3,339

Number of text messages sent or received by the average American teenager each month.

Big Cat

This guy caught my attention at the movies the other night, though I missed what he's promoting.

"Rapture," The Bittersweets

Based in Nashville, the Bittersweets are songwriter and guitarist Chris Meyers (from Massachusetts) and vocalist and guitarist Hannah Prater (from California). Check out their albums "The Life You Always Wanted" and "Goodnight, San Francisco."

Obama Is The Old Bush

Cut the president some slack, says Nicholas Kristof:

[M]aybe the best comparison is with President George H. W. Bush, a solid president and admirable man who had stratospheric approval ratings in 1991 at the end of the Persian Gulf war and then was fired by the public a year later when he sought re-election — because of a much milder recession than today’s. Bill Clinton, who was as good a president as we’ve had in modern times, captured Mr. Obama’s challenge: “I’d like to see any of you get behind a locomotive going straight downhill at 200 miles an hour and stop it in 10 seconds,” Mr. Clinton [said.]

Solomon Keith

Discussing his new autobiography, Life, on the Oct. 25 "Fresh Air," the Rolling Stones' Keith Richards tells host Terry Gross that he created most of the dense, overloaded guitar sounds on "Jumpin' Jack Flash" and "Street Fighting Man" (he says all the guitar sounds, but that can't be true) by playing an acoustic guitar through a cassette player. When the veteran broadcaster (to whom most guests speak with due respectfulness) asks which song he wants her to play to illustrate the technique, he replies:

I love 'em both, honey. Don't ask me to cut the babies in half.

Couple Hallmarks Stand Out, Right Off The Bat

The lead headline on the New York Times web site reads, "Bomb Plot Is Said to Contain ‘Hallmarks of Al Qaeda'." Exactly: They hate and want to murder Jews. The reporter who did the story for LA's NBC affiliate last night had picked up a hint locally that one of the two Chicago synagogues the bombs were headed for has a predominantly gay and lesbian congregation. If so, that would be an al-Qaeda twofer: Murdering Jews and homosexuals at the same time.

Department Of It Goes With The Territory

The New York Times:

The plot unfolded in dramatic fashion on international television, with scenes of security teams surrounding cargo planes in several countries, military fighters accompanying a passenger plane into New York and a grim-faced president and his aides, many of whom had spent a sleepless night.

Poor dears. I bet the stewards brought milk and cookies!

"Hereafter" Gave Me The Dickens

In Clint Eastwood's masterpiece "Hereafter," Matt Damon plays a reluctant psychic named George Lonegan who has just one dishonest moment which may actually amount to the same kind of leap of faith theologians have been taking for centuries. A little boy named Marcus (played by both Frankie and George McLaren) has pestered Lonegan into giving him a reading about his late brother, Jason (ditto). When earnest but fairly routine brother-to-brother advice from the great beyond doesn't satisfy Marcus ("You're on your own now, he says"), a calculated look crosses the psychic's face. "He's come back," he suddenly says. The next round of ghostly advice is far more reassuring. "If you're worried about being on your own, don't be. You're not," Lonegan tells Marcus (the bit from the trailer). "You're in him, and he's in you. You're one."

It was pretty clear, at least to me, that Lonegan made the second speech up to make the kid feel better. Or maybe it was inspired revelation. Either way, he was creating doctrine -- sort of like the gospel plus St. Paul plus church tradition. Eastwood and his scriptwriter, Peter Morgan (with whom I briefly discussed matters of faith when he visited the Nixon library several years ago), portray just two supernatural things as true: Lonegan's authentic insights about people in the afterlife and the near-death experience of French TV journalist Marie LeLay (Cecile de France). Such nonsectarian universalism, though insufficient for and even offensive to doctrinaire Christians, was far too churchy for LeLay's producer boyfriend and others in her rigidly secular milieu in Paris, especially after she insists on talking and writing about the visions (welcoming white light and so on) that she experienced when she nearly drowned during the 2004 Indonesian tsunami.

When she and the boyfriend are reunited after the disaster and embrace, you can't imagine them ever letting go. But he does soon enough, after LeLay keeps asking what he thinks heaven's like and he decides to sleep with her on-air replacement. The world's brokenness all too often rips asunder those who love one another, like little Marcus and his drug-addicted mother, and even kills love aborning, as with Lonegan and Melanie (Bryce Dallas Howard), who meet in a cooking class in San Francisco. These scenes are the most charming in the movie. In an inspired bit of casting, the teacher is portrayed by Steve Shirripa of "The Sopranos," who plays Nessun dorma and Che gilda manina in class while George and Melanie cautiously flirt and feed one another spoonfuls of Italian delicacies.

