The 11 Worst Movies I Have Seen

We all have that experience of getting up from the couch, or walking out of the theater, and thinking, "I will never get back the 2 hours of my life I just wasted!" But perhaps we can bring some good out of the cinematic sins that others have visited upon us. Or perhaps I'm trying to atone for having spent $15 to see The Green Lantern.

Note that these are movies that I have seen. (Thankfully, I managed to avoid Left Behind). Also, I will not attempt to explain why I saw some of these movies - except to say that college students have been known to do stupid things.

11. Bad Boys 2 was actually enjoyable at the time. But by the time it ended, I simply felt tired, and upon leaving the theater I realized that I had killed more brain cells than if I had spent the afternoon downing vodka. It was producer Jerry Bruckheimer who first proved, with Top Gun, that a movie didn't need to have a plot to be successful. Supposedly, the original script for Bad Boys 1 was so bad that he and director Michael Bay actually rewrote it. If only I could get my hands on that original script - now that would be interesting.

10. The American President. Political movies rarely work as good drama, simply because it is so difficult to avoid pushing an agenda. Director Rob Reiner didn't even attempt ambiguity or complexity. He made a thinly veiled infomercial for the Democratic Party, particularly then-President Bill Clinton, and against the Republican Party and then-nominee Bob Dole. Dialogue and situations were lifted straight out of the previous few years of political headlines, including the 1996 election and the Monica Lewinksy scandal. Like Facing the Giants (see below) for diehard Democrats.

9. Jarhead. Although well-acted and -directed, this Gulf War movie / Full Metal Jacket-remake fails to tell a compelling story or offer any redeeming elements. Part diatribe against the Marine Corps, part tragedy of a lost and confused young man, it is long on pathos but short on substance. Nothing about any of the characters, except perhaps the Sargeant played by Jamie Foxx, gives us any reason to love or hate them - only to pity them.

8. Scary Movie 1 & 2 are combined not only because I watched the back-to-back, but because they are utterly indistinguishable. (Don't believe me? Hook up two DVD players to a television and switch back and forth randomly. You'll never notice any discontinuity!) Like a desperate comedian losing his audience, both movies continually resort to sexual perversion in an attempt at actual humor. Parodies only truly succeed when they use the material of the original as a springboard to mock larger trends, and in this regard both movies fall flat and remain (thankfully) utterly forgettable.

7. Nothing But Trouble. I am told that this movie was intended to be a comedy. Unfortunately, without a laugh track it was difficult to distinguish those events meant to be funny, from those that merely appeared to be snapshots of the most bizarrely bad day ever.

6. Sex and the City 2. For the first 90 minutes, I found myself checking my watch, looking around the theater, thinking about technical problems at work, and wondering what we should do with the landscaping in our backyard. I could not find a reason to care about anything happening to any of the people on screen. I have never seen a movie whose subject matter was so utterly banal. The movie works only as an uintentional comedy, in that the central conflicts facing each of the four women are - if given any thought - actually hilarious. A sex addict complains she is losing her libido? The worst conflict in a marriage is whether to go out and party every night or watch TV every night?  etc. etc. blah, blah, blah. The one redeeming element? A surprisingly accurate portrayal of Middle Eastern culture.

5. The Joneses begins with a truly intriguing premise: a "family" of actors who move into a very upscale neighborhood and entice everyone to buy various products through a combination of suggestion and envy. There was great potential here for an insightful look at materialism and the way we are influenced - by envy or the desire for social status - to buy things we don't need. Unfortunately, the plot quickly becomes bogged down by the conflicts within the "family," then veers into utter tragedy before suddenly ending on a romantic note. The actions of one of the main characters, a neighbor who spends recklessly to keep up with the Joneses and then defaults on his jumbo mortgage, are incomprehensible - it is difficult to believe that someone that affluent would have so little clue about his own finances. Rarely funny, occasionally insightful, but thoroughly depressing.

4. Scream. Senseless violence, no plot, and only amusing to the degree that it pokes fun at horror-movie conventions. That is, unless your idea of comedy is watching somebody get pinched to death in a garage door.

