Plato: Symposium — The Ache You Can't Explain, and the Love You Were Made For

There is a particular kind of loneliness that visits you in the middle of a wonderful evening — when the conversation is brilliant, the wine is good, and the people around the table are exactly who you would have chosen. You are laughing, fully present, and yet somewhere beneath the laughter is a question you cannot quite silence: Is this it? Is this what I have been looking for? That ache — poignant, persistent, impossible to satisfy — is the hidden subject of one of the most beautiful books the ancient world ever produced. Plato's Symposium (Greek: Symposion, meaning drinking party; composed c. 385–370 BCE) gathers the most glamorous minds of classical Athens around a dinner table to answer a single question: What is the nature of Eros — of love and desire? The answers they give are among the most searching ever offered. And they are not enough. That is precisely why this book is worth reading.

The scene is the house of Agathon, a celebrated tragic playwright, in 416 BCE — the year Athens stood at the height of its imperial confidence and on the edge of the catastrophe of the Sicilian Expedition. Several guests at this table would help bring the city to ruin within a decade. Plato, writing from the other side of that ruin, from the shadow of Socrates' judicial murder, shapes the dialogue with double historical vision: a glorious doomed evening preserved in the amber of philosophical prose. The setting matters because the Symposium is not just philosophy. It is also a reckoning with mortality, ambition, and the terrifying gap between what human beings most want and what they are able to find.

Six Speeches and a Stairway to Heaven

The literary architecture of the Symposium is a masterwork of layered narration. Apollodorus retells to an unnamed companion what Aristodemus once told him about the banquet — and this double remove from the event is Plato's first gesture toward the reader: all human knowledge of the highest things is mediated, secondhand, imperfect. Within that frame, six men deliver increasingly ambitious speeches in praise of Eros. Phaedrus opens by arguing, citing Hesiod's Theogony (c. 700 BCE), that Eros is the oldest of the gods, the foundational cosmic force. Pausanias distinguishes heavenly from common eros. Eryximachus medicalizes love as the harmony of opposites. Then Aristophanes delivers the speech that has haunted Western imagination ever since.

In a myth of breathtaking tenderness, Aristophanes describes human beings as originally spherical — complete, powerful, and whole — until Zeus split them apart as punishment for their pride. Love, on this account, is the memory of completeness; every lover is a half-person searching for their missing other half. The structural echo of Genesis 2 is impossible to ignore: a narrative of original wholeness, separation, and the ache for reunion. But where Genesis grounds that ache in God's covenantal design — 'it is not good for man to be alone' (Gen 2:18) — and resolves it in the one-flesh union of heterosexual marriage, Aristophanes' myth includes same-sex pairings and attributes the division to divine punishment rather than creative purpose. The longing is the same. The diagnosis is different. The remedy turns out to be entirely different.

“The longing that Aristophanes describes so movingly, and that every human heart confirms, is the longing that Scripture both names and answers — not in a myth of reunion but in the reality of redemption.”

Agathon closes the formal speeches with a flowery rhetorical encomium that Socrates gently demolishes before reporting what the prophetess Diotima of Mantinea taught him: the famous Ladder of Beauty. Beginning with the love of one beautiful body, the philosopher ascends — to love of all beautiful bodies, then of beautiful souls, then of beautiful practices and laws, then of the beauty of knowledge, and finally to Beauty Itself: eternal, unmixed, pure, self-consistent, the Form that underlies all beautiful things. Diotima's speech is Plato's most daring philosophical claim: human eros, rightly disciplined, is the engine of the soul's ascent to the divine. The parallel to Proverbs 8 — where feminine Wisdom (Hebrew: chokmah; phonetic: khok-MAH) calls out to young men, offering herself as the path to life and the face of God — is both striking and revealing. Both Diotima and Lady Wisdom are female figures who mediate knowledge of ultimate reality to male seekers. But where Lady Wisdom is a person, pointing to the personal God, Diotima's Beauty Itself is an impersonal Form — something to be contemplated, never to be loved in return.

The Philosopher's Brilliant Dead End

The Symposium reaches its highest point and shows its deepest limitation in the same moment. Diotima's ascent is magnificent — perhaps the greatest pre-Christian account of the soul's orientation toward the transcendent. Augustine would later confirm in his Confessions that the Platonists had genuinely glimpsed what he could not find in them: 'You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you' (Confessions 1.1.1). The diagnosis is right. The medicine is missing.

Three things the Symposium cannot provide. First, its ultimate object is impersonal. Diotima's Beauty Itself does not love, does not speak, does not covenant, and cannot be in relationship. It is a Form to be contemplated, not a Father to be known. The God of Scripture is not the Form of Beauty — he is the living God who calls Abraham by name, who wrestles with Jacob at Jabbok, who says through Hosea 'I will betroth you to me forever' (Hos 2:19). The deepest human longing is not for an abstract absolute but for the face of a Person.

Second, the direction of love in the Symposium is entirely wrong. Eros moves upward, driven by human desire and philosophical discipline. Scripture's central movement is the inverse. God does not wait to be ascended to; he descends. 'For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son' (John 3:16). The Greek verb ēgapēsen (he loved) is aorist indicative — a perfective, completed historical act in which the eternal God moved toward the unworthy. This is not eros reaching upward toward beauty; it is agape (Greek: agapē; phonetic: ah-GAH-pay) stooping downward in grace. Paul captures the inversion with surgical precision: 'God demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us' (Rom 5:8). Eros loves the beautiful; agape loves the undeserving. The difference is the difference between a philosophy and a gospel.

Third, the Symposium has no account of sin, no diagnosis of moral catastrophe, no need for atonement. Its picture of the human problem is ignorance — the lover does not yet know where true beauty lies. The cure is education and discipline. But Scripture's diagnosis is categorically different: the human problem is not ignorance but rebellion, not a missing rung on the ladder but a broken relationship with the living God. Ecclesiastes 3:11 confirms the Symposium's insight that God has 'set eternity in the human heart,' but Jeremiah 17:9 names what lies beneath the longing: 'The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick — who can understand it?' The restlessness that Plato anatomizes so brilliantly is, in biblical terms, not merely incompleteness but exile — the exile of a creature who has turned away from the only one who could satisfy him.

What the Old Testament Knew That Plato Didn't

The Old Testament addresses Eros directly — and with far greater clarity than Athens managed. The Song of Songs (Shir HaShirim) does not spiritualize erotic love away; it celebrates it as a gift of the Creator, embodied and particular and passionate: 'I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine' (Song 6:3). Rabbi Akiva called the Song 'the holy of holies' of all Scripture, and rightly so — because it grounds the meaning of love not in abstract ascent but in covenantal particularity. Where Diotima's ladder ultimately abandons particular persons for the impersonal Form, the Song never leaves the beloved's face.

Even more striking is the contrast between Aristophanes' myth and Genesis 1–2. Both attempt to explain why human beings ache for union. But Genesis insists that God made human beings as male and female in his image (Gen 1:26–27), that the one-flesh union (Hebrew: basar echad; phonetic: bah-SAR eh-KHAD) of man and woman is the creational norm (Gen 2:24), and that this design is tov — good, genuinely good, not a concession to flesh that philosophy must eventually transcend. Where Aristophanes' myth includes three original sexes and valorizes same-sex eros, Genesis establishes complementary union as the pattern that images the relational God himself. Paul in Romans 1:26–27 reads same-sex erotic acts as one symptom of the larger idolatrous exchange — the substitution of the Creator for created beauty — that the Symposium, with all its brilliance, both describes and exemplifies.

The Old Testament's sharpest critique of the Symposium is not, however, ethical but theological: it concerns the nature of God's love. YHWH's love for Israel is not eros — it is hesed (phonetic: HEH-sed): steadfast, covenantal, self-giving loyalty that persists through betrayal and exile. 'I have loved you with an everlasting love; I have drawn you with unfailing kindness' (Jer 31:3). This is the love of a God who does not need Israel to complete him — he is not Aristophanes' half-person seeking reunion — but who chooses Israel freely, pursues her through her unfaithfulness, and promises a new covenant written not in stone but on the heart (Jer 31:31–34). Diotima never imagined a God like this. No Greek philosopher did.

The Word That Became Flesh — and Ruined Everything

The New Testament answers the Symposium not by climbing Diotima's ladder but by announcing that the One at the top of the ladder has come down. John's Prologue opens with the same words as Genesis — En archē ēn ho Logos ('In the beginning was the Word'; phonetic: en ar-KHE ayn ho LOH-gos) — and then makes a claim no Platonist could absorb: kai ho Logos sarx egeneto — 'the Word became flesh' (John 1:14). The aorist egeneto presents the Incarnation as a perfective, decisive event: the eternal Logos entered history as a particular embodied human being. This is the complete inversion of Platonic ascent. Plato's philosopher moves from the particular body upward toward the immaterial Form. The gospel announces that the immaterial Word moved downward into a particular body. The two movements cannot both be the way home.

The Philippians 2 hymn expresses the same theological revolution in poetry. Christ 'did not consider equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant' (Phil 2:6–7). Where the Symposium's philosopher grasps upward — the very gesture Aristophanes attributes to the original humans' hubris before Zeus — the Son releases his divine prerogatives and moves in the opposite direction. First Corinthians 13 then describes what the love that drove that descent looks like in practice: 'Love is patient, love is kind… it does not seek its own.' Agape, the love the Spirit pours into human hearts (Rom 5:5), is not Eros that ascends toward beauty; it is the cruciform self-donation of One who loved the unbeautiful at infinite cost to himself.

