, there is some macho posturing, but it's not exaggerated.  

Stefano is a hoodlum who works for a gambler and “operator,” presumably of criminal enterprises, Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas). Bailey/Markham had also worked for Sterling in the past, but there are clear indications that the parting was not a friendly one, and presumably has something to do with the fact that Markham has changed his name. Stefano seems friendly but there’s an undertone of menace in the conversation, not least as a result of the fact that Stefano has found Jeff at all. (How this came about is never quite explained.) Sterling wants to hire Jeff again. He agrees to meet with Stirling in Lake Tahoe the next morning. We assume there is an implied threat here, that Jeff was hiding from Sterling, and that now that he’s been found must deal with the situation.

The next scene takes place at night, and from this point the film gets literally and figuratively darker. Jeff asks Ann to accompany him on the all-night drive to Tahoe (only 78 miles according to the signpost in that opening scene, but maybe the mountain roads made for slow going). He wants to tell her the truth about his past.

Night drive to Tahoe.

In a lengthy flashback we learn of his previous life as a private detective hired by Sterling to locate Kathie Moffat (Greer), the girlfriend who had shot him and stolen $40,000.

I’ll stop the plot summary at this point. I’ve gone into this detail, and included these stills, in an effort to communicate how well-crafted the movie is. The story gets pretty complicated from here on, and I won’t be giving anything away if I tell you it's not a light-hearted one.

If you want to see a clip, go here. I didn't include it here because it goes further in the story than I wanted to, although it's not a major spoiler.

Kirk Douglas gives an excellent performance as Sterling—affable, smooth, and ruthless.

There's something crocodilian about that grin.

Sterling is involved with miscellaneous other shady types, including Rhonda Fleming as a femme at least as fatale as Kathie. The most potent thing about Kathie for me is that she taps something in men—or at least in this man—which makes us, against all evidence, suppose that a really beautiful woman is also good.  (There is a great riff about this in one of John Le Carre's books, but I'm not sure which one.) Ann is perhaps a bit too sweet; I learn from poking around on the internet that Virginia Huston was somewhat typecast as the good girl in this sort of film, and you can see why. 

The kid is a poignant figure. At the end of the movie we are back with him in Bridgeport. It's another bright day, but things have changed. There's an ambiguous bit at the end which fans of the film don't seem to be entirely agreed upon. Roger Ebert thinks it's just ambiguous, and I tend to agree.

I like this movie so much that I may buy a copy. That's very high praise for me, as I own fewer than a couple of dozen movies, and a lot of those are Bergman. If there's a noir film that you think is better, please let me know. And of course if you like the genre and haven't seen Out of the Past, do so at your earliest convenience.

—Mac is the proprietor of this blog.

For several weeks now I've established a routine of going down to the bay every morning with a folding chair, a cup of coffee, and my notebook, and writing for a couple of hours. I also take my phone with me, partly because someone might need to contact me, and partly so that I can set a timer to keep myself from sitting for too long at a stretch (back problems). That obviously presents a great danger of distraction, but so far I've managed to keep it mostly under control. 

What did begin to distract me, though, after the first few days, was my surroundings. There is the constant activity of gulls, pelicans, herons, ducks, geese, kingfishers, and the occasional osprey over and around the water. There is the water itself, the changing light and textures. And a bit to my surprise, the sky, with its constant movement of clouds--not surprise that it is beautiful and changing, but that I find myself paying so much attention to it. Of course that may have something to do with the desire to avoid work. And sometimes I can't resist picking up the phone and taking a picture.

Warning: Loud

That is, attempts to fiddle with the rules and create the possibility of picking someone else have been defeated, and Trump is definitely going to be the Republican nominee. 

"Looking to those colleagues, [Iowa committeeman Steve ] Scheffler admonished them to acknowledge their errors and unite around Trump."

Ha. As someone or other said somewhere or other in the past few days, we now have a choice between a candidate who doesn't know anything about the Constitution and one who knows but doesn't care. All in all, I suppose I'd prefer that Trump win, since I think or at least hope that the forces opposed to him would keep him from doing anything too crazy, and perhaps he might not be as actively harmful as Hillary intends to be. 

Also at National Review, Kevin Williamson writes that 1968 Was Worse, and we should all calm down about the state of the country.

