The Nolan Brothers’ movie, Interstellar, is the best science fiction flick I have seen in a long time. It holds together what great science fiction always has: the fantastical, the futuristic, and the human, along with something of the supernatural.…
Jonathan R. Wilson, God’s Good World: Reclaiming the Doctrine of Creation. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013, pp. 304, £ 16 / $25. During the winter of 1932-33 Dietrich Bonhoeffer presented a challenging series of lectures that followed the biblical creation…
One of the more subtle assumptions being made today within theology is the belief that anyone who lacks an appreciation for beauty must be in want of the ability to pray. This sentiment owes a large part of its contemporary appeal…
Following up an earlier post, “The Imagination between Beauty and Goodness,” in which I discussed how the imagination might help bring the values of beauty and justice into closer proximity, my purpose here is to consider the following: How are we to understand…
It is a commonly held opinion that Thomas Hardy, the prolific Victorian poet and novelist, is a pessimist. This perspective is documented well in a recent article in The Guardian wherein Hardy’s oeuvre is Talmudicaly mapped by its “AMPS” (or, its degree of “Abject Misery Per…
When I moved to California about three years ago, I could hear neither myself nor God. Just two weeks prior, my husband and I were residing in Oxford, set to return to America and make our “new” home in Illinois.…
In Christopher Nolan’s newest eye- and mind-bending space odyssey, Interstellar, there is plenty of action but also much to aid in silent contemplation. Nolan’s work is imbued with an intense spirituality that puts its emphasis on humanity. William Lynch was…
Jonathan Brant, Paul Tillich and the Possibility of Revelation through Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, xi + 235pp., 270pp. with appendices and end matter. £71 hardcover. In this volume of the Oxford Theological Monographs Jonathan Brant, the Oxford Pastorate…
Sensitive, tragic, tactile and often majestic, the poetry of John Keats feels like an ornate window through which we trace the author’s personality: with no other English poet is it so easy to apply the same adjectives to the work…