And then there is 1 John 4:8: Theos agapē estin — 'God is love' (phonetic: the-OS ah-GAH-pay ES-tin). Not 'God is the Form of Beauty.' Not 'God is the highest object of eros.' God IS love — not as a property he possesses but as the description of an eternally, personally loving triune being: the Father eternally loving the Son in the Spirit (John 17:24). This is not what Diotima taught. This is what Diotima could not have imagined: a God whose inner life is already an eternal exchange of self-giving love, who overflows into creation and redemption not from need but from the abundance of that love. The Symposium reaches toward this. The gospel names it.

Why Christians Should Read This Pagan Masterpiece

There are seven reasons Christians should read the Symposium carefully, critically, and gratefully.

First, it names the ache. Most people in our culture cannot articulate why they are unsatisfied — why the promotion, the relationship, the experience they worked so hard to obtain left them, within weeks, already longing for something else. The Symposium gives that nameless longing a philosophical address. It prepares the ground for Ecclesiastes and Augustine and, ultimately, for the gospel's announcement that the longing has a name and the name is God.

Second, it makes the gospel strange again. When you read Diotima's magnificent account of the soul's ascent toward Beauty Itself, and then read John 3:16, the sheer otherness of the gospel becomes luminous. You have not been told to ascend. You have been told that Love descended. You are not the lover in this story; you are the beloved — sought, found, and paid for at unspeakable cost.

Third, it equips you for the culture around you. Our culture is saturated with neo-Platonic assumptions: the idealization of romantic love as a transcendent experience, the spiritualization of beauty, the sense that certain aesthetic experiences put us in touch with something beyond ourselves. People who have read the Symposium can meet those assumptions where they live, honor the genuine insight within them, and then gently redirect the conversation: 'Yes, you are right that beauty points beyond itself. Do you want to know to whom?'

Fourth, it connects you to the Fathers. Justin Martyr, Origen, Augustine, and Gregory of Nyssa all wrestled with Platonic eros in constructing Christian theology. Augustine's Confessions is incomprehensible without the Symposium as a foil. Gregory of Nyssa's concept of epektasis (phonetic: eh-PEK-ta-sis) — the soul's infinite, joyful, never-completed ascent into an inexhaustible God — is a Christian transformation of Diotima's ladder: same dynamic, different destination, different engine (grace instead of eros). To read these Fathers well you need to know what they were arguing with.

Fifth, it confronts you with the seriousness of disordered desire. The Symposium shows with terrible clarity what happens when the soul's native longing for God is redirected toward created beauty: it produces philosophy of stunning depth and genuine insight, and it is still not enough. Brilliant, sincere, disciplined seekers who did not have the gospel went as far as the human mind can go and arrived at a Form that cannot love them back. Romans 1 diagnoses this not with contempt but with grief: they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images, and the ache never left.

Sixth, it sharpens your understanding of love. The distinction between Platonic eros and NT agape is one of the most important distinctions a Christian can carry. Eros loves the beautiful; agape loves the unworthy. Eros ascends; agape descends. Eros is driven by lack; agape overflows from fullness. The more clearly you understand what the Symposium is reaching for, the more precisely you understand what the cross actually is.

Seventh, it is beautiful. God made human beings capable of producing works of extraordinary beauty, and the Symposium — with its nested narratives, its comedy and pathos, Aristophanes' myth, Diotima's luminous speech, and Alcibiades' drunk confession that Socrates is the only man who has ever made him ashamed of himself — is genuinely great. Christians do not need to be afraid of greatness wherever it appears. We serve the God who made the capacity for greatness and who will, at the last, redeem it.

Taking the Symposium Into Your Week

Here is a question worth sitting with, drawn from the Symposium itself: What is the one thing you most want? Not the answer you would give in a church small group, but the desire that actually drives your week — the person, the achievement, the experience, the feeling of being seen or fully known that you have been quietly, persistently reaching for? Diotima would tell you that desire is real, that it is pointing somewhere, and that following it honestly will eventually bring you to a rung of the ladder you cannot climb past on your own.

The gospel tells you that the One at the top of the ladder has already come to the bottom and stood beside you in your reaching. The cross is God's answer to human eros — not a ladder you climb but a rescue you receive, not a vision of impersonal Beauty but the face of a Person who knows your name and has already paid everything to bring you home. 'Behold, I stand at the door and knock' (Rev 3:20). That is not Diotima's eros. That is divine agape — not waiting to be ascended to, but already at the door.

“The cross is God’s answer to human eros — not a ladder you climb but a rescue you receive, not a vision of impersonal Beauty but the face of a Person who already paid everything to bring you home.”

Read the Symposium — slowly, openly, with a Bible nearby. Let Aristophanes make you feel the ache. Let Diotima stretch your mind toward the transcendent. Let Augustine's voice join the conversation at the margins: 'You have made us for yourself, O Lord.' And then hear Revelation 21:3 as the answer Plato's dinner party could not provide: 'Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.' Not a Form. Not a ladder. A dwelling. An unending feast. A face.

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Sophocles: Trachiniae and the God Who Enters Our Tragedy

When Love Becomes Poison

Hear it: the screaming of a man who cannot die fast enough. Not the clean cry of a battlefield death — this is a sound that does not stop, raw and animal, filling the stone air while servants stand useless around him. Heracles, the greatest hero Greece ever imagined, whose hands strangled lions and redirected rivers, is writhing on a stretcher in a robe he cannot tear off because it is dissolving his flesh as he breathes. Somewhere offstage, his wife has just killed herself, having learned what her gift has done, and the silence from that room is its own kind of screaming. His son, who has already watched his mother die, is now receiving his father’s final instructions: carry me to the mountain, build me a pyre, and then marry the woman who started all of this.

That is where Sophocles’ Trachiniae ends. Not with a solution. With a son carrying a body and a chorus saying the only thing left to say: “There is nothing here that is not Zeus.”

I want to be honest with you before we go further: I have been in this story. I have sent something I believed was a gift — something offered from genuine love — and watched it destroy what I cared about most. If you have too, this is not academic for either of us.

The play diagnoses something precisely true about human experience — what we will call the Heat: the situations and devastating pressures that form the occasion of our deepest wounds. Something hard happened (the Heat); something in your heart responded badly (the Thorn); Jesus absorbed the consequence of that response (the Cross); and now something new is possible in you (the Fruit). Only the Bible can get below the Heat to treat the root.

Literary and Historical Background

Sophocles did not invent his story. The Heracles cycle was already ancient when he took it up, drawn from Homer’s Odyssey, the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, and the lost epic Capture of Oechalia. What Sophocles does is force his audience to feel the cost of getting there. The oracle of Zeus at Dodona promised Heracles that his labours would end either in peace or in death. Every scene winds tighter around that oracle like a rope no character can see until it is too late.

The questions the play raises are universal: What becomes of greatness when it shatters? What do you do when the forces governing your life are inscrutable? Sophocles is not wrong about human nature — he understands that love and destruction can occupy the same gesture, that good intentions do not insulate us from catastrophic consequences. The diagnostic categories we will use — the wound beneath the wound, the idol beneath the fear, the Cross as the only cure — are drawn from Jeremiah, Job, Paul, and the Gospels. Sophocles helps us see the problem. Scripture alone names and resolves it.

If you are reading this as someone who is not yet a Christian — or who is not sure — I am not asking you to accept the theology in order to feel the diagnosis. The diagnosis is available to anyone who has been Deianira or Hyllus. The question of whether the gospel is the answer is a fair one. But you cannot honestly dismiss the answer until you have genuinely felt the problem.

The Shape of the Tragedy

Feel the weight of the first panel. Deianira is alone in a household that never quite became home, managing children and servants while her husband performed impossible feats in impossible places. She has heard nothing for fifteen months. When news finally arrives it comes with captive women in tow — one of them young, beautiful, and silent. Deianira touches that silence like pressing a finger against a bruise. She is afraid, and afraid people reach for what they have. She has a robe soaked in what a dying centaur told her was a love charm. She folds it carefully, sends it with a servant, and stands in her doorway waiting for it to work.

But notice what is beneath the fear — this is where the Thorns begin to show. Deianira’s fear is not simply the reasonable alarm of a wronged wife. It is the expression of a heart that has made her husband’s presence and approval the source of her security, identity, and worth. This is what Jeremiah 2:13 calls broken-cistern thinking: “my people have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves.” The Thorn is the idol: the deep heart demand that another human being supply what only God can give. Not malice, but disordered love; not wickedness, but a heart looking to the wrong place for its life.

The second panel belongs to Heracles, carried onstage in torment as the robe eats him from within. Before he dies he extracts an oath from his son Hyllus: build the pyre, then marry Iole. Hyllus must carry the body of the father whose commands destroyed his mother, and wed the woman whose arrival set everything in motion.

Beneath the weight of that carrying, if we are honest, is often a Thorn of its own: the heart’s deep demand that the universe be just — that burdens fall on those who deserve them. When that demand is denied, the wound is not merely circumstantial. It is the heart’s uprising against the One who governs the universe (James 4:2). Hyllus’s Thorn is the idol of a fair world — one of the most common and most underdiagnosed idols in the human heart.

Before reading further, pause. What are you actually holding on to that you have not yet named? Who around you is standing where Hyllus stands? The answer that is coming addresses not only the wound but the idol beneath it.

Sophocles does not explain the suffering. He makes you feel it, and then he goes silent. That is precisely where the Bible begins to speak.

Old Testament: the Cross Foreshadowed

Before reaching for the theological resolution, feel the ash beneath Job’s fingers. He is sitting in it, scraping his skin with a piece of broken pottery, having lost his children, his wealth, and his health in a single sequence of days. His friends arrive and for seven days sit in silence with him — which is the most useful thing they do. When they open their mouths they offer explanations Job cannot accept.