Well, yes and no. 1968 was worse in terms of actual disastrous events and threats (many younger people don't realize how tense the Cold War really was, and a lot of older people seem to have forgotten). But the fabric of the nation has deteriorated further since then. It's true that the divisions between young white leftists and the moderate-to-conservative wider culture was just as intense, if not more so, in 1968. Race relations, as tense as they are now, are surely better overall. But after 50 years of cultural and political struggle the sides are much more evenly matched in numbers, and there is much more widespread sense on both sides of being in a struggle to the death. Neither side really feels that it can live with the other in the long run. The anger and frustration are worsened by the continual expansion of the national government's assertion of control in state and local affairs. The national safety valve of federalism--the idea that Nebraska and Connecticut can be allowed to run themselves in different ways--is treated by the left as a right-wing plot, and the left has control of most of the judiciary, which ought to stop the overreach.

Possibly worse: the political system itself is showing signs of severe damage. In 1968, whatever you thought of most politicians, you could suppose that most of them respected the constitutional system, and that the people themselves respected it and expected the politicians to do so. I don't think that's true anymore. Too many of the supporters of both Hillary and Trump simply want what they want and would be perfectly happy to support a monarch who promised to give it to them.

Vanilla does not equal plain! It's a delicious flavor.

--Jay Nordlinger of National Review, in a tweet posted on the magazine's web site. (No, I am not on Twitter and don't want to be.)

I love vanilla ice cream, and for that matter vanilla almost anything. A few months ago I saw these in the grocery store while I was looking for another favorite, ginger snaps, and have become very fond of them.

Mija lives in a modest apartment in South Korea. She supports herself and her sullen, uncooperative grandson, Jongwook, by caring for an old, physically incapacitated man. She is the sort of person who slips unobtrusively in and out of the lives of others without making much of an impression—except for one thing. She is always dressed very nicely, and it is this that others notice about her.

She has not been feeling well lately. She's worried about her heart. However, when she goes to see the doctor, he is less concerned with her physical condition than he is with the fact that she is losing words—not forgetting them, but momentarily unable to recall the names of common things. So, he arranges for further tests.

Leaving the hospital, Mija finds herself in the middle of a tragedy. The body of a teenage suicide, Heejin, is being taken out of an ambulance. Her mother, grief-stricken and hysterical, is staggering through the parking lot.

Soon Mija's own life is shaken by two devastating revelations. First, she finds that she is in the beginning stages of Alzheimer's. Second, she finds that Heejin killed herself because she had been repeatedly raped by six boys at her school, and Jongwook is one of the boys. Worse, the fathers of the other five boys have consulted an attorney about how they can save the reputations of their sons. The attorney believes that the poor farming family can be bought off for 30,000 Won, and they want her to pay a sixth, 5,000 Won. This far exceeds her ability to pay, and also, she is increasingly haunted by the death of this young girl, the devastation of her family, and the guilt of her grandson. However, it is hard for Mija to even consider going against the decisions of these men, and it doesn't occur to them that she would.

Mija is a woman without a voice. I don't think that I would have understood the full import of this had I not worked with Korean students and ministers at the seminary where I worked for eight years. Many older Korean men just do not seem to think that women are capable outside the home. (The younger students did not seem to be like this at all.) One older Korean student really did not want to work with me. He wanted to deal exclusively with my boss, but my boss kept sending him back to me, which was not entirely comfortable. And then, there was a woman who was about 40, and you could tell by the way that she dealt with people that she had come from a culture where women were very apologetic and meek in their relations with people in authority. And so I wonder how this plays out in South Korea itself. Mija says to someone on the phone that she has to put up with Jongwook's behavior because he is the head of the house—a boy of about 16 or 17.

Until now she has really only expressed herself in her clothing, but knowing that before very long she will not be able to be heard at all, Mija looks for a way to say what she has to say, and she finds it in a poetry class. She takes the class very seriously and works hard to find poetic inspiration, but it seems to elude her. Slowly, though, through Heejin's funeral (Catholic), her meeting with Heejin's mother, her attendance at a local poetry group, and the beauty of nature, she finds her voice and writes her poem, both on paper, and in her own life.

When I sent Maclin the post for Two Lives, he said that it sounded like a “good but painful-to-watch movie.” I'd say that that is a pretty good description of Poetry also. Jeong-hie Yun is excellent and we are always aware of the conflict and the desire that fill Mija. Some of the choices that she makes disturb us, but this isn't our story, it's Mija's, and by her lights, they are the right ones.

Among other awards, Poetry the award for Best Screenplay at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival.

—Janet Cupo has been commenting on this blog for about as long as it's existed, and has her own excellent blog at The Three Prayers.

