These posts are a collection of reviews or commentary on movies I like, books I am reading, and/or music that I wish to recommend.

Misfits and champions

A revaluation in the market for baseball players resonates in the lives of young men. It was as if a signal had radiated out from the Oakland A's draft room and sought, laserlike, those guys who for their whole career had seen their accomplishments understood with an asterisk. The footnote at the ... Continue reading

Our bodies, our souls

What does it mean to be human?In an earlier age, that question would have been answered with a conviction that we are a temporal manifestation of a spiritual reality, finding our beginning and end in a sovereign Creator who fashioned us and set us loose in the playground of his designs on ... Continue reading

Departures

When young Daigo Kobayashi loses his job as a cellist with a Tokyo symphony and returns to his hometown looking for work, he answers a newspaper ad from what seems to be a travel agency. It is only when he is long into the interview that he discovers, to his horror, that he is being hired as a ... Continue reading

Crazy Heart: A story of redemption

I used to be somebody, but now I am somebody else I used to be somebody, but now I am somebody else Who I'll be tomorrow is anybody's guessWhat was thought to be the right way turned out the wrong way after all What was thought to be the right way turned out the wrong way after all What ... Continue reading

Nagging questions: MacArthur Park

Someone left the cake out in the rain. I don't think that I can take it, 'cause it took so long to bake it, and I'll never have that recipe again. Oh, no! — from the 1968 hit song MacArthur Park There are many questions in life, some big, some not so big. Big questions: Does God exist and does ... Continue reading

What I’m reading

I've just started reading Eric Metaxas' exhaustive new biography on Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy. I'll have much more to say about it when I've finished. Metaxas has done an impressive job researching Bonhoeffer's German roots, and the cultural and familial ... Continue reading

The Red Badge of Courage

[G]radually [the young soldier] ... found that he could look back upon the brass and bombast of his earlier gospels and see them truly. He was gleeful when he discovered that he now despised them. ... He felt a quiet manhood, non-assertive but of sturdy and strong blood. He knew that he would no ... Continue reading

O Holy Night

There's a lot of great Advent blogging going on. Roger Overton, who writes for The A-Team Blog, is doing a line-by-line devotional series on the great Christmas hymn O Holy Night.From Roger's introduction: The original “O Holy Night” was composed in French in 1847 by Adolphe Adam. He used the ... Continue reading