Wonderful Matters

Just have to plop up here a quick post on an article right there in the big mainstream McPaper, USA Today . A university professor has a column in which he asks, "Are we living in the Hunger Games?" I wrote at length about the film The Hunger Games as a profound metaphor for very real contemporary human sacrifice. Yes, human sacrifice happens all the time by everyone not living by the self-sacrificial principles of Jesus Christ. It isn't always in the physical violence people do to one another but in the spiritual and emotional violence they do. The reason so many refuse to accept this truth is that it is so hard to discern in the lives of everyone who does it, which it seems is just about everyone. Here the author elucidates how evident this is. He will certainly get points from those shouting about how inequitable all things economic are in this country. He will get more points from those who want to screech about how much power too few people have to exploit other...

This past week events occurred in my life that paralleled one another quite profoundly. The first was that a president was reelected who is so wickedly reprobate that I grieved over the continued course of this nation. Many said, "Oh quit yer whinin' -- that's been said so many times before and look, we're still okay." No we're not. We're still living in a moral sewer. The second was I spent my week exhaustively working to permanently dismiss from my classroom a student who is pathologically manipulative, narcissistic, and sociopathic. The emotional and spiritual violence spewed from this young man utterly destroyed the instructional integrity of my classroom. Both were awfully draining events to endure, but what made them so striking was not just the similarities in the breadth of evil reflected in them, but that so many people either refused to see and act appropriately on them, or much worse: allowed them or even enabled them to continue. Regard...

My niece has been over this weekend, and she's exactly the same age as my daughter. It was a great opportunity to see Wreck-It Ralph , and it was a terrific movie. It was actually kind of slow to start, and I started to see some of the same formulaic plot devices that you see in all the Pixar movies. But the key message is one I want to share with you here because it relates exactly with the subject of my latest home page piece . I want to start by sharing with you something you may already know. I am a rabid San Francisco Giants fan. So it may go without saying that when they won their second World Series title in three years last Sunday night, I was ecstatic. But I realized something a while ago that is quite profound about this ecstasy, and it is one of the most perverse facts of life that there is. For you see, the splendidly wonderful wonderfulness of that whole thing wouldn't mean a thing if there weren't The Los Angeles Dodgers . And not just the Dodgers, b...