Videos

You’ve probably been to church in the past 10 years and not liked some of the music but not exactly sure why. In this video we are going to look at the 10 problems with contemporary worship music.

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Little known fact, Samson was a good guy:...

Men and women are similar and different and they’re similar and different in all facets of their life. Men and women have different physical excellencies and one of the main physical excellencies of men is strength and women is beauty.

Pano Kanelos announced on Barry Weiss’ Substack that they were helping cofound the University in Austin that would be devoted to “truth” and “freedom.” There are good and bad things about this so let’s look at both.

If I were to film this video without being in it what would you think? [static/glitch transition yourself in] You might think that there’s something wrong, that it was a mistake but for great works of art that option is not available because the artist has thought way more than you.

Classic fairy tales are told and retold, rewritten and dramatized innumerable times. But when you go back to the originals you often find fascinating and perplexing mysteries that have been buried in the retellings. Today we’re going to look at Beauty and the Beast.

Babette’s Feast is a sophisticated analysis of the relationship between sensuous and spiritual beauty written by Karen Blixen and then made into an oscar winning film. Unfortunately, some of the sophistication was missed in the film so we will jump between the two in order to uncover its beauty.

One of the common reasons given is that the Hebrew form means Yah(weh) is Salvation. And while that’s certainly true, whenever you name someone a famous person’s named there’s always more going on than simply the etymology.

How the healing of the centurion’s servant is told as a battle.

Hierarchy is one of the most important aesthetic principles but it is today the most forgotten. And hierarchy is not just a principal in aesthetics but a principle in all of reality.

Some thoughts on the Hennessy bottle designed by the architect Frank Gehry. And symmetry. And Russell Kirk.

Here is a summary of my previous posts on why Jesus was resurrected on my third day:

Trump, Debate & Theology of Laughter

A look at some overlooked questions about political signs.

In the book The Poetics of Biblical Narrative, Meir Sternberg has a chapter on gaps in stories. He says that

The story of Zacchaeus is one of the most well known stories in the gospels. But when you read it there is a strange information distribution. Now, what’s information distribution? One of the helpful things that you can do when you’re trying to understand a story, especially a well-known one, is look at how much information is devoted to each major section or event or character in the story.

Welcome back to the Bible is Art where we are currently in a series on a Christian Guide to Beauty and Design. If you haven’t seen the videos up to now I would recommend you watch those before you watch this. But if you’re ready to move on, today, we’re talking about the properties of, or, what makes something beautiful.

The story is fairly straightforward, but the extended descriptions of the actions of the paralytic or his friends is what caught my attention. In such Short stories whenever there is a lot of words given to seemingly less important things, like the movement of the paralytic, it makes me wonder if our author is drawing our attention to it for another reason. Perhaps white on first reading appears to be minor or secondary is actually major primary.

G.K. Beale has a great article on The Gospel Coalition Blog about Why Is the Number of the Beast 666 in Revelation 13:18. I wholeheartedly agree with him but think that there is a layer that's missing.

While this might seem to be a difficult question, it is actually quite simple, because it’s the same structure of every other question about a good property like justice or goodness. Something is just, loving, and beautiful if it reflects God and his justice, love, and beauty. God is eternal, the creator, and the source of all life, of everything.

Matthew has opened his story with a genealogy locating Jesus in the family of Abraham and King David. Then Matthew narrates the strange circumstances of his birth with Mary as the seventh woman in the Bible to have a story told about their inability to conceive.

The book of Deuteronomy is confusing for many. And this is because it seems to repeat a lot of the history of Israel that has already happened as well as many of the laws. I mean there’s another copy of the Ten Commandments and the title of the book itself means “second law”. But there are important differences between the first occurrence of these stories and law and the second. And when you understand the differences, you’ll understand the art and genius of Deuteronomy.

Ezekiel is a strange book and its strange in many ways. One of the ways it is strange is that there are a lot of numbers in Ezekiel. And these numbers come in two forms. First, there are dates and second, there are measurements.

Beauty is objective. That is, when I say that poster or a painting is beautiful or well designed, I am saying something about the work, not something about how I feel about it. I’m not offering a preference. I am saying something about the work’s nature or essence, it’s structure and the relations between its parts.

The Peanut Butter Falcon is a work of the highest literary and dramatic skill. But because it has been described by many critics as a “feel good movie” I worry that its depth, symbolism, careful attention to detail, surgical development of themes and images might be lost. So in praise of this great film, let’s look at the art of the Peanut Butter Falcon.

And this week, we're talking about that great quotation from Isaiah 7:14, “The virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel." And we will see how this is one of the most misunderstood texts in the entire Bible.