But watch what Job does with the Heat. He presses: “I will speak. I will not keep silent” (Job 7:11). And in pressing, he exposes his own Thorn: the demand to be vindicated by a God who appears to have turned away. The whirlwind’s answer does not explain the Heat. It addresses the Thorn — not with information but with presence. “I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted” (Job 42:2). The Thorn of demanded vindication is replaced by the Fruit of humble trust in a God who is present and purposeful even when he is not explanatory.

Samson in Judges 13 through 16 offers a second angle. Like Heracles, he is a man of divinely given strength whose passion becomes the instrument of his ruin. But unlike Heracles, Samson does not operate in a cosmos of blind fate. The God of the covenant refuses to stop working even through the wreckage of Samson’s idolatry, and even his death serves purposes larger than his choices. The Bible does not deny the Heat or sanitise the Thorns; it places both inside a story governed by a God whose faithfulness outlasts every human failure.

New Testament: the Cross and the Spirit Poured Out

There is a man on a cross who has done nothing wrong. He is there by deliberate, loving, eyes-open choice — bearing in his own body the weight of every poisoned gift humanity has ever sent or received, absorbing in himself the full consequence of every Thorn: every misdirected love, every demanded fairness, every heart that has looked to the wrong source for its life. He is not mythology. He rose. The stone moved. This is the hinge on which everything turns.

The author of Hebrews is making a precise claim when he writes that our high priest was “in every respect tempted as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15). He is not offering general sympathy but identifying a specific qualification: this priest knows the Deianira-temptation — the pull to secure your life in something other than the Father — and did not break under it. He knows the Hyllus-uprising — the heart’s demand for a just universe — and bore its full weight without sinning. That is the ground of our confidence: not that he is tolerant of our weakness but that he has stood exactly where we stand and not fallen. He then absorbed the full consequence of our falling: “learned obedience through what he suffered” (Hebrews 5:8) — his suffering was not fate but formation, the Cross becoming the ground of all Fruit.

And here is what this means for the specific idol: what Deianira needed was not a stronger grip on her husband but a vision of the One in whom all the security she craved is given freely, permanently, and without the possibility of revocation. In Christ there is an inexhaustible supply of the very thing the idol promised and could not deliver — identity, worth, security, love — given not as reward for virtue but as gift to the undeserving. The idol is not merely wrong; it is pitifully inadequate beside the real thing. Christ is not the consolation prize when the idol fails. He is the original, of which the idol was always a thin and unsatisfying copy.

But do not receive this only as historical comfort. He is what is happening in you right now, by his Spirit. You do not merely receive help from Christ; you are joined to him — so that what is true of him is legally and vitally true of you. You are not primarily “person in pain” or “person with a poisoned past.” You are, if you are in Christ, a new creation — a new kind of being, available right now, before anything in your circumstances changes.

A word for the reader already in Christ who is still carrying this alone: you need not carry it as if the Cross had not happened. The risen Christ is not watching from a distance. He is present, active, and already at work in what you are carrying. Let him into the part you are still managing yourself.

And this is how it happens: you cannot name your own Thorn, let alone release it, by your own moral effort. The Spirit of God — given to those who are in Christ — is the one who illuminates the idol, gives the desire to repent of it, and sustains the new direction day after day. This is not your project; it is his, in you.

Paul — who knew suffering not theoretically but in his own body — writes without sentiment: “For those who love God all things work together for good” (Romans 8:28). Not most things. Not the pleasant things. All things — because the One who governs all things has gone into the worst of them and come out the other side. “The sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed” (Romans 8:18). What Hyllus could only grieve, Christ has conquered — not for mythology but for history, for you, for now.

Benefits of Reading: Equipped for the Silence of Trachis

If you have followed the argument this far, you are holding something useful: a vocabulary and a set of images that match the inner landscape of people around you who would never open a Bible but might talk about a film, a story, a sense that the universe doesn’t care. You now have a way into those conversations that is not abstract.

The Early Church Fathers understood exactly how to handle material like Sophocles’ Trachiniae. Justin Martyr saw in the Heracles myth a distorted imitation of Christ’s genuine sonship. Clement of Alexandria found in heroic virtue a dim trace of the Logos. Augustine used the tragedy of Hercules to illuminate the bankruptcy of the earthly city. They moved toward pagan literature with the gospel in hand, the way a physician moves toward a symptom: accurately, for what it reveals, then with a remedy ready.

Where in your life have good intentions led to damage you cannot undo? Who around you is carrying a Hyllus burden? The person who knows the way from the Heat through the Thorns to the Cross and into Fruit has something worth offering that no mere sympathy can match.

Do not read Job 1 alone if you can help it. Read it with someone who knows your Hyllus chapter. Repentance and faith do not sustain themselves in the solitary individual; they are nourished by prayer, by the word read and heard, by the table of the Lord, and by the company of brothers and sisters learning the same rhythm.

The Invitation to Repentance and Transformation

You already know what this play is about, because you have lived some version of it. You have sent a poisoned robe. Perhaps not literally, but you have acted from love and caused harm. Or perhaps you are Hyllus — handed a burden not of your making, carrying it forward into a future you did not choose.

If you accept the worldview of the chorus — fate is inscrutable, the gods are distant, suffering has no purpose and no resolution — then you will carry the weight alone, without your deepest Thorn ever being named or addressed. That is not peace. It is a wound that is never treated because its name is never spoken.

Before you receive the gospel invitation, consider receiving the gospel diagnosis. You may need to repent of the Deianira idol — the deep conviction that another person’s presence or approval can give you the security that only God supplies, so that when it is threatened you reach for a robe instead of a prayer. You may need to repent of the Hyllus idol — the unspoken demand that God owe you a fair universe. Repentance is not self-condemnation. It is opening the hands that have been gripping the wrong thing — and the moment your hand begins to open, his is already there.

The God of Scripture is not Zeus. He does not remain at divine distance while the oracle plays out. He enters. He wears the robe. He climbs the hill. He dies the death. And he rises — so that your Deianira moments can be forgiven, your Heracles rage can be met with a priest who understands it, and your Hyllus burden can be carried by One whose shoulders are actually broad enough.

For the Deianira-pattern person, Fruit looks like reaching for prayer before the robe. The morning she turns that direction, nothing about her circumstances has changed — the threat is still real — but she has gone to the right Source. For the Hyllus-pattern person, Fruit looks like waking each morning and releasing the demand for fairness before it calcifies into resentment. When either pattern person does this, that is not merely healing. That is worship. That is the glory of God displayed in a human life genuinely changed by grace. If you are barely holding on — if the very idea of open hands seems impossible — that is precisely the condition the risen Christ has faced before. He does not require you to generate the faith to receive him. He generates it in you. Ask him for it.

Here is the single most important thing: suffering is not the final word, and the idol beneath your suffering is not your identity. The Cross names both and addresses both.

This week: Read Job 1 and Romans 8 with someone who knows your Hyllus chapter — someone who can sit with you in the silence before they start explaining. Find someone living in the silence of Trachis and sit with them, just present. And then, when the moment comes, tell them about the Hero who took the Thorn into himself so that the robe of destruction could become the robe of righteousness. Tell them it is not mythology. Tell them the stone moved.

If you are ready, say it now — even in a whisper, even with uncertainty: “Lord, I open my hands. I name what I have been gripping. I receive what you offer.” That prayer, however halting, is the beginning of everything this essay has been pointing toward. That is not the wisdom of Athens. It is the grace of God.

The One making the offer is the only figure in the history of human storytelling who has actually conquered the thing you are afraid of — who has gone into the Heat, named the Thorns, absorbed them at the Cross, and is even now producing Fruit in those who trust him. This is for you, in the situation you are actually in, right now, with whatever you are carrying. Come with open hands.

Euripides: Alcestis and the Shadow of Resurrection

Of all the plays Euripides wrote, Alcestis occupies the strangest position — too hopeful to be pure tragedy, too shadowed by death to be comedy, and too morally uncomfortable to be simple celebration. Produced in 438 BCE as the fourth play in a tetralogy, filling the slot normally reserved for a satyr play, it stands at the intersection of burlesque and pathos in a way that only Euripides could manage. The plot is deceptively simple: Apollo, having been exiled to serve the mortal king Admetus, repays his host’s legendary hospitality by persuading the Fates to grant Admetus an extension of life — on the condition that someone else consents to die in his place. His aged parents refuse. His wife Alcestis agrees. The play opens on the morning of her death and closes with Heracles, who has wrestled Death himself at the graveside, returning the veiled and silent woman to her husband. What makes the play theologically provocative is not the happy ending but the relentless moral pressure Euripides brings to bear on everyone involved. Alcestis is noble, but she is also quietly exacting. Admetus is genuinely loving, but he is also, as his father Pheres says with lethal clarity, a man who let a woman die in his place. Consider whether you have ever been Admetus — grateful for a love that cost you nothing, protected by a sacrifice you did not make, standing at last in an empty house wondering what your survival was worth. Euripides understood that moment, and he could not resolve it. The gospel can.

Alcestis and the Greek Literary Tradition

Euripides receives the Alcestis myth from older tradition and subjects it to the same psychological pressure he applies everywhere. The figure of Heracles is drawn directly from the world of the satyr play: he arrives travel-stained and hungry, is feasted in secret while servants weep nearby, drinks heavily, sings rowdy songs, and then, sobered by the truth, marches off to wrestle Death at the graveside. The values of Homeric epic pervade the play — xenia, the sacred obligation of hospitality, is the hinge on which the entire plot turns — but where Homer tends to present hospitality as straightforwardly honorable, Euripides makes its cost visible. Admetus upholds xenia magnificently while simultaneously having allowed his wife to die for him, and the play holds these two facts in the same frame without resolving the tension. What is genuinely beautiful and true in Alcestis deserves acknowledgment before critique begins: the dignity of Alcestis’s self-giving love, her quiet practicality at the moment of death as she secures promises for her children, her refusal to sentimentalize what she is doing — these are drawn with real moral admiration, and a reader who finds her compelling is responding to something genuinely there. Herodotus, roughly contemporary with Euripides, shared a keen interest in how fortune reverses itself and how character reveals itself under pressure — Admetus is, in this sense, a thoroughly Herodotean figure, a man whose virtues and failures are displayed together by the crisis that strips away his pretensions. The confrontation between Admetus and his father Pheres, in which two men tear each other apart over which of them should have died, has no Homeric precedent: Homer does not stage this kind of domestic savagery, and it is Euripides’ particular genius — and his particular burden — to see it clearly and refuse to look away.