Possibly most people who read this blog also read these other two, but just in case:

Craig Burrell describes his initial investigation of Heidegger. 

As part of Janet Cupo's 52 Saints series, Grumpy writes about St. Bonaventure. 

I have to face the fact that though I'm pretty interested in theology and philosophy, I'm never going to become very knowledgeable about them. It has a lot to do with being 67 years old. Supposing I live another ten years or more, I could possibly read a lot on these topics, but only at the cost of giving up some of my other interests, and I have to choose. So overviews like these are of great interest to me. I have some notion, for instance, of what Aquinas is all about, but Bonaventure was not much more than a name to me.

Oh, and while I'm at it: here's an interesting news story about a couple of cosmologists who seem to think that life is based on information...or something...I don't think I understand just what they're saying, but the story is interesting for what it reveals about the way cosmology seems (inevitably?) to walk up to and sometimes cross the boundary between physical science and philosophy-theology. I was amused by this:

Self-awareness, he said, is not an obvious product of the electrical activity inside your head.

Indeed. In fact I'd say the idea that it is so is a sheer act of materialistic faith. And:

For many in the physics and astrophysics games, however, even the simplest suggestion that hard science can't ultimately account for the entire universe and everything in it – alive or not – sets off warning bells.

I'd say that fact is itself a sort of warning bell--a warning that there's more going on there than disinterested inquiry.

...I don't want to submit myself with great confidence to God's holy will, which is Love and Mercy itself. I want him to fix the problem I'm asking him to fix. 

Still another "Samson and Delilah" variant. I love Patty Griffin, but when I first heard this one I didn't like it that much. But it grew on me.

I still like Ashley Cleveland's better, though. Older folks may remember that Peter, Paul, and Mary also recorded the song under the "If I Had My Way" title. To my taste it sounds a little on the awful side now. 

I think this is not only a leaf but some part of the flower apparatus, as the other leaves don't have this purple stalk. The flowers are purple. 

There are many things to appreciate about Pope Francis. "Go to the margins"--yes. "The shepherd should smell like the sheep"--yes. And much more. But he also creates a great deal of confusion, and the controversy that followed his remark a week or so ago that the Church should apologize to homosexuals has brought me to a point where for the sake of my own spiritual health I am going to have to stop paying attention to him. Yes, if you seek out the full text and read the remark in context, it doesn't mean that the Church should apologize for saying that homosexual acts are wrong, and doesn't really say anything that isn't already normal Catholic teaching. But the whole thing followed a disheartening and now established pattern.

First, the pope, often but not always when speaking off the cuff, says something that gets attention for its departure, whether real or apparent, from Church teaching. The press turns it into a sound bite. Theologically and politically liberal Catholics applaud and say "Take that, you bastards" to conservatives. Secular liberals say "It's a baby step but better than nothing." Theologically and politically conservative Catholics say "Oh no." Among the latter group, those who already detest Francis (sadly, the word is not too strong) charge him with heresy and demand that he resign. Those who are more sympathetic to him go to a lot of trouble to analyze his words and to put the best possible construction on them. Then the fuss dies down till next time. 

I don't know whether all this is beneficial to anyone's spiritual life, but it certainly is not to mine. Of the parties I named, I'm most usually in the "sympathetic conservative" group. I don't like being critical of the pope. I don't think it's my place to pronounce on his orthodoxy. Yet I can't pretend that I think all is well when Francis says things that I believe are at best unsound and needlessly confusing. Three years into his papacy it's pretty well established that confusion and division are notable features of it and likely to remain so. You may say that's because he's a bad pope, and the people who resist him are good, or because he's a good one, and the people who resist him are bad. But the facts of confusion and division are undeniable.

As I know I've said here before, this development is deeply saddening to me. Just when I thought we had gotten past the divisions within the Church, they have been reopened and deepened. It's not only saddening but troubling: am I going to find myself before this is all over having to choose between what the current pope says and what the tradition of the Church says? 

I'm not a theologian and am not in a position of authority or influence. I'm just a Catholic layman trying to live his faith in an increasingly anti-Christian culture. These controversies are making that more, not less, difficult. I have work to do. I don't have time to do the kind of careful reading and analysis required to separate the wheat from the chaff in remarks that are sometimes almost incoherent. And so, out of a sense of self-preservation, I'm going to start ignoring these periodic eruptions. In fact I think I'll just kind of withdraw from the whole Catholic controversy scene. I do not see any benefit to attending to it, and I see a certain amount of harm.