3. Swimming Pool. This movie should have been rated "X." And the plot (if you could call it that) made absolutely no sense. Reviewers praised it's "Hitchcockian sense" and the director claimed it "mixed fantasy and reality on the same plane." More accurately, it mixed gratuitous sexual content with a failed aspiration to be about something.

2. Jeepers Creepers. Not even scary, just pointless and disgusting. It featured bad acting, senseless gore, and a "plot" (using term loosely) in which evil wins for no particular reason.

1. Facing the Giants. Terrible acting, preachy dialogue, and ridiculous plots could all be forgiven when the movie was made by a Baptist church in the 9th poorest metro area of America. The real problem - and, unfortunately, the reason the film was so popular with many Christians - is that it contains, by far, the worst theology I have ever seen or heard. One reviewer called it "pornography for evangelical Christians." The gospel according to this movie: walk into a field and put your hands in the air... and God will give you a new truck, a winning football season, and cure your infertility! Truly an embarrassment to the church. And, quite possibly, the worst movie ever made since the invention of motion pictures - surpassing even Plan 9 From Outer Space.


Wow, I feel better now. Perhaps one of these days I'll write about good movies. Until then, consult Christianity Today's list of the Most Redeeming Films of 2012 - especially if you have seen any of the above monstrosities.

Penn State acted in accordance with their values

In what everyone is hoping will be the end of a sad and twisted saga, former Penn State defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky was recently sentenced to 30-60 years in prison for molesting numerous children. The scandal, and its cover-up by the school's administration, brought down legendary head coach Joe Paterno, the university president and other administrators, and has nearly destroyed what had been one of the top college football programs in the nation. As details of the cover-up unfolded - particularly the conclusion of ex-FBI Director Louis Freeh that Paterno himself concealed Sandusky's crimes - the public was increasingly shocked and horrified. As we all should be.

But many were also left scratching their heads. How could otherwise respected leaders have participated in covering up such monstrous actions? Beneath the veneer of integrity, was Coach Paterno so greedy that he would trade the innocence of young boys for success? Beneath the veneer of intellectual excellence, was University President Graham Spanier actually stupid enough to think that covering this up was a good idea? Gary Moore suggested that the involvement of large sums of money in college athletics is the source of the corruption. But plenty of industries, not to mention single corporations, routinely handle larger sums with far more minor scandals. When the last time you were afraid to take your children to McDonald's because they did $27 billion of business last year?

The scary truth is that Penn State was not hypocritical. On the campus of a major public university, athletics is pretty much the only thing that passes for religion. As theologian Michael Novak has observed, sports satisfy our longing for sacred time and sacred space. And as George Marsden described in The Soul of the American University, sports eventually filled the naked space left by higher education's abandonment of a Christian center. Most institutions of higher learning no longer have any required classes, much less required chapel attendance, and cannot identify any core of knowledge or values they wish to pass on to students. With the concurrent growth of Marxist social views and the proliferation of student groups with their own grievance-based politics, the modern uni-versity has nearly degenerated into a "versity" with nothing to unify it... except sports.

Simultaneously, nearly every major university thoroughly inculcates their students in moral relativism and seeks to banish any talk of moral absolutes. Simplistic notions of right and wrong have been replaced by nuanced shades of gray, which over time all start to blend into the same shade of whitewash.

And to top it all off, here was a man satisfying his own particular sexual orientation (albeit one that is still considered deviant).

So what's the administration to do? Preserve, at all costs, the one thing actually considered sacred on their campus. Protect the high priest (Paterno) and his assistant priest (Sandusky). And dismiss all talk of "the right thing to do here" as the product of unsophisticated notions. And if the innocence of a few young men must be sacrificed on the altar of the venerable institution and its religion - well, what's so bad about a few early sexual experiences?

As the scandal broke, students rioted, and when the NCAA sanctions were announced, all those idealistic young future leaders were aghast - some apparently even weeping. One would have thought that the real victims were the football players rather than the children who were raped.

The bottom line is that Penn State acted in accordance with its deepest values as an institution. Apalling? Yes. Shocking? No.