Alcestis and Ancient Near Eastern Literature

The resurrection at the center of Alcestis sets it in conversation with a broad tradition of ANE literature concerned with the boundary between death and life. The most obvious parallels are with the Sumerian Inanna-Dumuzi cycle, in which the goddess Inanna descends to the underworld and must provide a substitute — her husband Dumuzi — to take her place among the dead, enabling her own return. The structural similarity to Alcestis is striking: voluntary substitution, descent, and return. Egyptian traditions concerning Osiris, dismembered and restored through the devotion of Isis, carry similar themes of death-for-life exchange. What distinguishes Alcestis from these ANE precedents is its decisively non-mythological, non-cyclical character: Alcestis is not a goddess enacting a fertility ritual, and her restoration is not the turning of the seasons. She is a mortal woman, and her death is simply death — the same death that will claim everyone in the audience. Heracles does not perform a ritual; he wins a wrestling match at a graveside. The ANE traditions embed death and resurrection within cosmological cycles and divine drama; Euripides is already moving toward something more human-scaled, more historically particular — and in that movement, however unknowing, he is moving in a direction that Scripture will eventually fill with content those traditions could not provide. The anxiety about mortality that pervades Alcestis, the longing for a champion who can actually defeat death rather than simply incorporate it into a cosmic rhythm, is precisely the longing that the resurrection of Jesus Christ answers. Euripides does not know that answer, but he is asking the right question.

The Old Testament in Dialogue with Alcestis

The Old Testament engages the themes of Alcestis at multiple points, and the contrasts are sharper and more instructive than the parallels. The hospitality of Admetus finds its richest scriptural echo in Abraham’s reception of the three strangers at Mamre in Genesis 18, where lavish hospitality turns out to be hospitality offered to God himself and results in a promise of life where death seemed certain. But Abraham does not earn a bargain with fate; he receives a covenant promise from a God whose faithfulness does not depend on negotiation. The ram that God provides in place of Isaac in Genesis 22 is the Old Testament’s closest analogue to the substitutionary structure of Alcestis, but even here the contrast illuminates everything: the ram is provided by God himself, the substitution serves a covenantal and ultimately redemptive purpose, and the entire episode points forward along the road of redemptive history toward the sacrifice that will actually accomplish what no human arrangement can. The miracles of Elijah and Elisha — in which dead children are restored to life through the prayer of God’s prophets — show that power over death is real and available, but it flows from the living God who holds death in his hand, not from heroic combat or bargained extensions. The ram at Moriah, the raised child of Zarephath, and the eschatological visions of Isaiah 26:19 and Daniel 12:2 are not isolated incidents but waypoints on the road to a resurrection that answers them all — a resurrection that will address not merely the physical fact of death but the moral and legal reality that makes death necessary. Where Admetus’s story ends with a restored marriage and a chastened husband, the Old Testament’s resurrection promises point beyond themselves to a God who will keep his covenant across death itself.

The New Testament and Alcestis

Think of what Heracles actually accomplishes at that Thessalian graveside. He wrestles a figure, wins, and brings a woman back — and she will die again. The grave he empties will be filled again, by her, in due time. It is a reprieve, not a rescue. Now consider what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:56: “The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.” Heracles has no answer for any of that. He can overpower the personification of death; he cannot address the judicial sentence that makes death necessary in the first place. Only the one who bore that sentence in his own body, who was made sin for us so that we might become the righteousness of God, who descended into death and rose on the third day with a body no longer subject to corruption, has done what Heracles only mimed. There is a story told of Spurgeon, that he once watched a man try in vain to pump water from a dry well and said: “You will work yourself to exhaustion before a drop comes up — the source is broken.” Every human attempt to defeat death apart from Christ is that pump. The source is broken. Hebrews 2:14-15 names the mechanism with precision: Christ shared in flesh and blood so that “through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery.” Notice the argument: it is through death, not around it, that victory comes — because the problem is not merely mortality but the satanic bondage that sin and death together produce. Christ enters the bondage, satisfies the law’s demand, breaks the chain, and rises free — and all who trust him rise with him. The risen Christ who filled the empty tomb stands ready to fill the empty house of your grief and your mortality. If you have never trusted him, this is the moment.

Implications for Christian Belief and Practice

Alcestis rewards careful Christian reading because it forces into the open a set of questions that Scripture alone can answer, while showing what human moral insight, unaided by special revelation, can and cannot achieve. The play sees clearly that self-sacrificial love is the highest human virtue — Alcestis is drawn with genuine admiration, and her quiet dignity puts her faithless husband in the shade. This moral intuition reflects what Paul in Romans 1-2 calls the law written on the human heart, the common grace by which even pagan literature can perceive something true about the moral order. But the play sees equally clearly that this sacrifice is not enough: Alcestis dies, Admetus is shamed, and without Heracles the story ends in irreversible grief. Seeing that truth requires the Spirit’s illumination — this essay can point, but only the Holy Spirit can open eyes to see oneself in Admetus and Christ as the answer, which means that reading Alcestis is itself an occasion for prayer. Practically, imagine a conversation with a friend who has just lost someone irreplaceable — the chair is empty, the routines broken, the house echoing — and who finds no philosophy adequate to the weight of it. Alcestis gives that conversation a starting point: here is a play that names exactly what you are feeling, that knows the human longing for a champion who can actually win, and that points, without knowing where it is pointing, toward the one who did. The Spirit uses means, and one of those means is the honest testimony of the best pagan literature, which tells the truth about the wound even when it cannot name the physician. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the answer not just to Euripides’ question but to your neighbor’s grief, and to your own.

Conclusion

To him who descended into the darkness of death and ascended in glory, the witness of Alcestis points — imperfectly, partially, but genuinely. Euripides knew that death was the enemy, that the highest love gives itself away, and that a champion who could defeat the grave would be the greatest benefactor of the human race. He did not know the name of that champion, but the name has now been revealed. Reading Alcestis alongside the New Testament produces not merely an interesting literary comparison but something closer to what Paul was doing in Athens — finding in the best of the pagan tradition the altar to the unknown God, the longing whose true object has now been made known. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the eucatastrophe that the play reaches toward without being able to grasp: not Heracles standing victorious at a Thessalian graveside, but the risen Lord standing in a garden outside Jerusalem, speaking a name — and in speaking it, filling everything that death had emptied. Death is the problem. Sin is its root. Jesus Christ is the only champion who has ever actually solved it, and he solved it by bearing the law’s full condemnation in his own body and walking out of the tomb on the third day. If that is not yet your trust, let it be. To him be glory, now and always.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Sappho: Erotic Love vs. True Biblical Love

Introduction: The Poetess of Lesbos

Sappho of Lesbos, who flourished around 600 B.C., stands as one of the most celebrated lyric poets of the ancient world. Writing in the Aeolic dialect of Greek, she composed songs of extraordinary emotional intensity, most of which have survived only in fragments — scattered scraps of papyrus, quotations preserved by later grammarians, and a handful of more complete poems. The ancient world honored her alongside Homer, and Plato allegedly called her the “tenth Muse.” What survives is haunting precisely because of its incompleteness: lines that break off mid-thought, images of flowers and moonlight and trembling desire that feel both alien and achingly familiar. Her primary subject is eros — love and longing in their most visceral and destabilizing forms. She writes about the ache of separation from beloved companions, the physical symptoms of desire, the jealousy of watching another receive affection she craves, and the invocation of Aphrodite as her divine patron and ally in love’s wars. For the Christian reader approaching Sappho for the first time, the experience is something like touching fire — beautiful, illuminating, and not without danger.

Sappho and the Greek Literary World

To read Sappho rightly, one must understand her place within the broader landscape of Greek literature. She belongs to the tradition of melic or lyric poetry — poetry composed for musical performance, often in the context of private or semi-private gatherings, quite different from the grand public epics of Homer or the civic tragedies of Sophocles. Where Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey organized Greek identity around heroic virtue, military excellence, and divine fate, Sappho oriented her world entirely around the private geography of the heart. Her near contemporary Alcaeus, also from Lesbos, wrote lyric poetry as well, but his themes leaned toward politics and the symposium. Sappho’s work seems to emerge from a circle of women — possibly a thiasos, a religious and social association devoted to the worship of Aphrodite and the Muses — in which young women were educated in music, poetry, and the refinements of beauty before marriage. Many of her poems mourn the departure of beloved companions, and the erotic coloring of this mourning has been the subject of fierce scholarly debate for centuries. Some scholars argue that the homoeroticism is explicit and should be taken at face value; others argue that the intense emotional vocabulary of female friendship in the ancient world does not map neatly onto modern categories of sexual orientation. What is clear is that Sappho’s poetry places female desire and the female gaze at the center of its vision in a literary culture that overwhelmingly privileged the male perspective, and this alone is remarkable.