But when Melanie learns George is a psychic and insists on a reading, he learns things she can't bear for a near-stranger to know, and their relationship ends. It's happened to him before, and it's the main reason he wants out of the business. Finally, he flees to London, where he meets Marcus (and his brother). Journalist LeLay's there, too, enabling the threads of the story to come together in a way that seems as easy and natural as every moment, line, and note (Eastwood wrote the score, with a little help from Rachmaninoff) in this enchanting, beautifully made movie. He surely has now earned the status of one of our greatest directors.

The freaky thing for me today was the reason George goes to London. He's a Dickens fan who falls asleep listening to passages from David Copperfield, and the first thing he does when he hits town is visit Dickens' house at 48 Doughty St. Kathy and I have been there. But not knowing we'd be seeing a movie tonight about God and Dickens, this afternoon I wrote a post about Dickens and God.

Clash Of Civilizations? What Civilization?

Yemen-based terrorists tried to send bombs to two synagogues in Chicago.

As Good As God

Turning to Charles Dickens in middle age and as a relatively recently minted priest (we call ourselves "midlife vocations"), I've been especially curious about his many references to God, faith, and the church.

As for his denominational status, the Unitarians make this apparently reliable claim:

Although Dickens was baptized and reared in the Church of England and was a nominal Anglican for most of his life, he turned to Unitarianism in the 1840s as a Broad Church alternative. He associated with Unitarians until the end of his life. Early experience with Dissenters gave him a lifelong aversion to evangelical zeal, doctrinal disputation and sectarianism. Equally unsympathetic with High Church Anglicanism, he feared that the Oxford Movement might lead the English back to Roman Catholicism.

That adds up. In Bleak House he makes several references to the beautiful language in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer but evinces no regard for its underlying doctrines (such as the pretty thoroughly Calvinist 39 Articles). A Christmas Carol stresses fellowship and compassion as the virtues of true religion. According to his father, Bob Cratchitt, Tiny Tim offers a bit of Christ talk pertaining exclusively to the Savior and his healing work:

Somehow [Tim] gets thoughtful, sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember, upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.

In my current read, The Old Curiosity Shop, a unnamed London passerby serving as narrator in the first few chapters says this on encountering the central character, little Nell:

I love these little people; and it is not a slight thing when they, who are so fresh from God, love us.

I wrote earlier in the week about Dickens as liberation theologian because he says the poor are especially close to God. So too in chapter 41, when young Christopher Nubbles, called Kit, goes looking for his mother to help in a scheme to persuade his beloved Nell and her grandfather to return to London. Kit, getting ahead in the world by virtue of his honesty, industry, and decency, had taken his mother, siblings, and friends to the theater and an oyster dinner the night before. When he arrives home the next evening to collect her for her mission, she's apparently gone to church -- not an Anglican one, mind you, but what we would call an urban evangelical storefront called Little Bethel where the pastor thinks he knows (as some also insist today) who the real Christians are:

Little Bethel might have been nearer, and might have been in a straighter road, though in that case the reverend gentleman who presided over its congregation would have lost his favorite allusion to the crooked ways by which it was approached, and which enabled him to liken it to Paradise itself, in contradistinction to the parish church and the broad thoroughfare leading thereunto.

Kit finds the preacher in full voice and his mother and most of the congregation fast asleep. Rousing her and propelling her into the street, the usually equable and kindly young man waxes prophetic. He thinks the evangelist is exploiting her misguided shame over the prior evening's innocent indulgences:

"What was there in the little bit of pleasure you took last night that made it necessary for you to be low-spirited and sorrowful tonight? That's the way you do. If you're happy or merry ever, you come here to say, along with that chap, that you're sorry for it. More shame for you, mother, I was going to say."

"Hush, dear!" said Mrs. Nubbles; "you don't mean what you say I know, but you're talking sinfulness."

"Don't mean it? But I do mean it!" retorted Kit. "I don't believe, mother, that harmless cheerfulness and good humour are thought greater sins in Heaven than shirt-collars are, and I do believe that those chaps are just about as right and sensible in putting down the one as in leaving off the other -- that's my belief."

Kit seems to mention shirt collars to signify the kind of well-off people he's now working for -- decent and honorable, as it happens, but just as likely not, as in the case of Scrooge and especially Nell and Kit's bete noire, the odious Quilp. Here Dickens' straightforward gospel is that being rich won't necessarily get you into heaven and indulging in simple human pleasures won't keep you out.

What does get us in? Dickens knew it when he saw it, as in the case of his sister-in-law, Mary, who died a few years before he wrote The Old Curiosity Shop. As we approach All Saints Day, Dickens seems to be teaching us to find divine inspiration in the recollection and emulation of those who have made our lives and world better. I don't like to think about it, but little Nell will die at the end of the novel, and as she does, a kindly friend will say:

There is nothing . . . no nothing innocent and good, that dies and is forgotten. Let us hold to that faith or none. . . There is not an angel added to the Host of Heaven but does its blessed work in those that loved it here.