Andy Gullahorn is one of those artists that i keep “rediscovering.” i’m sure you know what i mean. i’ll listen to his records for a while and then, for some unknown reason, i’ll just stop. no real reason. maybe i just get distracted by other things, or something like that, but somehow his stuff will fall out of rotation for a couple of months. then, as i’m scanning through my iTunes library, i’ll see his name and realize that i haven’t listened to him in a while, and then i’m floored as to how songs like his could ever fall out of rotation. or why i even bother listening to anything else at all!

my first exposure to andy was a couple of years ago at Andy Peterson’s Behold the Lamb of God show in Nashville (if you ever see the BtLoG dvd, you might see a familiar face [*cough*me*cough*], as the picture fades to credits at the end; but i digress). at this show, Andy played a song called “Holy Flakes” that, quite frankly, was and is hilarious. however, i was not prepared at all for the end of the song in which a hammer was lowered that struck to the very heart of Christian consumerism. it was at that moment that i realized that a special talent was standing on the stage in front of me.

andy’s songs span a wide spectrum of themes. funny, serious, thoughtful, love songs. yet his genius is found in making each one of them deeply profound and deeply penetrating. i don’t know that i’ve ever met an artist who so clearly and quickly spoke directly to me in their songs. not at so deep a level as this, that is.

Reinventing the Wheel is Andy’s third album, and, in my opinion, it’s his best album to date. from lamenting the passing of the great work it takes to break in a new baseball cap, to the realization that a lifetime spent with the one we love is still not enough time spent with the one we love, to a beautiful ballad detailing the triumphs and trials of one of Andy Osenga’s toes (for those of you keeping score, that is 3 different “Andy’s” that have been mentioned in this post), these songs are a wonderful testament to Andy’s gift of storytelling and poetry.

the song on the album that i’ve been digging the most in the last few days is his “More of a Man.” this is a sort of “coming of age” song, but in a different respect. it talks about the changes that come from crossing the river that runs between the land of singleness and the land of marriage and family, and the struggle that comes in leaving behind your independence and “manly” things like chicken fried steak and Jean-Claude Van Damme, in exchange for maturity, responsibility, and Dora the Explorer.

my wife and i have not entered into the “with kids” stage of this adventure yet, but i can definitely relate to the song because so much sacrifice is required in marriage. there are many times when i long to be back in a place where i can spend all my time playing video games, watching mindless action movies, and drinking beer. but then i remember about the place that God has put me in and the relationships he has called me to pursue and invest in, namely with my wife, and all of a sudden those “manly” things don’t seem as important anymore. it seems more manly, especially in this point of history, to focus on being a good husband and growing in intimacy and relationship with my wife and friends, than any amount of (regular) dr. pepper could ever be.

so check out andy gullahorn if you never have. you will most certainly not regret it.

is now available (larger, higher-res version here).

as someone who was less than impressed with the adaptation of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, this second installment actually looks pretty good. i’ll reserve judgment until i see the film, however.

this is one of the greatest articles i’ve ever read in the new york times. apparently the highly exciting National Geographic discovery of The Gospel of Judas last year has taken a dramatic twist.

Judas, apparently, was not a heroic, holy spirit whom Jesus asked to hand him over to the Jewish and Roman authorities. turns out, quite the contrary, that Judas was a greedy, demon-possessed man who betrayed Jesus!!!! a shocking revelation, indeed (*cough*Luke 22:3-6*cough*)

in the above article, the author details the completely shoddy scholarship that National Geographic employed in translating the document, twisting what the ancient coptic actually said in order to gain flashy headlines and sexy praise for their efforts in calling the New Testament accounts of Jesus into question. thankfully, they have now been exposed for the frauds they are.

says the author:

I think the big problem is that National Geographic wanted an exclusive. So it required its scholars to sign nondisclosure statements, to not discuss the text with other experts before publication. The best scholarship is done when life-sized photos of each page of a new manuscript are published before a translation, allowing experts worldwide to share information as they independently work through the text.

Another difficulty is that when National Geographic published its transcription, the facsimiles of the original manuscript it made public were reduced by 56 percent, making them fairly useless for academic work. Without life-size copies, we are the blind leading the blind. The situation reminds me of the deadlock that held scholarship back on the Dead Sea Scrolls decades ago. When manuscripts are hoarded by a few, it results in errors and monopoly interpretations that are very hard to overturn even after they are proved wrong.

To avoid this, the Society of Biblical Literature passed a resolution in 1991 holding that, if the condition of the written manuscript requires that access be restricted, a facsimile reproduction should be the first order of business. It’s a shame that National Geographic, and its group of scholars, did not follow this sensible injunction.

shame on you, National Geographic.

that’s what this site says. my first couple of thoughts:

PJ directing? freakin’ awesome and about damn time.