Sappho and the Ancient Near Eastern Background

The parallels between Sappho’s poetry and ancient Near Eastern love literature are striking enough to warrant careful attention. Egyptian love poetry from the New Kingdom period (roughly 1550-1070 B.C.) — such as the poems preserved in the Chester Beatty Papyrus and the Harris 500 Papyrus — shares with Sappho a vocabulary of longing, physical description, and the beloved’s idealized beauty. Both traditions celebrate the body with sensuous specificity, lament the pain of separation, and personify love as a consuming force that overturns ordinary life. The famous Mesopotamian texts surrounding the sacred marriage of Inanna and Dumuzi, while embedded in a very different ritual context, similarly explore the language of divine eros and its relationship to fertility, beauty, and cosmic order. These traditions provide the cultural atmosphere in which ancient love poetry across the Mediterranean and Near East developed, and they suggest that Sappho’s work, while uniquely Greek in its formal features, participates in a much older and wider human conversation about what love does to us. For the biblical scholar, this background is essential: it reminds us that the Song of Songs did not emerge in a cultural vacuum but spoke into a world already saturated with love poetry, and that the inspired canonical text both resembles and decisively reframes what its neighbors were doing.

Sappho and the Song of Songs

The most theologically interesting comparison for the Christian reader is between Sappho’s fragments and the Song of Songs. The parallels are genuinely remarkable. Both celebrate the physical beauty of the beloved with frank sensuality. Both describe love as overwhelming, almost illness-like in its effects — Sappho’s famous Fragment 31, in which the speaker describes her heart racing, her vision failing, and cold sweat pouring over her at the sight of a beloved woman sitting near a man, has often been compared to the Shulammite’s lovesickness in Song of Songs 2:5. Both traditions use natural imagery — flowers, fruit, night breezes, gardens — to evoke erotic longing. Wedding songs appear in both. And yet the differences are as instructive as the similarities. Sappho’s world is polytheistic; her primary divine interlocutor is Aphrodite, the goddess of erotic desire, who descends to earth in Fragment 1 with charming, even playful, willingness to help Sappho win back a wayward beloved. The Song of Songs operates entirely within a monotheistic framework, and while its eroticism is unapologetic, it is ordered — celebrated within the covenantal structure of committed love that points, in the Jewish and Christian traditions, toward the love between God and his people, and for Christians specifically, between Christ and the church. Sappho’s eros answers to no authority beyond itself. The Song’s eros is gift and image, not ultimate. That distinction, theologically, is everything.

The Old and New Testaments and the World Sappho Represents

The Old and New Testaments do not mention Sappho, but the world she represents — the Greco-Roman culture of erotic desire, religious pluralism, and the celebration of love as its own justification — is one the biblical writers engage critically throughout. The Old Testament prophets consistently use erotic imagery to describe Israel’s unfaithfulness to God, treating the pursuit of foreign gods as a form of adultery (Hosea 1-3, Ezekiel 16, Jeremiah 2). This is not merely metaphor; it reflects the reality that Canaanite and wider Near Eastern religious practice often fused fertility religion, sexual ritual, and worship in ways that the covenant God explicitly forbade. The New Testament, writing into a fully Hellenized Mediterranean world, confronts Greek erotic culture more directly. Paul’s discussion of sexual ethics in 1 Corinthians 6 and 7 and his treatment of same-sex relations in Romans 1:24-27 represent a direct engagement with the sexual ethos of the Greco-Roman world, of which Sappho was a celebrated exemplar. Paul does not attack beauty or desire as such — the same apostle who wrote Romans 1 also wrote the love hymn of 1 Corinthians 13 — but he insists that eros, detached from the ordering purposes of God, becomes disordered and ultimately self-destructive. The contrast with Sappho could not be sharper: where Sappho invokes Aphrodite to aid her in pursuing whoever she desires, Paul insists that the body belongs to the Lord and that sexual union is charged with covenantal and even eschatological meaning.

The Early Church Fathers’ Assessment

The early church fathers knew Sappho and had mixed views of her. On the negative side, figures such as Tatian of Syria in the second century attacked her explicitly as a “love-mad woman” and a model of sexual immorality, linking her to the broader pagan culture the early church was determined to distinguish itself from. This view was common in apologetic literature aimed at contrasting Christian moral seriousness with the licentiousness the fathers associated with Greco-Roman paganism. On the more generous side, other early Christian writers could acknowledge the formal beauty of her poetry and its utility as an example of the wedding-song tradition. Clement of Alexandria, who was broadly sympathetic to appropriating Greek learning in service of the faith, recognized that pagan literature contained genuine insight into the human condition even where it required correction. This more nuanced position reflects the broader patristic project, exemplified above all by Augustine, of neither wholesale adopting nor wholesale rejecting classical culture but rather judging it by the standard of the truth revealed in Christ. Augustine’s own account of disordered love in the Confessions — his restless heart seeking rest in created beauty rather than the Creator — provides perhaps the most theologically precise framework for evaluating Sappho: her poetry is a record of a brilliant, sensitive soul in the grip of eros that has no anchor beyond itself, beautiful in its honesty, poignant in its incompleteness, and ultimately incapable of answering the longing it so exquisitely describes.

Theological and Ethical Implications for Christians

For the Christian reader today, Sappho raises several important theological and ethical questions. On the question of same-sex desire, the fragments attributed to Sappho have made her an icon in modern discussions of homosexuality and sexual identity. The consistent testimony of Scripture, as understood by evangelical Christians across history and affirmed in the historic Christian confessions, is that sexual union is designed by God for one man and one woman within the covenant of marriage, and that same-sex erotic desire, whatever its origin, is one manifestation of the disordering of human affection that followed from the fall (Romans 1:24-27, 1 Corinthians 6:9-11). This position should be stated without contempt for those who struggle — indeed, Paul’s point in 1 Corinthians 6 is precisely that such disordering is redeemable through the washing, sanctifying, and justifying work of Christ. Sappho’s poetry does not justify a revision of this position, but it does illustrate why the biblical vision of ordered love matters: the intensity of longing she describes, the vulnerability, the grief of lost connection — these are not errors of human experience to be suppressed but genuine dimensions of the image of God in us, which the gospel aims not to eradicate but to restore and rightly order. Reading Sappho also sharpens our appreciation for the Song of Songs as canonical Scripture. The Song is not embarrassed by human desire; it celebrates it. But it places that desire within a framework of covenant, fidelity, and divine purpose that transforms eros from a consuming fire into a sacred gift.

The Call to Biblical Love and Intimacy with Christ

There is a reason Sappho’s fragments have moved readers for twenty-six centuries. The longing she describes — that ache for union with a beloved, the fire beneath the skin, the grief of separation, the desperate invocation of divine help in love’s pursuit — is not alien to us. It is, in fact, a signal of transcendence. Augustine was right: our hearts are made for a love that no human beloved, however beautiful, can finally satisfy. The Christian is invited not to the extinguishing of desire but to its fulfillment in the love of the God who, in Christ, pursued his beloved with a love stronger than death. The Song of Songs whispers what the New Testament declares in full voice: that the covenant love between Christ and his church is the reality of which all human eros is a shadow and a sign. Sappho trembled before a face across a banquet room and reached for Aphrodite’s help. The Christian trembles before the cross and finds there a Lover who did not merely send a letter but descended, suffered, and rose — for us. “I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine” (Song of Songs 6:3). In him, every fragmented longing is finally made whole.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Possible questions Israel asked Hosea

Possible questions Israel asked Hosea

Totally Undeserved
• Hosea, why would a godly, upright man like you love a filthy, treacherous whore?
• You tell me, why would a holy, righteous God love a sinful, adulterous people like us?

Desperately Needed
• Hosea, do you think that whore needs your love?
• You tell me, don't we desperately need God's love?

Extremely Costly
• Hosea, why would you pay such a high price for a woman who despises your love?
• You tell me, why would God be willing to sacrifice his own son for people like us who despise his love?

Wonderfully Transforming
• Hosea, what do you get from loving this worthless woman?
• You tell me, what happens when God loves us unconditionally? That is the only way for him to change us.

Love Believes All Things

"Love Believes All Things."  1 Corinthians 13:7

Soren Kierkegaard, in his book, Works on Love, reveals the bankruptcy of those who are overly critical, skeptical and suspicious of others. A loving person and a mistrusting person may have the exact same knowledge about an individual but they will draw different conclusions from what they know. A loving person will always interpret the individual in the best positive light, giving him the benefit of the doubt. A mistrusting person, however, will interpret the individual in the worst possible light, refusing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

The mistrusting person feels that believing the individual would be foolish and gullible. By believing the individual, the mistrusting person fears he will be deceived and taken advantage of. Therefore, to avoid being deceived, the mistrusting person always takes the position of skepticism and criticism, viewing all actions of the individual with suspicion.

However, there are many ways of being deceived. If you always mistrust others and view them with suspicion, you cheat yourself out of love. You may never be deceived and taken advantage of by others, but you will also never experience intimacy and love. Therefore, you may never be cheated by another person but you will have cheated yourself out of the most important thing in life—love.

If you love someone else and give them the benefit of the doubt, you may be deceived and cheated. But you will only be deceived and cheated in finite things, things that are temporal and less important. However, if you love and trust others, you will have grasped the most important fundamental truth of life.


Kierkegaard also took a hard swing at his critics when he called them “associate professors [whose] task in life is to judge the great men. [They display a] curious mixture of arrogance and wretchedness—arrogance because they feel called upon to pass judgment, wretchedness because they do not feel their lives are even remotely related to those of the great.”


Read C. Stephen Evans’ article, “Kierkegaard Among the Biographers” in Books & Culture, July/August 2007, pages 12-13.

The Color of Law

The Color of Law, Mark Gimenez’s first novel, follows in the style of John Grisham. Gimenez has the same grasp of the law and the moral dilemmas faced by lawyers. Gimenez is grittier than Grisham and tends to be a little preachy, yet he has a readable style that balances vivid detail with action and suspense.