Doing Good and Doing Well

A recent piece by the New York Times' conservative columnist, David Brooks, caught my attention while I was working 12-hour shifts in a chemical plant. He posits that our society, like British society 100 years ago, is transition from an industrious one to a more "genteel" one, concerned with the finer things in life but not with making money. Along the way he highlights the opinions of Corelli Barnett (cited in the provocative and thoughtful The Post-American World) and our own first lady, Michelle Obama. In her own words:

“We left corporate America, which is a lot of what we’re asking young people to do,” she tells the women. “Don’t go into corporate America. You know, become teachers. Work for the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse. Those are the careers that we need, and we’re encouraging our young people to do that. But if you make that choice, as we did, to move out of the money-making industry into the helping industry, then your salaries respond.” Faced with that reality, she adds, “many of our bright stars are going into corporate law or hedge-fund management.”

There's no doubt that good teachers are essential to thriving society, and the same is true for community developers (though the contribution of community organizers is more questionable). But there is a tremendous folly here. It's not the derision towards business and industry, the dismissal of the value contributed by those who actually make things, or the arrogance of a multimillionaire who proclaims that she chose to "move out of the money-making industry": all of that could be expected from the Obamas. What is truly shocking about the First Lady's quote is that it represents an immense ignorance of the American tradition.

As British historian Paul Johnson observes at the outset of A History of the American People, the two great ambitions of Americans have always been "to do good and to do well." These twin drives arose out of the Reformation and arrived on our shores with the Puritans. Their descendants in New England lived out the same values. The top two occupations of leaders in the Abolitionist movement were pastor (no surprise) and... entrepreneur.

There is, in fact, a fascinating tension here that forms one of the central narratives of American history. What happens when doing good and doing well collide? Once again, slavery is a case in point: Southern landowners did well (though not as well as we imagine), not only because of slavery, but because Eli Whitney (of Connecticut) invented the cotton gin, thus making their product profitable. What happens when profit and reform collide? Can you always get rich by changing the world? During the 1990s tech boom, companies often recruited skilled engineers by claiming that their work would "change the world." There's no doubt that many technical innovations have - but have they truly changed it for the better? Or, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

The First Lady, who like her husband is supposedly intellectual, could have explored this tension. She could have urged her audience not only to teach, but to take a stronger set of ethics and moral leadership into the corporate world. After the greed and stupidity of the last few years, the arena of the marketplace is as in need of change as any segment of society. Instead she relied on stale "us vs. them" political talking points. Perhaps it is too much to expect First Ladies to write their own speeches, but could she at least not plagiarize hers from a teacher's union?

But Brooks assumes the First Lady's erroneous dichotomy and perpetuates it in his own musings. He takes it for granted that there is an inherent conflict. Perhaps my own experience is unique, but growing up in Kansas it was not uncommon to see the same families produce teachers and missionaries as well as engineers and executives. In my experience in the evangelical world, across multiple states and a few foreign countries, I encountered world-changers, ambitious achievers, and sensitive aesthetes with regularity. We had our inevitable conflicts but we were brothers and sisters. We never imagined that we were at war with each other.

The solution is not to accept this false dichotomy, but to toss it out in favor of something far older. One of the themes of the Reformation was the view of all work as spiritual valid and a form of service to God. In the Middle Ages, "secular" work as often denigrated in favor of "spiritual" work such as serving in the church. Mrs. Obama is essentially advocating a Medieval approach to vocation - except that teachers, social workers, and government employees have now replaced priests, monks, and nuns as the "sacred" workers. In contrast, the Reformers viewed Christ as Lord of all areas of human endeavor. When Martin Luther advocated for the "priesthood of all believers," he didn't mean that everyone should be a pastor; he meant the mechanic was a priest in his shop, the banker in his office, and the mother in her home. All vocations were to be pursued with a religious devotion, "working unto the Lord and not [merely] for men." I believe it was primarily this emphasis (and not agony over predestination) that led to the "Protestant work ethic."

But articulating a comprehensive Biblical worldview might be too much for the Obamas, or even for our "genteel" society. In an age where most states run lotteries and "Desperate Housewives" earns top ratings, calling for a return to the Protestant work ethic and the Christian-inspired sense of vocation may be setting the bar too high. The First Lady, and Mr. Brooks, could start by simply encouraging their listeners to be more American.