3D? hmm…..

now i haven’t seen Beowulf in 3D (and i probably won’t because of the changes i’ve heard they made to the story; Beowulf is one of my favorite books), but i know some people that have and they said the effects were pretty amazing. the only complaint i’ve heard is that emotion still doesn’t translate and the eyes of the cgi actors are still lifeless and dead.

that’s my fear of doing The Hobbit (probably my favorite book of all-time) in 3D. i suppose this could be a non-issue if they can achieve the 3D effect without cgi actors, and i truly hope that this is the case. i just can’t imagine Bilbo, Thorin, Gandalf, etc. as lifeless, soulless cgi animation. the one thing that makes me think this will be a non-issue is the article’s mention of Jackson wanting to go back and do the LOTR films in 3D as well. i guess we’ll just have to wait and see how all this pans out.

another interesting note from the article is the mention that there will be two films. presumably, the first film will be The Hobbit and the second film will be a sort of prequel to The Lord of the Rings, speculating on events that took place in the 60 year period between the two. should be interesting, to say the least, but if there’s anyone we can trust to do this right, it’s Peter Jackson.

(HT: TORN)

so like i said, i’m sort of relaunching this site and that time has now come. if you’ve been here before, you’ll notice a new theme design, although the layout remains pretty much the same. you might also notice that the address of this site has changed and is now brandoncozart.com, so be sure to update your bookmarks if you have this site bookmarked.

along with a new design is a new, or rather, stated, focus. i think that one of the reasons i haven’t posted as much as i would have liked up to this point is a lack of clear intent for my blog. i think i thought too often that if i didn’t have something long and profound to say, then i just shouldn’t post. but over the last couple of months, as i’ve been reading more and more blogs, i’ve realized that most blog posts might just be a short paragraph, a single quotation, maybe even just a link to someone else’s blog post. my posts have sort of evolved into that in the last couple of months, but having it stated will help me out a ton, i think. so at least, if all goes to plan, i’ll have at least one post per week, but hopefully there will be more.

in addition to this, i’ve also decided to focus my posts in the area of the intersection between faith and culture. again, i think that that’s what my posts have evolved into in the past couple of months, as that’s what i’ve been most interested in in that time, but the sort of self-consciousness that i mentioned above still hindered the quantity of posts on here. what this means as far as content is that i plan to use this blog for book reviews, possibly movie and music reviews, as well as interaction with articles that i find interesting and relevant to this project.

so why a Peanuts theme? well aside from being the greatest cartoon strip of all time, when i think of something that perfectly captures the intersection of faith and culture i think of Peanuts. Charles Schulz was truly a genius at capturing the cultural sitz im laben and dissecting it from a number of angles, including the angle of faith. and he did so, of course, through the lives and conversations of children. brilliant!

Peanuts has had a big impact on me over the years and has always been a part of my life, and i feel that this is a fitting tribute to what Charlie Brown and his gang has meant to me. also, in further honor of Schulz’s life work, around the first of the year i plan to start posting a Peanuts strip per week on a particular day.

so that’s the manifesto, so to speak, of where i want this blog to go from this point on. and to get it started, i will be doing a series of posts on the highly lauded, highly controversial, His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman (from which comes the much anticipated holiday movie, The Golden Compass). i’m really looking forward to reading this books because i’ve heard so much about them, good and bad, and i think they will be a fascinating read.

38-30. Gig’Em!!

so i haven’t posted on this blog in a while, and that for a number of reasons, not the least of which is time. but another reason for this is probably a lack of focus or purpose for this blog. so this is just a note to say that i am in the process of recasting a vision for this blog, as well as a complete redesign (so if things look a little wonky, that probably means i’m playing), and my hope is that doing so will allow me to be more aware of blog post ideas, and that this will give me the encouragement and drive to keep up with this thing.

so stay tuned. i hope to “relaunch,” so-to-speak around the first week of december or so.

don’t judge an article by its title. Paul Spears has written a brilliant article on the merits of the Harry Potter series and the place of popular literature in the academic world. i encourage you to read it.

Harry Potter is Dreadful and Vulgar

(HT: JT)

so after reading the book i naturally looked around for some commentary, and i was particularly interested in what religious commentators had to say. i found an article in a prominent publication that i believe is wildly off the mark.

the article comes from Christianity Today and is entitled “What Would Jonathan Edwards Say About Harry Potter?” (thus mixing two of my prime interests!). in this article the author, Josh Moody, begins by stating:

So there we have it. The most engrossing imaginative world created at the start of the 21st century is essentially pagan.

that is the thesis of his article, and i do not think he could be more wrong. i would argue that it is not essentially pagan, but is essentially, i stress the word essentially, Christian. do i think the Harry Potter story is a Christian allegory? no, i don’t. do i think the Harry Potter story deals with many issues pertaining to religion including death, love, the natural state of man, and redemption? you betcha.

Moody goes on in his article to show how Jonathan Edwards interacted with popular (and by that i mean main stream, pop-culture type things) trends of the day, most notably the rise of Enlightenment thinking. he states, and i agree, that Edwards would not have ignored the Harry Potter phenomenon, but would have searched its pages for insight in to why these books affect people the way they do and what that says about the contemporary cultural climate.

Moody then goes on, however, to misrepresent what he sees as the central theme of the series. he says:

The latest and last of Rowling’s Potter series…is all about death. In case the title didn’t make that clear (”the Deathly Hallows”), the frontispiece has two quotations referring to death. There is a sense in which the whole seven-volume series has been about death.

