January 30, 2002

As I emerged from the dairy aisle in the neighborhood supermarket and turned toward the bagels, I spotted my old friend Terry Regan over near the soups. He saw me at the same time and we started toward each other. I hadn’t seen Terry for nearly a year and he looked slimmer. Good for him, I thought; he needed to trim down a little.

When former secretary of State Madeleine Albright was fielding questions about Afghanistan recently, one inquirer asked about the role of women in Islam, citing the miserable treatment of females in Afghanistan. Albright’s response was less interesting than the assumptions of the questioner, who was clearly expressing the opinion of many Americans. When the first photos of Afghans appeared after the trouncing of the Taliban, most Westerners viewed the newly uncovered faces of women as more proof that American military action against the Taliban was indeed justified.

Most people, on some level, love movies. Yet as both a Christian and a filmmaker, I’m persuaded that Christians have not excelled at filmmaking because they haven’t really loved the cinema. They may love the power of cinema. They may appreciate the social impact of cinema. Yet many Christians remain suspicious of film, and that’s a problem if one wants to succeed in the creative endeavor of making films. In order to do what I do, one must know and love the entire history of film, and believe that filmmaking is an expression of creativity that glorifies God.

The first thing that strikes us about Lucille Clifton’s poetry is what is missing: capitalization, punctuation, long and plentiful lines. We see a poetry so pared down that its spaces take on substance, become a shaping presence as much as the words themselves.

For years premature rumors circulated about the demise of the Consultation on Church Union—the 40-year-old theological dialogue in which nine U.S. church bodies have sought to break down the barriers that divide them. On January 19 in Memphis it took only a couple of minutes for church representatives to lay the consultation to rest, voting unanimously that COCU’s work “is now concluded.”

My guess is that most middle-aged people when prodded to consider “aging” think immediately about what the flesh is heir to. In my case, there is the hair once “prematurely” gray now (without excuse) white. The root canals. The face that looks increasingly lived-in, the lower back that threatens to go out. Like vultures circling, the American Association of Retired Persons invites membership just before the 50th birthday; after it, Modern Maturity continually threatens to show up in the mailbox.

Director Wes Anderson's vision in his latest and (so far) greatest film, The Royal Tenenbaums, is so singular that it is difficult to isolate its individual elements. His meticulous specificity in creating characters, the hallmark of his previous two films, Bottle Rocket and Rushmore, has expanded to include not only the dialogue (written again with friend and actor Owen Wilson) but also the costumes, set design, cinematography and music.