The Real Conspiracy

Recently a close friend, whom I greatly admire, told me that he had a hard time believing that the World Trade Center towers fell as a result of the planes that were crashed into them. Usually, I don't take comments like that seriously; they tend to come from people who are slightly unhinged and to be followed by incredibly bizarre explanations, such as when a Kuwaiti told me "the Jews" were behind it all. (The Lady, who is half-Jewish, was surprised to learn of her role in the September 11th attacks.) But this friend is level-headed, intelligent, studying for the ministry, and solidly patriotic (as evidenced by 8 1/2 years enlisted in the Air Force, and now a commission as a Second Lieutenant).

His own qualifications don't cause me to believe that theory for a second, and I would challenge anyone to find a structural engineer who actually believes the towers fell for some other reason. But it does go to show we all can be drawn to any explanation which posits that something bigger is going on.

These days, there are conspiracy theories for everything: the JFK assassination, September 11th, the Iraq War, aliens, the economic crisis, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, health care, immigration, AIDS, gun control, the Roman Catholic Church, and Christianity as a whole. A 1997 movie even capitalized on the trend. Virtually none of them have been proven, all are perpetuated with the scantest of evidence and most far-fetched of reasoning, and many have in fact been disproven. But they persist. As soon as one is debunked, another pops up in its place.

Maintaining a genuine conspiracy is incredibly difficult. Charles Colson, infamous for his role and Watergate and now famous as the founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries, often recounts the pitiful attempt to hold together the Nixon White House in the face of increasing probes into wrongdoing. Only a few of the most powerful men in the United States of America were involved, and the worst punishment they expected to face was disgrace, or possibly a light prison sentence; Colson's 1-year sentence came as a surprise. They held their conspiracy together for all of... 2 weeks. That's how long it took before one of them defected.

The probability that a secret will be leaked increases exponentially with the number of people who know. All it takes is slight pressure, or a slight mistake, for someone to slip up. For instance, if 50 people know a secret, and each has only a 1 in 1000 chance of spilling the beans in a certain time period, then the probability of the secret getting out is:

1- (1-0.001)^50 = 5%

Not bad, although still risky. But what if the heat is on, ever so slightly, and now the probability of someone breaking is even 1 in 100?

1- (1-0.01)^50 = 39%

Or what if 100 people know?

 1- (1-0.01)^100 = 63%

The odds are looking poor. But this analysis fails to take into account the fact that the first one to talk will probably have a better chance of saving his or her skin.

The idea that our lumbering and often-inept American federal government could manage to maintain a vast conspiracy is simply laughable. The idea that a massive corporation, employing tens of thousands of people and interacting with the public continually, could be secretly running the world is equally farcical.

What makes us so susceptible to conspiracy theories? Why do we want to believe that there is some secret cabal controlling everything, some sinister individual pulling the strings? In science, theories that poorly explain things or lack confirmation are usually thrown out. Why do these theories persist, when time and again things can be better explained by the ordinary temptations of greed, power, sex, or just plain incompetence?

In the Modern Era, we would like to believe that science has exorcised all of the demons from our world. There is a perfectly rational explanation for everything. Human beings do things, even bad things, for simple and comprehensible motives... and that's it. The world works according to certain laws. And beyond that, there is nothing but personal subjective opinion. There is no grand story, no big picture. The world simply is what it is, and anything we can't explain will be explained soon enough by physics or evolution. (This is, by the way, the worldview of The Economist).

But these explanations, now matter how well they work on the immediate level, are strangely unsatisfying. The pieces are all there, but somehow they don't add up. And the theories ultimately lead to dead ends.

Deep down, we know that there is something else at work. We don't just "want to believe," we actually sense that there is something truly nefarious behind it all, working the invisible strings for malevolent ends. We have lost the capability to describe who or what this is. So we turn to conspiracy theories - or we settle for our modern explanations.

C.S. Lewis once remarked that a man who will not believe in God will believe in anything. We are born with an innate drive to worship, and something will ultimately be on the altar of our heart.

