More Than One Lesson

In this sermon clip, Tim Keller discusses the result of picking and choosing which Biblical principles we will follow.

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7. THE APOSTLE

What I love most about Robert Duvall’s powerful film about a small-town Pentecostal minister who falls from grace and rediscovers himself in the aftermath is its courage to believably portray a culture of people who had previously been viewed primarily as clownish clichés at best and sinister hypocrites at worst. With Duvall’s film, the Southern charismatic culture (in which I was raised) is given flesh and bone. The quirks and eccentricities of their religious fervor are treated with striking grace and humanity and the film succeeds both as a compelling story of one man’s fall and redemption and as a glimpse into an often misunderstood and ridiculed American sub-culture. Duvall’s performance is mesmerizing and the world he builds for his characters is consistently believable and often quite moving. Yet, it doesn’t make the mistake of baptizing its protagonist in ultimate righteousness either. The apostle of the film’s title is full of violence, lust, and a certain measure of arrogance and pride. Yet, he is also passionate about spreading the gospel and saving the lost, hopefully recovering for others what he seems to have lost for himself. This duality makes the film too human to dismiss, despite its overtly religious dialogue and settings. In it—for the first time as a charismatic Christian—I saw myself and the people I grew up with realistically portrayed and I love the film for that reason chiefly among others.

In this sermon clip, Rankin Wilbourne discusses separating our ego from God’s will when making a decision.

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In this episode, Tyler and Josh discuss Lauren Greenfield’s The Queen of Versailles and Robert Redford’s Ordinary People.

EPISODE BREAKDOWN
00:00:45- Intro
00:01:20- Will Gray
00:03:55- Reed’s Top Ten
00:08:10- The Queen of Versailles
00:44:40- Ordinary People
01:25:16- Episode wrap-up

8. CHILDREN OF MEN

When I first saw Alfonso Cuaron’s masterpiece, I watched it casually as a recommendation from a friend. Little did I realize its story would exponentially grow in my heart and mind as the years progressed. In a futuristic world, women cannot conceive children. The world is steadily decaying with this realization and amidst this turbulent scenario, one man stumbles across a frightened young pregnant girl. What follows is a journey about death (and ultimately rebirth in a very literal sense). There are too many themes at play in this movie to do justice in a single paragraph, but what most inspires me about the film is the heartbeat at its center that with new beginnings (specifically the birth of a new generation) comes hope. Hope like that is not only worth fighting for, but worth giving your all to see it come forth. As a man of faith, this theme speaks very loudly to me and the journey that Clive Owen’s character takes in this movie is one of the most beautiful illustrations of it I have ever seen.

9. 12 ANGRY MEN

Perhaps the greatest courtroom drama to not take place inside of a courtroom, 12 Angry Men started as a play by Reginald Rose with a masterfully simple premise: a young man is on trial for the murder of his father and his fate is in the hands of 12 jurors. As they deliberate on the trial and its evidence, what begins with one man against the other eleven becomes an incredible examination of the assumptions, prejudices, and judgments we make daily in the course of our lives. The film is an exercise in subtext, and it works not only as a gripping mystery story while the evidence against the accused young man unfolds, but also as a provocative portrait of the wounds and frailties that lay within all of us. The formula has often been duplicated in TV shows and movies (always translating the superficial mystery story and never translating the profound human undertones of the original). But Sidney Lumet’s film version, with its subtle power and threads of grace, is still my favorite.

“Survivor” has long since established itself as a prime time staple.  In many ways, it has paved the way for reality competition programs.  Challenges, alliances, confrontations; it all started with “Survivor.”  I myself was never a big fan of the show; like so many others, I wrote it off as “just another reality show.”

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Selecting your favorite list of anything can be a pretty pretentious act at times. If you’re like me, you enjoy multiple pieces of art for multiple reasons and the stack of qualifying elements to place something in a category of favorites can get buried under the weight of its own possibilities.

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Sunday night’s finale of The Walking Dead, entitled Welcome to the Tombs,  concluded the opposition between the prison group and the citizens of Woodbury. The episode managed to successfully dish out a little slice of everything: suspense, horror, action, emotional conflict, and philosophical dialogue. All the while, the episode maintained the attention-grabbing quality that the show has earned this season.

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