Even Dumbledore (beware: spoiler) seems to have tinkered with the less-than-salutary sides of this fascination. Also, there’s Voldemort, with his evil determination to avoid death at the cost of others’ lives, and Harry, dear Harry, who with his purity and bravery manages to cheat death again and again, even finding himself at one point in a sort of cosmic waiting room with the dead Dumbledore.

now on one level i suppose you could say that the overall story is about death. but i think that would be selling it short. i think it would be much more accurate to say that the overall story is about how to deal with something that we will all one day face, and that, of course, is death. we will all one day die. we will all lose friends and family to that last enemy. the question is more about our response to when that happens and our taking it upon ourselves now to learn how to deal with death for the times when we are staring death straight in the face. i think that’s part of the brilliance of the story. what J.K. Rowling has managed to do is to show children an honorable way, in the characters of Harry and those around him, of dealing with death. too many children’s tales fail to deal seriously and honestly with the subject, too many parents believe it to be too weighty of a subject, and so our children grow up not knowing how to cope when someone is lost. that is a great tragedy.

but Moody’s misreading goes deeper than that. he describes Harry, pure and brave (Harry is certainly the latter, but i would not argue that he is the former), as having managed “to cheat death again and again.” now, that may be true on some level and in some instances, but it makes me wonder if he truly read the entire series as he has claimed to have done. more often than not Harry’s “cheating” of death is due to the brave and gallant friends that he has surrounded himself with, or it is due to the effects of the profound sacrifice of love that his mother made for him when he was an infant.

but though he may have “cheated” death in the first six books, by the end of the seventh Harry was mature enough and brave enough to look death in the face and say, “O Death, where is thy sting?” now i said in my previous post that i didn’t think the scene in which Harry sacrificed himself was that powerful, and i still don’t on a surface reading level, but the more i’ve thought about it the more i’ve discovered the true profundity and beauty of the imagery that Rowling packed in. but more on that in a second.

Moody goes on to say:

What does this tell us, Edwards would have wondered. He would have discovered that we live in an age that is fascinated by the transcendent—and the paranormal—but that, while intrigued, is totally confused about that realm.

Edwards would have seen that the essential question of spirituality—What happens when I die?—is a great vacuum that culture is looking to fill. The series also tells us—and this no less important—that if Rowling’s world is expertly reflecting the light our world can shed on these matters, true understanding is at a pretty low level.

part of the beauty of books is that different readers can get different ideas out of reading the same words. however, i’m not sure where Moody gets that the underlying question of the series is “what happens when i die,” especially when that question is based around the “cosmic waiting room” scene that Moody referenced.

Harry, in a sense, knew what was going to happen when he died. he was going to be able to join those he had lost, those who had sacrificed themselves, by and large, to save and protect him. and he was ok with that. if there was one thing that Harry had finally understood it was that there are far worse things and far worse fates than death.

the “essential question of spirituality” that i believe Rowling addressed in the series is “what is the greatest virtue that exists in the world?” and, as we are continually reminded throughout the seven volumes, that virtue is love. it is shown in the sacrifice Harry’s mother made to protect him. it is shown through the many relationships, flawed as they are, that Harry clung to as he grew up and began to understand love. it is shown through the great sense of guilt and remorse that Dumbledore had in the loss of his sister. it is shown through the incredible lengths that Snape would go to out of love for the girl he never won.

above all that, however, it is shown in Harry, at the height of the ultimate battle between good and evil, accepting his fate, taking that fate head on, and walking to his death under the belief that his sacrifice would save many. deeper than that, however, Harry contained a piece of his enemy within him. thus it was not really Harry who died at the end of the Avada Kedavra curse, but evil. to make it abundantly clear, you could say that Harry carried the ultimate expression of sin and death with him to his death, and he then rose again to fight and win the final victory.

i believe that is what Edwards would have seen. and i believe that he would be satisfied that no more compelling of a story is needed in order to shed “true gospel light on the transcendent.”

i know i’m late to the game, previous responsibilities held me back (the lengths i’ve had to go through to not have anything spoiled!), but i am finally able to read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and final book of the saga regarding “the boy who lived.” to celebrate this momentous occasion, i thought i would do a sort of running commentary, chapter by chapter, not only because of the story’s coming to a close, but also because it will help me piece things together from the previous six books. so i’ll read a chapter and then give my thoughts on it. that’s how this will work.

unlike most Potter fans, i don’t have an extensive list of predictions. i only have two main ones. snape is good and harry will die. i won’t fully develop my theory regarding harry’s death here (if you’re interested, a partially developed version is in the comments of this post at kari’s blog). all along i’ve thought that the book would end with harry’s death, but i’ve softened on that a little lately. i still think harry will die, but i’m not sure that the book will end with him dead as there could be some sort of resurrection after the final battle. but we shall see.

so, the commentary will commence after the jump (obviously, if you’ve not yet read the book and don’t want anything to be spoiled then proceed no further as there will be copious spoilers). (more…)