Is it about football, Christian charity, booster loyalty, or just plain greed? Is this story a Christian parable, an insult to Christianity, or worse, a tragedy of how a black man was exploited by wealthy white Republicans? Eve Franklin explores prominent spiritual themes in the book The Blind Side (made into a by the same…
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Reciting from the book of Job, playing “Oh Happy Day,” and employing double meanings to the word “race,” attempts to be much more than a predictable movie about a housewife with guts and a very special racehorse. In some ways it even succeeds. Eve Franklin previewed Secretariat and shares her critical thinking. Read the family-friendliness…
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We’ve returned to the studio to record the second part of our discussion on the action-packed, sci fi thriller, I, Robot. (Though actually we never left the studio after recording the first discussion. If you sent us feedback after hearing the first part of this discussion, we’ll be sure to discuss in some future episode,…
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It’s been a while since we’ve posted a regular episode, but we hope you’ve enjoyed our long run of Initial Reaction episodes this summer. We bring you a critical-thinking discussion on the action-paced, science fiction thriller, I, Robot. Not based on the critically-acclaimed robot stories by Isaac Asimov (as the title would suggest), I, Robot…
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Our roving cohost, Chris Jones, joins Eve Franklin in the studio, without Daniel Lewis, to discuss the highly anticipated (at least by a high percentage of the female population) sequel to Twilight and New Moon: Eclipse.
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Perhaps the easiest spiritual analogy to draw from the The Twilight Saga is the concept of eternal love. Throughout the four-book story from Bella’s almost continuous perspective, Bella shows how completely unworthy she feels of Edward’s love.
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The movie edition of Stephenie Meyer’s second book in the Twilight Saga, New Moon, raises issues on growing old, damnation, souls, and trusting people.
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There are some brief spiritual gems in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga that caught my eye. One of them was a quick statement in Breaking Dawn that opened up a spiritual parallel that has a subtle strength throughout the series—that of members making up a body that needs a definite head. There are good examples of spiritual leaders throughout this saga both on the werewolf side of things and on the vampire side.
Another spiritual gem that is quite obvious is the parallel of the vampire with spiritually dead man. Meyer presents vampires as walking, talking corpses, which makes an interesting picture of the spiritual condition of unregenerate man.
There are a couple things that I really appreciate about the underlying worldview that Meyer’s reveals in her storytelling. First off, through her character Edward, she demonstrates marriage as a lasting and true commitment.
Read MoreIn my last post I talked briefly about how Meyer used the vampire myth in her popular series, but with the undead as main characters, it’s a given that death and eternity are going to be discussed, as well. I also found out after reading the saga that Meyer is a Morman, and so I’m sure her faith does influence her worldview, which is bound to have some influence on her stories. So it was no surprise to me that Meyers has her characters speculate a lot on spiritual matters—especially those having to do with death and eternity.
Read MoreTaking into account that the Twilight Saga books are secular fiction and do not observe a Christian moral code, one of the only objectionable elements that could be argued over is the subject matter of vampires, so this is the first topic I’d like to discuss at length in my first of several critical thinking posts on this intriguing series.
Read MoreA lot of people spend hours watching movies and television, but some of us spend as much time (if not more) reading books. If someone asked me for the top five things I spend time doing, reading would be near the top of the list. But just like movies and television can influence the way you see the world, books can have the same subtle effect on your thinking.
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