Scott Fenny is a wealthy lawyer in the biggest law firm in Dallas. Scott has succeeded by being creative with the law, doing whatever he has to in order to win. He is living the perfect life, living in a $3 million mansion, drives a $200,000 Ferrari, wears thousand dollar suits, dines at the most exclusive dinner clubs, and is envied by many. But Scott is selfish, self-centered, arrogant, uncaring and shallow, just like all the other successful people around him, but he doesn’t know it.

Then into his perfect life falls a bomb. The federal judge appoints him as a public defender for a heroin-addicted prostitute charged in the murder of senator McCall’s son. Senator McCall is one of the most powerful men in Texas and is running for president, and he pressures Scott’s boss to keep his son’s wild and violent past out of the trial. Scott chafes at being told to lose the case and refuses to withhold the evidence.

Within days his perfect life has been completely unraveled. He loses his Ferrari, his mansion, his exclusive club memberships, and his wife, who walks out on him. Finally, he loses his main client and then his job. Completely devastated, Scott is forced to search his soul to find out what is most important. He chooses to defend the prostitute to the best of his ability; to discover the truth and not simply win. As a result, his life is completely changed and Scott becomes a caring, compassionate, man who thinks of other’s needs and not just his own.

Several quotes from the story are profound:

First, Scott’s boss tells him, “The color of the law is not black and white; it’s not about race. The color of law is green; money is what the law is all about. The law is for making and protecting rich men’s money.”

Second, Scott’s boss recounts what his first boss told him about success as a lawyer, in order to convince Scott to lose the case and move on. He said, “Early in your career you must decide whether you want to do ‘good’ or do ‘well.’ If you do ‘good’ you will never do ‘well’; you’ll never be successful. How does a lawyer become successful? By doing his job. Which is making rich people richer. And we get paid very well for doing our job. You have to ask yourself, ‘Do you want to make money or do you want to make the world a better place? Do you want to drive a Cadillac or a Chevrolet? Do you want to send your kids to private schools or public schools? Do you want to be a rich lawyer or a poor lawyer?’ If you want to do good, go work for the legal aid and help the little people battle their landlords, the utility companies and the police, and feel good about it. But don’t have regrets twenty years later when your classmates are driving new cars and taking vacations in Europe. And you will have to tell your kids that they can’t go to an Ivy League school because you did ‘good’.”


Gimenez is very cynical about lawyers and clearly shows the moral dilemma a lawyer must face. A lawyer, according to Gimenez, is merely someone who gets paid to lie. And the better you are at lying the more successful you will be as a lawyer. A lawyer will never be successful if he is concerned about truth and justice. While this may be hyperbole, anyone who desires to become a lawyer should wrestle with this dilemma before he even considers going to law school. For the rest of us, it is important to remember that a lawyer doesn’t have your best interest in mind; all he cares about is the bottom line.


Third, when Scott’s main client drops him, Scott asks him why he isn’t being loyal to him as a friend, since he took him on as a client eleven years ago when he was just a struggling land developer. The client retorts, “I am only loyal to my friends. All you wanted was my money, so that is all I ever gave you. You over billed me and took as much money from me as you could, and I didn’t complain; that was my payment to you in full. You are not my friend because you didn’t want to be my friend. And because you are not my friend, you don’t deserve my loyalty.”

Gimenez portrays the loneliness of a life lived only for success, money, status and all the things that go with it. There is no love, no intimacy, no transparency, no friendship between anyone, not even his wife. The only person Scott even gets close to is his nine-year old daughter. Everyone else is using him and being used by him, making love and true friendship impossible. Everyone needs to consider the cost of such a life and determine if it is truly “success.”

Two Noble Kinsmen

William Shakespeare’s romantic tragedy/comedy, The Two Noble Kinsmen, first performed in 1612, was one of his last plays and was based on the Knight’s Tale of Chaucer. The two main protagonists, Palamon and Arcite, are both princes of Thebes, best friends and cousins. When Athens attacks Thebes, both are taken prisoner where they pledge their undying loyalty and affection for each other.

No sooner have they eloquently declared their eternal friendship that Arcite, through the prison window, sees Emilia, a beautiful princess of Athens and falls instantly in love. Upon hearing of her beauty, Palamon looks through the prison bars and falls for her as well. Immediately they begin fighting over her, each declaring the right to marry her. Their friendship turns into bitter rivalry and they both vow to kill the other in order to wed the beautiful princess.

Arcite is released from prison and sent away from Athens. He returns to Athens in disguise and in a contest wins the right to be Emilia’s attendant. Meanwhile, the jailor’s daughter falls in love with Palamon and helps him escape from prison, believing he will surely marry her after her daring rescue. Palamon, however, spurns her love in favor of pursuing Emilia, and she goes mad.

Arcite finds Palamon on the run and helps him remove his chains. He provides Palamon with food and armor and allows him to regain his strength so they can duel to the death to see who has the right to wed Emilia. While they are engaged in battle, the king of Athens stops their fight and commands them to engage in a public contest.

Before the tournament, Arcite prays to the gods that he may win the battle; Palamon prays that he may marry Emilia; Emilia prays that she may be wed to the one who loves her best. Each prayer is granted: Arcite wins the contest, but is then thrown from his horse and dies, leaving Palamon to wed Emilia.

Great Expectations

The 1998 movie rendition of Great Expectations, starring Ethan Hawke, Robert De Niro, and Gwyneth Paltrow, succeeds in setting Charles Dickens’ classic novel in modern times, portraying the power of love, acceptance and forgiveness.

The story traces the life of Finn Bell, who falls in love with a rich girl, Estella, and spends his life trying to win her love. His love for Estella inspires him to begin drawing and painting. When Estella walks out of his life without even saying goodbye, Finn puts the pencils and paints away and buries his dreams of becoming an artist, and of marrying Estella.

The movie, and the novel, begins with Finn stumbling upon an escaped convict, Arthur Lustig, whom he supplies with food and bolt cutters to cut his shackles, and then helps him escape from the police. Lustig is later captured and that is the last Finn hears about him.

Finn lives with his sister, Maggie, and her husband, Uncle Joe. Maggie walks out on Joe and Finn, and Joe raises Finn as his own son. While on an errand to the dilapidated mansion of Ms. Nora Dinsmoor, Finn sees Estella for the first time and becomes enchanted with her. When Ms. Dinsmoor invites Finn back, he soon discovers that she is an eccentric lady who hates men. As she continues to invite Finn back to be around Estella, it becomes obvious that her hatred for men, caused by her fiancé not showing up for the wedding, is what is driving her to seek revenge on Finn by causing him to fall in love with a girl he will never be able to possess. Even though she clearly warns Finn of her intentions, he blindly falls in love with Estella, only to have his heart broken.

After giving up painting for nearly ten years, a lawyer approaches Finn with an opportunity to have a private show in New York. He takes the offer and begins to paint. While in New York he meets Estella and begins to pursue her again. She poses for him and his inspiration returns. Finn tries to break up her upcoming wedding but to no avail. As he goes to her home to plead with her he discovers that she is not home but her aunt, Ms. Dinsmoor is there waiting for him. She taunts him and reveals that she was merely using Finn to make Estella’s fiancé jealous so he would finally commit and get married. She laughs at Finn for his naivety, and rejoices in the success of her plot to break Finn’s heart. When Finn breaks down, she becomes remorseful and asks Finn for Forgiveness, which he refuses to do.

As he returns home, Finn helps an old man escape from some mobsters who are trying to kill him. In his apartment the old man reveals himself as the escaped convict, Arthur Lustig. Finn helps him to elude the mobsters but Lustig is finally stabbed on the subway. Just before he dies, he tells Finn that he was the one who sponsored his art show and bought all of his paintings because he wanted to repay Finn for his kindness.

Finn later returns to visit his uncle Joe and learns that Ms. Dinsmoor has died and that her mansion will be leveled. He goes to visit it for one last time and runs into Estella, who is now divorced, and her daughter. Estella apologizes for all the pain she has caused him, and Finn reaffirms his love for her.

In classic Dickens style, pain, misfortune, and abuse are overcome with love, forgiveness and kindness. When we are mistreated we can respond as Ms. Dinsmoor did, seeking revenge and dying lonely and bitter, or we can respond as Finn did, forgiving and loving even the one who has broken your heart. We should also be aware that even our smallest kindnesses can have far-reaching consequences. Forgiveness, love and kindness are always the right and best choices, even when it is towards those who have hurt us or don’t deserve it.

Babel

The movie Babel, starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, is an intriguing story about a married couple, Richard and Susan, who are struggling to be reconciled after the Richard abandoned the family and has now returned. In order to encourage his wife’s forgiveness, Richard takes Susan on a vacation of North Africa so they can spend a lot of time together and talk through the issues.

The movie artfully weaves three other stories together to illustrate how one event is caused by another, working together to bring about the final result. First there are the two Moroccan brothers, both in their early teens, who are shepherds taking care of their father’s flock in the hills. Their father buys a rifle for them to kill the jackals before they eat all the sheep. In a bizarre twist, the younger brother, trying to outdo his older brother, ends up shooting Susan, who is riding in a tourist bus passing past the brothers’ village. The boys hide the rifle and run back home, while Richard frantically tries to find a doctor who can save Susan’s life. As the police investigate the incident, the trail leads back to the father. As they flee the police, the older brother is shot to death by the police before the younger brother surrenders and confesses.

Then there is the story of a Mexican nanny taking care of two children, a boy and a girl. Half way through the movie you begin to realize that these are Richard and Susan’s children. The nanny, desiring to go to her son’s wedding but unable to leave since Richard and Susan haven’t returned on time, takes the children to Mexico along with her nephew who drives them there.