Welcome back to the Bible is Art where we explore the literary artistry of the Bible and this week we’re going to explore that great poem in Ecclesiastes 3 about time.

Genealogies might look boring. But every profession trades in particularities. Biology has cells, programmers have bits of code, and designers have colors and shapes. The particularities here are people, people particularities, the best kind.

This week we’re going to look at the art of action in stories in Plato’s Dialogues, Netflixes The Bodyguard, and the Gospel of John.

Welcome back to the Bible is Art and this week we’re starting a new series on A Christian Guide to Beauty and Design.For awhile now I’ve been writing a book. And I’ve been writing a book because it didn’t exist. You see, years ago I was teaching a high school course on Christian Worldview where we had sections on every main area of knowledge. So we had a Christian view of economics, science, ethics, mathematics and aesthetics, the study of beauty and design.

In Matthew’s Gospel, after the Angel visits Joseph and tells him to marry Mary and to name Jesus Jesus, Matthew, the narrator, tell us that “All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet” and then Matthew quotes from Isaiah, “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel.” Which means “God with us.”

Some time ago the philosopher Alain de Botton’s School of Life released a video called “How to Replace the 10 Commandments.” He said that they “maintain an extraordinary hold on our imaginations” but the problem is that they sound “peculiar” today. They were for a particular people and thus they are a bit parochial.

This is what the near last few verses in John’s Gospel says:Peter turned and saw the disciple whom Jesus loved following them, the one who also had leaned back against him during the supper and had said, “Lord, who is it that is going to betray you?”

I love John 21, the last chapter in John’s gospel. And I love it because it’s weird and there’s a lot of things to figure out. So let’s review what John 21 is about. After Jesus’ resurrection seven of his disciples go fishing during the night. They’re unfruitful in the work, not catching any fish, but in the morning, a man calls out to them from the land and gives them instructions how to fish better and then their catch is enormous.

Some of the people in Matthew’s genealogy we know about, we’ve read about them before in the grand story, in the Old Testament. But others we don’t know.

Matthew begins his gospel with an expansive, and exhaustive genealogy. Where Jesus is identified with the highest members of the Israelite family. Kings, priests, prophets, and psalmists. And in all this Jesus is this climactic cumulative character encompassing all of humanity in his body. This is the king about whom this gospel will be about.

Let's read for you the annunciation scene from Matthew’s Gospel:“Now the birth of Jesus took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly. But as he considered these things, look, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream saying, ‘Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife,

The book of Exodus is organized into 3 sections that follow the Israelites from Egypt through the wilderness to Mt. Sinai. So the literary structure looks like this. Israel in Egypt, Israel in the wilderness, and Israel at Mt. Sinai.

The Peanut Butter Falcon is a work of the highest literary and dramatic skill. But because it has been described by many critics as a “feel good movie” I worry that its depth, symbolism, careful attention to detail, surgical development of themes and images might be lost. So in praise of this great film, let’s look at the art of the Peanut Butter Falcon.

Imagine this. The wisest man whoever lives comes to town and you get to go hear him give a talk. You’re excited because you think that now he’ll be able to bring everything together, make sense of it all, provide some secret that we haven’t uncovered yet. But the first thing he says is that everything is vanity and he repeats that throughout his whole hour long talk.

We often think that genealogies are lists of names, just a collection of people without any purpose or perspective. But nothing could be further from the truth.In Jesus’ family tree, there are hundreds, if not thousands of names missing.

Matthew organizes his book into alternating sections of stories and teachings. And we know this not only because we see Jesus doing things and then having long speeches but also because after each of the teaching sections Matthew repeats the same phrase, “when Jesus finished saying these things…” And Matthew does this to indicate the end of each teaching section (7:28, 11:1, 13:53, 19:1, 26:1).

The first sentence in Matthew’s Gospel is this, “The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ.” Why start this way? By the time we get to Matthew’s Gospel, we’re in the fifth act of a five act play, we’re at the end of the story, so where are we in the story, what’s happening?

Inception ends with a riddle. The movie is about dreams and reality. And each character has an object, called a totem, that works differently in the real world and in dreams. Cobb, played by Leonardo Dicaprio, has a spinning top that works normally in the real world but never stops spinning, never falls over when he’s in a dream. The top tells him what’s real and what’s fake.

It’s a common literary technique to use physical things for metaphorical reasons. For instance in Dante’s Divine Comedy, Dante is on a physical journey from hell to heaven that is meant to be a metaphor for his spiritual journey or in the Bible, Israel’s physical wilderness wanderings for 40 years are meant to be metaphorical of their spiritual wanderings.