In early 1996, my husband and I had been married for a couple of months, and were visiting Canberra for his PhD study. He was working and I was more or less at leisure for a couple of weeks, though feeling unwell, since we were expecting our first child. One day, I went to the movies to see the US/Australian movie “Babe” about a little piglet and how he finds his place on the farm. He decides to try herding sheep. (Wikipedia entry--contains plot spoilers.)

I think it was just the hormones, but this movie had me in tears of joy. It really is a delightful story, and is right up there with “Molokai” as a favourite. The ending still moves me.

Here is the trailer. 

The movie was filmed in the southern highlands of New South Wales, and the lead roles were Farmer Hoggett (US actor James Cromwell) and his wife Mrs. Esme Hoggett (Australian actress, Magda Szubanski). The leading actors for the voices of the animal characters were Hugo Weaving (Rex), Miriam Margolyes (Fly) and Christine Cavanaugh (Babe). The actors in this were all excellent, as was the direction (Chris Noonan). The animal characters are really good too.

I agree with the critic who said that the well-trained animals, good animation, and intelligent script make this such a good story. It is set in no particular time, although it has an old-fashioned, mid-20^th century feel to it. It's also not set in any particular place, although filmed in NSW. None of the characters are Australian. Most speak with American or English accents. It is perhaps trying to appeal to all English-speakers and I think it succeeds at this.

It had been years since I last saw it, but I was happy to discover that watching it again confirmed that it really is as good as I remember. It is a joyful, beautiful thing and I feel confident in recommending it to you all as a great family movie. It deserves to be a family classic. That said, there are some themes which the youngest family members might feel worried about, for example, the threat of certain animals becoming dinner for the farmer and his wife, or the scene where a sheep, “Maa,” has blood at her neck after an attack from wild dogs, so it's perhaps best to view it first before showing it to the very little ones. Also, some youngsters may not realise that meat is from animals! This can be traumatic for some of them. There is nothing too disturbing though, as far as I can tell.

It can be rented for a couple of dollars on Amazon Prime, if you have that, but I'm convinced it's worth buying the DVD. It shouldn't be too hard to rent, at least, wherever you are.

It's a simple movie, so there isn't much more to say, except that the first time I saw it, I wanted to turn right around and go to the next showing, and that's not common for me. For some reason, I didn't do this. Maybe I had to be somewhere. When you're feeling low, grab a cup of tea, and watch this movie about the winsome little pig, “Babe.”

—Louise is an Australian homeschooling mother of six, currently living in Texas

I assume the Remain folks have evidence of actual racism and xenophobia on the Leave side, but it  certainly seems that they are also conflating those with perfectly reasonable concerns about immigration and other matters pertaining to nationhood (SOP in the immigration debate in this country, too). But this is the sort of argument I've heard. It may be right or it may be wrong but it's civilized.

I've been thinking about this since I mentioned Obama's apparent lack of love for this country in a post last week. I see some evidence that the sort of patriotism I was thinking of there is less common than I assumed. Perhaps the president's detachment is not unusual any more. That wouldn't really be surprising, considering the ideological assault on the country that's been in progress since the 1960s.

But part of the problem in discussing any of this is the equation of patriotism with nationalism, and exaggerated, possibly pathological, nationalism at that. I don't consider them to be the same thing. In my mind patriotism is fundamentally natural and healthy, and in fact I'd say that if a person feels none of it at all then something is wrong with either him or his country or both. Further complicating things in this country is that nationalism for Americans is bound up with the American creed, which is not the same thing as the actual geographical and cultural country. Here's a Sunday Night Journal from 2005 on that topic: "Patriotism and the American Creed".

Another take on that classic gospel song.

 Wondering who the backup vocalists are, I Googled the song, and was surprised to see:

 The AllMusic entry seems to say it was The Jordanaires, who sang on some of Elvis's hits.

I'm writing something of an apologetics nature that has me producing sentences like "The Church has always stuck to [its|her] story." I kind of like using "her" instead of "its." I like the old tradition of using feminine pronouns to refer to the Church, and I have some idea of why that's theologically appropriate. But I'm wondering what the current status of this usage is. Is it now bad manners, like referring to grown women as "girls"? (I guess that can still be permitted in certain contexts and with certain intentions, but I recently heard someone do it in an old-fashioned patronizing way that made even politically-incorrect me cringe.) I don't want to be servile to contemporary fashions, especially as they're generally based on non-Christian attitudes. But I don't want to be needlessly annoying, or just antique in manner, either. What think ye?