The final story is of a deaf Japanese girl who is desperate for love after losing her mother by suicide. Feeling alienated from her father, she seeks the attention of any male she thinks she can seduce. In another bizarre twist, she seduces a young police detective who has come to ask her father a few questions. When she realizes that the police are interested in her father’s missing rifle, she tries to protect him by fabricating a story about her mother’s suicide, saying she jumped from the balcony. Later on we realize that the rifle was given to a Moroccan hunting guide by her father as a thank you present. It was this rifle that was sold the brothers’ father and which nearly killed Susan. The Japanese girl’s father tells the police detective that his wife didn’t jump from the balcony but blew her head off with a gun. It was the girl who was the first to find her mother dead. While the father emphatically claims it was suicide, we are left wondering why he gave the rifle away. Was he overcome with grief and wanted to get rid of the weapon that his wife used to commit suicide, or was he trying to get rid of the evidence that might implicate him in the murder of his wife. In either case, the giving of the rifle to the Moroccan guide was the event that eventually led up to the shooting of Susan.

The movie also shows how the shooting of Susan ultimately causes the deportation of the Mexican nanny. Since Richard and Susan couldn’t come back on time, she took it upon herself to take the children to Mexico for the wedding. On returning to the United States, the border guards realized something wasn’t right, and a chase ensues as the nephew tries to elude the border patrol. Finally, they are found and the nanny is deported for illegally taking the children into Mexico without written authorization from the parents.


This movie artfully shows how one action can affect the lives of many other people. A suicide/murder leads to a gun being illegally purchased. That leads to an accidental shooting which results in the police killing a young boy fleeing from authorities. The shooting leads to the husband and wife being unable to return home on time, leading to the nanny taking the children illegally into Mexico, ultimately ending in her deportation.

Every decision we make affects not only ourselves but others around us, and may cause a chain of events that touches the lives of people we will never meet. The law of unintended consequences is real and must be taken into account when we make decisions. While we can’t know what result our actions may have, we can be sure that when we make wrong choices we will end up hurting someone. There are no victimless crimes and when we choose to do what is wrong or foolish, we will eventually have to answer for the pain and suffering it caused others.

In the end, the whole sequence of events resulted in the reconciliation of Richard and Susan. This reminds us that God works all things together for the good. Even negative circumstances can work good in our lives. So, even though we can’t choose the consequences of our choices, God can still override our ignorance, foolishness, and sinfulness for his glory. The key is to seek forgiveness and reconciliation.

One caveat needs to be made: this move has some explicit sexuality and portrays some negative behavior, so it isn’t for everyone.

Love for God

"To show great love for God and our neighbor we need not do great things. It is how much love we put in the doing that makes our offering something beautiful for God."

Mother Teresa

The Merry Wives of Windsor

The Merry Wives of Windsor, a romantic comedy written by William Shakespeare, was first performed in 1600. The play centers on the attempts of Falstaff to seduce the wives of Ford and Page in order to gain control of their money. Mrs. Page is infuriated by Falstaff’s letter asking for an liaison and she seeks the help of Mrs. Ford, who has received an identical letter from Falstaff, to find a way to ruin Falstaff without destroying her honor and reputation. Both husbands are told of Falstaff’s intentions and Mr. Page is not worried, since he doesn’t think his wife will fall for Falstaff, while Mr. Ford becomes jealously irate and seeks to capture Falstaff.

Mrs. Ford invites Falstaff over for a liaison, and while they are talking, Mrs. Page rushes in, forcing Falstaff to hide. She announces that Mrs. Ford’s husband is about to return and Falstaff panics. Mrs. Page and Mrs. Ford hide him in a laundry basket and the servants sneak him out under Mr. Ford’s nose. However, he nearly suffocates in the dirty laundry, gets all dirty, and then is thrown into the river.

Even though he has been humiliated, Falstaff returns again to Mrs. Ford and seeks to seduce her. This time Mrs. Page enters and again acts angry to discover Falstaff there. She warns them that Mr. Ford is almost home, so they disguise Falstaff as a fat old woman who has come as a fortuneteller. Mr. Ford hates witches and kicks Falstaff out of his house, unaware that he is the woman in disguise.

Even though humiliated a second time, Falstaff agrees to meet Mrs. Ford in the haunted forest at night. While he tries to seduce her, the children and slaves dressed up like fairies and elves attack Falstaff, pinching and burning him until he is completely terrified. As the children leave, Mr. Ford and Mr. Page arrive and Falstaff realizes he has been fooled. Falstaff is urged to give up his lustful pursuits and Mr. Ford is admonished to trust his wife. In the end, the merry wives of Windsor have won.

Shakespeare has effectively dealt with the issue of immorality and jealousy, playfully showing the foolishness of men. The wisdom of the two wives turned a potentially destructive situation into a learning occasion for the men. Shakespeare’s main objective was to show that wives can be merry, that is have a full, exciting, and meaningful lives, while remaining true to their husbands. This is a much more constructive and wholesome philosophy than what is being taught through our popular culture today.

The Taming of the Shrew

The Taming of the Shrew, a romantic comedy, is one of William Shakespeare’s earlier plays, first performed in 1593-94. It is a play within a play, with the first act setting the stage for the second play. The first play is a comedy where a wealthy lord plays a joke on a drunken peasant, Christopher Sly, by taking him to his home while he is passed out and instructing everyone to treat him like a lord when he comes to. Sly refuses to believe he is a lord even though all the servants and attendants tell him that he has suffered amnesia and has mistakenly claimed to be a poor peasant for the last several years. He finally believes them when he meets his “wife” who is a young page dressed up as a woman. When he wants to go to bed with his wife, the staff force him to watch a play instead. The play we watches becomes the main focus for the rest of the play.

Lucentio, a rich young man, and his two servants arrive in Padua in order to attend the university. However, when Lucentio sees a beautiful young woman, Bianca, he decides to pursue her instead. There are several barriers that threaten to make his desires impossible. First, Bianca’s father refuses to let anyone marry Bianca until her older sister Katherine is married. Unfortunately, Katherine is an ill-tempered woman with a bitter tongue and no one wants her. The second problem is that there are two other young men already seeking to win Bianca’s love.

Lucentio poses as a Latin tutor and is allowed to teach Bianca Latin. He quickly uses the Latin lessons to declare his love for Bianca and she begins to fall in love with him. However, another young man poses as a music teacher and also wins the right to teach Bianca music. In the end, Lucentio wins her heart but still must wait for Katherine to be married first.

This problem is solved when Petruccio, a rich man from Verona, arrives to find a rich woman to marry. Upon hearing about Katherine, he immediately sets out to marry her in spite of her bad reputation. Since he doesn’t care what kind of character his wife has, as long as she has a large dowry, Petruccio sets out to tame the shrew right from the start. When he meets her father, he declares his intentions to marry Katherine, and her father thinks he is crazy. Nevertheless, he meets with Katherine and they have a bitter exchange of words, but Petruccio is ready and follows his plan to break her will. He tells Katherine’s father that she loves him and wants to marry him on Sunday.

On the wedding day Petruccio is late and arrives poorly dressed riding a worn out old horse. After the wedding, he refuses to stay for the banquet and commands Katherine to come away immediately to his house. At home Petruccio refuses to let Katherine eat or sleep for several days, pretending he loves her too much to let her eat his poor food or sleep in his poor bed.

On the way back to Padua, Petruccio forces Katherine to agree that the sun is the moon and that an old man is a young maiden. Through his cunning plan, Petruccio has broken Katherine’s willfulness and has brought her under his control. At a banquet Petruccio bets the other two men that they cannot get their wives to come them before he can get Katherine to come. Since they know how strong-willed Katherine is, they agree to the bet. The first man’s wife refuses to come because she “is busy” and the second man’s wife demands that he “come to her.” When Petruccio sends word to Katherine, she comes immediately and asks what he wants. The other men are shocked, and Petruccio commands Katherine to make the other two women to come as well. When she returns with them, Petruccio tells Katherine to remove her hat because it makes her look silly. She quickly complies to the astonishment of all. He then commands her to rebuke the other two women for not obeying their husbands, which she aptly does. Everyone then fully realizes that Petruccio has truly tamed the shrew.

Ender's Game (2)

I just finished the last book in the first series of Ender’s Game, Children of the Mind. This was the most philosophical of the whole series while Xenocide was the most religious. Orson Scott Card plans to write one more novel that will tie the first and second series together, most likely set mainly on the planet Lusitania where most of the action has taken place in the last three books. Lusitania is the planet where Ender Wiggin finally settled, got married, and died.

While it is unusual for the hero to die half way through a novel, Ender isn’t really dead, at least not fully. This is Card’s attempt to explain his philosophy of man’s nature. His views are interesting and thought-provoking and he deals with many of the major issues in this philosophical debate. Card sees man as possessing an immaterial soul that takes on a body at birth. Humans are not defined solely by their memories or their soul; rather, both memories and soul are essential to personhood.

Children of the Mind also tackles other major philosophical issues. One of the main themes is the human tendency to fear that which is different, leading humans to be quick to judge others. Humans tend to jump to conclusions about others without taking the time to really understand them. The whole series revolves around the issue of the fear of alien species which appear to pose a serious threat to the survival of the human race. Cards point is that we need to take the time to understand those who fear and seek to communicate fully instead of defending ourselves as a knee-jerk action. This principle is also applied to inter-human personal relationships.

This issue was also dealt with in great detail in The Hive Queen, Ender’s first book, where Ender tries to atone for his act of xenocide by seeking to understand the enemy he nearly annihilated. As a Speaker for the Dead, he seeks to communicate the history, culture and true intentions of the alien race that had attacked earth and which he nearly blew into oblivion in a preemptive strike on their home planet. By seeking to fully understand an alien species that nearly destroyed earth, Ender becomes the chief paradigm for empathy and love for those who are different and seemingly dangerous.

