in the open space: God & culture

Marvel Studios Guardians of the Galaxy is the latest addition to Marvel’s franchise, and it is an eclectic mix. It has the saddest and most moving opening of a blockbuster sci-fi movie since Abrams’ Star Trek , and yet it is as full of quips and wit as Whedon’s cleverly-dialogued Avengers . It has a bazillion homages to great sci-fi films, but it still feels like its own story—complete with a   fully believable walking, talking tree creature and a wise-cracking raccoon. And smack dab in the middle of all this? One of the more unusual kingdom images* I’ve collected thus far. (Warning: some spoilers ahead) A common theme in comic book movies is a disparate group of people coming together to form not just an association but a new community or family . In the X-Men films, it is a group of mutants ; in Avengers , it is a group of superheroes. In Guardians , it is a group of people written off by the galaxy: Peter Quill is a smuggler and thief whose mother died when he ...

This past June in San Francisco, Annie and Perry Klebahn put their 10-year-old daughter Phoebe in the care of United Airlines’ unaccompanied minor program on a flight to a summer camp in Michigan. When Phoebe landed in Chicago, however, the program “forgot” to send someone to walk her to her connecting flight to Grand Rapids. When the girl asked for help, she was repeatedly told by busy attendants to wait. When she asked to call her parents (three times), they told her to wait. She missed her flight—but her parents had no clue until the camp frantically called to inform them that Phoebe had never arrived in Grand Rapids, and the United employees there had no idea where their daughter was. What happens next only compounds United’s already deplorable conduct—and reveals something about our culture, ourselves and our faith. Bob Sutton, who wrote about the experience on his Work Matters blog , details how the parents spent almost an hour on the phone trying to locate their...

This post originally ran as a column at MWR this month . As part of its “Thank you, Mom” campaign leading up to the 2012 Olympic Games, Procter & Gamble released a two-minute ad directed by the award-winning Mexican film director Alejandro González Iñárritu. Titled   Best Job , it was shot on four continents. It opens with a series of images featuring dark streets and homes, mothers gently waking their children, making breakfast, walking them to buses, trains or driving them to school, washing clothes, and waiting during swimming and gymnastics lessons, races and games. As the children grow, the images cycle through the mothers’ unremitting love. When their children compete in the Olympics, the camera lingers on the faces of these mothers as they watch — intent, hopeful, brushed with tears.   Best Job   ends with the words: “The hardest job in the world is the best job in the world. Thank you, Mom.” If you haven’t seen   Best Job , you...

James Tissot's "Le parfum de Madeleine" (between 1886 and 1894) via Wikipedia My 9 year-old son and I have been reading through a graphic novel version of the gospels and recently hit that moment in Luke where Jesus is reclining at a table eating dinner by invitation at the house of Simon the Pharisee. Suddenly, a woman with a less than stellar reputation appears at the door, makes her way to Jesus, and stands at his feet with an alabaster jar of perfumed ointment. She’s weeping so hard that Jesus’ feet are wet . She kneels, dries them with her hair and spreads the expensive ointment on his feet, kissing them. Now, I’ve read this story before, but this time I couldn’t get out of my head. It’s a riveting and jarring moment. Just what exactly happened— what kind of encounter with Jesus did she have —that made her respond like that? “It is not clear whether she had met Jesus,” Leon Morris tells us in his commentary on Luke . “She may simply have been among th...

photo: mine A few weeks ago, I was driving through the church parking lot looking for a parking space before the late afternoon worship service. Just about the time I saw a spot close to the building I also spotted another car at the far end of the lane turn in and come up the row towards me—and my parking space. Two thoughts went through my head in that second: I saw it first. Then: Wait. You’re at church. Let them have it. When both of us drove by the spot and left it for the other, I could only laugh. Only in a church parking lot. But as I pulled into another space an aisle over, another thought went through my head: Why don’t you do that all the time? This wasn’t the first time in the past few months that I’d been confronted with the uncomfortable realizations that my attitudes and outlook on life needed some adjustment. Frankly, it’s been a rough year, and for the last few months it’s felt like I’ve been crawling out from the under the weight of it. Several close family ...

created at gliffy.com “The best decision makers are the ones who know when   not  to trust themselves.” ~Dr. Roy Baumeister Earlier this week, I read a fascinating article in  The New York Times,   “ Do you suffer from decision fatigue? ” The article explores several studies and includes interviews with researchers that conclude “the very act of making decisions depletes our ability to make them well” and then asks: “So how do we navigate a world of endless choice?” According to the studies and researchers, our willpower weakens as the day goes on, like a tired out muscle—and our ability to make good decisions wanes with it. The more decisions we make, the harder it becomes to make good decisions and the easier it becomes to give into desires that thwart our goals (like eating that candy bar when we are on a diet or sending that e-mail when we know we shouldn’t). In addition, the level of glucose in our bodies also affects our decision making ability—the le...

CW We always have a choice, Kal-El. Your father didn’t have to care for you the way he did. Yet still he made that choice every day he was with you. He chose to be your protector, just as you’ve chosen to be the Earth’s protector. Nobody forced that on you, yet you embraced it. Nobody made that choice for you. We all choose our own fate. ~Brainiac, "Homecoming" episode of Smallville  The final season of Smallville is playing out fabulously. “Lazarus,” the season premiere, brought to the front burner a theme that has kept me intrigued in this 10-season-long series : how choice determines the path we walk, be it towards light and life or darkness and destruction. And the 200 th episode picked up on that and played it out in a wonderful and moving way. In a kind of twist on A Christmas Carol , a reformed and now good Brainiac takes Clark into the past, the present and the future in an attempt to help him face his fears and darkness and embrace the path we know he will. A...