The corollary to this, is that whoever does not believe in The Devil, will believe in conspiracy theories. A recent poll shows that only 68% of Americans believe in a personal devil, and in my experience far fewer actually take that Being seriously. But having rejected as old-fashioned nonsense the real Conspirator, the true Enemy - with all his accomplices - we chase one human conspiracy after another for the slightest of reasons. We know there is something bigger - and far more evil - behind all that we see, but we are suppressing this knowledge.

Instead of concocting our own silly theories, we ought to take Jesus at his word: "I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven" (Luke 10:18). Yes, there is a Devil, Satan, the Enemy, or whoever you wish to call him. There is a personal being behind it all, seeking to destroy us, to pervert all that is good, and to hijack all of Creation. And although his notoriety may at times compel fear, he has discovered that in most societies, anonymity is far more effective. As the thief "Verbal" Kint says in The Usual Suspects, "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn't exist." The Biblical explanation is in fact the best fit with reality, the best explanation for the world in which we live, and the most useful knowledge for living a truly meaningful life.

But if you don't like that, there's always The X-Files.

Commencement

Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels' speech to the graduating class of Butler University is the best I have ever heard in my entire life. You can read the text, or watch it on YouTube (part 1; part 2).

With blunt humility and a razor-sharp wit - two qualities not often found in combination - Daniels eviscerates his own generation for its failings while pleading with the new graduates to strive for something much better. It's a speech which ought to go down in history as a classic, particularly for lines such as these:

"As a generation, you are off to an excellent start. You have taken the first savvy step on the road to distinction, which is to follow a weak act."

"In sum, our parents scrimped and saved to provide us a better living standard than theirs; we borrowed and splurged and will leave you a staggering pile of bills to pay. It's been a blast; good luck cleaning up after us."

"Selfishness and irresponsibility in business, personal finances, or in family life, are deserving of your disapproval. Go ahead and stigmatize them. Too much such behavior will hurt our nation and the future for you and the families you will create."

And,

"Live for others, not just yourselves. For fulfillment, not just pleasure and material gain. For tomorrow, and the Americans who will reside there, not just for today. ... Do worry 'bout tomorrow, in a way your elders often failed to do."

[emphasis mine]

One of the most refreshing features of Daniels' words, in addition to their plain-spoken wisdom, is fact that he refuses to condemn or pass blame without also pointing the finger at himself. It's clear that he does not embrace the bankrupt values of the Baby Boomer generation, he assumes that most parents in the audience do not, and I can say that my own parents did not live this way either. Yet his words of condemnation - and repentance - are always on behalf of "we," not "they." Like Ezra, Isaiah , and his Biblical namesake before him, he humbly chooses to identify himself with these failings instead of locating the problem elsewhere.

Would that more of his peers had the same courage.

Modern Art

Last month, while briefly back in the USA, my wife and I finally visited Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art. Our expectations were not high, but we wanted to experience all of our city's museums and hopefully come away with a better appreciation for modern art. The experience was indeed educational - in fact, I learned more about art, and what makes for truly great art, than ever before - but not in the way I expected.

After strolling past some mobiles which showed mechanical aptitude if not aesthetic sophistication, we were treated to a series of charcoal sketches attempting to capture the sickness of post-apartheid South Africa. Then we entered the feature exhibit, "Protest Protest," which sucked out any warmth we hadn't already lost to the frigid winter wind. We came away feeling utterly depressed, as if we had just walked through a decaying neighborhood with no signs of life or renewal. I've visited some pretty tough neighborhoods, but this was the bleakest and angriest place I have seen.

Photography was actually not allowed, so I had to sneakily obtain photos while the security personnel were looking the other way. (There's something deliciously ironic about breaking the rules to take pictures of an exhibit devoted to protest and anarchy).