While the first book, Ender’s Game, is appealing to a wide audience, the later books in the series have a narrower appeal. Children of the Mind is probably the least appealing of the series since it has less action and more philosophizing and psychologizing. I also recommend that the first three books be read first, since much of the Children of the Mind depends on all that has happened in the first three books.


Here are the books in the Ender’s Game series with the books I have read marked with an (x):

ENDER’S GAME

FIRST SERIES:
Ender's Game (x)
Speaker for the Dead (x)
Xenocide (x)
Children of the Mind (x)
Ender in Exile: Ganges (working title)

SECOND SERIES:
Ender's Shadow (x)
Shadow of the Hegemon (x)
Shadow Puppets
Shadow of the Giant (x)
Shadows in Flight

Other:
First Meetings

Love Your Muslim as Yourself

This article, "Love Your Muslim as Yourself", is one of the best Christian articles I have read about the situation in the Middle East. Most Christians (including myself) are woeful ignorant of what is really going on and what is motivating all of the violence. If we are going to love our neighbor as ourselves, we need to spend more time getting to know our neighbor. You can’t love someone you don’t understand, and we need to deepen our understanding of the world’s second-largest religion.

Here are a few quotes that I found convicting and helpful:

One reason is that Middle East conflicts are complex. In a press conference, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said the violence in Iraq cannot be described as a civil war. “I think that the words civil war oversimplify a very complex situation in Iraq,” he said. “I believe that there are essentially four wars going on in Iraq. “One is Shi'a on Shi'a, principally in the south; second is sectarian conflict, principally in Baghdad, but not solely; third is the insurgency; and fourth is al Qaeda, and al Qaeda is attacking, at times, all of those targets.” And that's just Iraq. Equally complex conflict characterizes Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon, Iran, and, of course, Israel and Palestine. While few would argue that Middle East issues are solely religious, there are strong religious dimensions to which our military and diplomatic efforts must pay attention.

“We have little, if any, ability to deal with religious differences in a hostile setting,” Johnston says. To be clear: It's not that Sunnis and Shi'as are killing each other over doctrine or worship practices—politics, revenge, culture, religion, and ethnicity have all come together to create an explosive, hate-filled atmosphere. But knowing more about Islam can provide the basic understanding needed to begin addressing such issues.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that evangelicals hold as many stereotypes and misunderstandings about Muslims as does our broader culture. We need to use Sunday school classes and sermons to communicate more about who Muslims really are and how we can love them as ourselves.


You can read the article at: http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2007/april/11.27.html

Madama Butterfly

I went to see Madama Butterfly performed by the Elgin Opera. The singing was excellent but the low budget left the stage sparse. The Elgin Opera has been in operation for five years and did a commendable job, especially the orchestra composed of two violins, a viola, a cello and a piano.

The story is about a U.S. Navy officer, Pinkerton, who marries a fifteen-year-old Japanese girl while his ship is anchored in Nagasaki. Pinkerton is warned by Sharpless, the U.S. Consul that such a marriage will only end in disaster, since the young girl will be devastated when he leaves. Pinkerton shrugs off the warning and declares that he has intentions of marrying a “real wife” when he gets back to the states. As the marriage proceeds, the villagers and family members denounce Cio-Cio-San, whom Pinkerton calls Madama Butterfly because of her innocent beauty, because she has rejected the local gods for Pinkerton’s God. Even though she is hurt by the denunciations, she is happy to be married to Pinkerton.

Three years later Cio-Cio-San is still waiting for Pinkerton to return as he has promised her. Everyone says she is foolish since they know Pinkerton has no intention of returning. Undaunted by their unbelief, she is so steadfast in her faith that he will return she turns down marriage proposals from wealthy suitors. Every day she searches the port for any sign of Pinkerton’s ship.

Finally, after three long years, she sees his ship coming into port. She is so elated that she stays up all night waiting for him to come home, yet he doesn’t appear. Finally, the next morning Pinkerton arrives with his American wife to break the news to Cio-Cio-San, but she is asleep. When he realizes that she has been faithfully waiting for him to return, he is stricken with grief over the pain he has caused her. He cowardly runs away, unable to tell her the news himself, leaving his wife to be found by Cio-Cio-San when she wakes up. Cio-Cio-San is devastated and realizes the Pinkerton has come not for her but for their three-year-old son. She tells her son to look closely at her face so he will remember her and then tells him to go and play. As he leaves to play, she kills herself with the same dagger that her father used to commit suicide. As she is dying, Pinkerton comes to retrieve his son, finding her too late. As he bends over her dead body, the curtain closes.


This is a powerful tragedy that illustrates the pain and suffering caused by military personnel stationed overseas who get involved with local women. The U.S. military has had a dark history in this matter, but it is not alone. Every major nation that has troops stationed on foreign soil is guilty of the same crime. While the U.S. military discourages such marriages, it does not prohibit them. Commanders and chaplains should be better trained to deal with this issue.

But the morale is limited to international marriages of convenience. Many men play fast and loose with women, leaving a trail of broken hearts behind them. It is hard not to find a woman who has not been mistreated by shallow professions of love only to find themselves used and abandoned when the relationship is no longer convenient. Modern pop culture tends to support this behavior through movies, TV shows, and music while at the same time lamenting the pain of such broken relationships. Parents, teachers and other leaders need to educate young women and guard them from predatory males intent on using women and then throwing them away.

Loving the Good

St. Augustine said, "The good man is not he who knows what is good, but loves it." And when one truly loves what is good, he does what is good out of desire not duty. Only this kind of love is able to overcome the errors of human love.

When we love God, not for what he has done for us, but for who he is, holy, righteous, merciful, kind, etc., and we love our neighbor with this divine love, we will do what is right. St. Augustine said, "Love and do what you will." When we love in this way our will is conformed to the will of God, so that all we will to do is according to God's will. In this way, the law is fulfilled in us.

Machiavelli on Love

Machiavelli, in documenting the lives of great men who achieved great worldly success, who were lovers of riches, fame, and power, demonstrates how this triad seduces men and alienates their affections for truth, beauty, and goodness.

What you love reveals your character. If you love the world, you cannot love God. If you serve money you cannot serve Christ. To be friends with the world means you are an enemy of God. To love sin is to hate holiness. Conversely, to love holiness is to hate sin; to love God is to hate the world; to love Christ is to abandon riches, fame, and power.

What does it profit a man to gain the whole world yet lose his soul? What would a man give in exchange for his soul? What do you love more than God? What are you pursuing more than Christ? Loving riches, fame, and power precludes you from loving truth, beauty, and goodness.

The Illusionist

The Illusionist was a well made, well performed movie with a stirring ending. It was a romantic story, with a near epic struggle between a man of ignoble birth, Eisenheim, and the crown prince, Leopold, for the love of a duchess, Sophie. Eisenheim’s strong love for Sophie drive him to use his magic in some very creative ways to fool the crown prince and escape with his life-long love. The magic he performs seems almost impossible given the historical setting, but a man with extreme ingenuity possibly could have pulled it off. The death scene reminded me more of a modern Hollywood style trick than a possible maneuver by a nineteenth century magician. The gullibility of people was much greater since they had not been exposed to so much modern special effects as we have.

In the end, the hero wins the maiden and the evil villain is thwarted, ruined and commits suicide. The death of the crown prince is portrayed in such a positive light, I found myself unconsciously applauding his demise. But after some reflection, I had to ask myself a few questions. Did Eisenheim know that the crown prince would commit suicide? Probably not. Is Eisenheim in some way responsible for his death? Probably. As a Christian, can I agree that his actions were noble and righteous? No. Would it be ethical for me to do a similar thing? No. While the crown prince was evil and threatened the happiness of both Sophie and Eisenheim, resorting to fraud and deception that ends in suicide is questionable at best.

So, I was reminded that I must be careful whenever watching a movie to evaluate my responses to the story and not just let the producer sway my thinking and feeling unchallenged. This is especially important for movies since film is such a emotional medium that has incredible power to influence our thinking. It is often not the rational arguments of teachers and preachers that shape our worldview and mindset but the popular culture, through music and videos. It is imperative that we challenge the messages we are receiving from our culture and subject them to scrutiny by the Word of God.

Gridiron Gang

I enjoyed the movie Gridiron Gang, starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. I thought the production was second-rate but the story was inspiring. The acting wasn’t topnotch, since most of the actors were unknowns. While I have a lot of respect for the Rock and enjoy his movies, I must admit that he is not a great actor. The movie lacked the emotional punch of other similar movies, such as Remember the Titans, where racial tensions had to be surmounted in much the same way that gang rivalries had to be transcended in Gridiron Gang. Much more could have been done with this movie to make it a top-notch production that would have more effectively promoted its inspiring message.

I was inspired by the story mainly because it was based on true events. I admire the compassion and tenacity of Sean Porter, the main character, who sacrifices and innovates to help gang members in juvenile prison develop the character and attitudes necessary to escape the dead end lifestyle of the inner city gangs.

To be honest, I was moved emotionally more by the clips at the end showing the real life people portrayed in the movie. Their comments were more powerful than the movie was. It would have been better to have watched 15 minutes of these clips than watching the movie. The real Sean Porter was much more dynamic than The Rock was able to portray him. And the young men were able to communicate the transformation that had taken place in their lives because of Sean’s tough love.

I hope that more people realize that the present system isn’t working and use this model as inspiration for creating more effective alternatives to our juvenile justice system. It would also be valuable for anyone who works with youth to inspire them to come up with more effective methods of instilling values and character.