Here's an example of how modern art approaches difficult political questions:


The pamphlet in the lower left is the most gentle, filled with fuzzy images and similarly fuzzy words calling for peace. The folded-out piece standing in the upper right consists of photos of members of the Bush administration made to look like mug shots, with their "crimes" listed on the back. Behind it, barely visible in this photo, is a "visitor's guide to Baghdad" filled with dire images and over-the-top warnings about how terrible life is there, as well as sarcastic advice on how to experience violence and chaos. The open black-and-white spread above the colorful pamphlet shows rooms full of caskets and lists various facts (or perhaps claims) about the war in Iraq. To its right, in perhaps the lone nod to fairness, are a few of the "Iraq's Most Wanted" playing cards. (Confession: I own the whole deck). Another exhibit (not shown) included coloring books graphically depicting war violence and atrocities, as well as guides warning against the evils of the American military; yet another included a poorly drawn diagram contrasting the benefits of wealth-redistribution with the injustice of "capitalism."

This typified the entire exhibit - not just dark, but angry, utterly cynical, and consistently to the extreme left in its view. (So much for diversity). I appreciate well-reasoned arguments even when I disagree with the viewpoint, and I appreciate art that engages me emotionally and intellectually with difficult issues. But this was neither. The art on display was bereft of beauty and dehumanizing to its subject.

But this raises an important question: how can art engage a difficult and emotional issue such as war? As we sat in the museum's cafe, searching for answers, another image came to our minds. Not from an art museum, but from Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry.

In the exhibit housing a U-Boat captured during World War II, and dedicated to the contributions of the U.S. Merchant Marine, sits a depiction of two mariners adrift on a piece of scrap wood from a ship - apparently theirs - sinking in the background, with small pieces of wreckage burning in the water around them. I was immediately struck by the stark realism, the painstaking attention to detail, and the fundamental dignity with which the subjects were portrayed. The men's bodies were bruised and dirty, and their faces etched with a mixture of pain, sorrow, and grim determination to survive. Like all men at war, they have been thrown against their will into terrible circumstances, left only with the freedom to choose how to personally respond. Their uniforms recalled the pride and patriotism with which they enlisted for service, but their place on a makeshift life raft betrayed the knowledge that they may never see home again. It was clear that these men were paying a tremendous sacrifice, and the viewer of the exhibit was not only drawn into their world, but made to feel the price they paid. Instead of seeking to hit a political target, it humanized the men whom the war affected. That exhibit simultaneously expressed the horror and the heroism of war. It reminded me why we hate war, and also why we give medals to those who go and fight. It made a statement that speaks with equal profundity to the absolute pacificist and the gung-ho soldier, a statement so powerful that over than 2 years later the mere memory of it brings tears to my eyes.

That's what art is meant to be. Funny that we had to go to a science museum to find it.

Opium in Israel

On her 10-day trip to Israel this summer (through Birthright) my fiance', The Lady, visited the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem along with 39 other young Jewish men and women. It was an overwhelming experience which left an incredibly strong imprint upon her. In one of the most powerful exhibits, the visitors walk across a glass floor, beneath which lie thousands of shoes from Holocaust victims. Some are the boots of grown men, some are the stylish shoes of adult women... and some are childrens' or even babies shoes. She has often described her emotional state after seeing the museum as "a wreck."

But this time in the retelling she mentioned something that she hadn't before. As she stood in the final room of the museum (more on that later), weeping and heartbroken over the evil and suffering and over the lives destroyed forever, the tour director, came to get her and bring her to the rest of the group. They were standing outside, waiting and seemingly bored. They had walked blithely through the museum and then left emotionally unaffected. They had endured another obligatory Jewish history lesson and could now get on to the more important business of drunken club-hopping.

Why the difference? How could anyone not be affected by a remembrance of the most barbaric acts committed in the 20th century? How could genocide against one's own ethnic group elicit so little response? Why did The Lady weep while the others remained stoic or even apathetic?

There is an important difference between The Lady and her 39 fellow travelers. Her compatriots were all thoroughly secular, not practicing Judaism or any faith whatsoever. She, although raised secular, is a committed Christian and Bible college graduate.

Karl Marx is often quoted as saying that "religion is an opiate of the masses." He actually said religion "is the opium of the people," and did recognize that it may serve some legitimate purpose. But he was an atheist, and the misquote--and its common interpretation--sum up a common objection to religion: that it is simply a way to make people feel better, to escape the reality of evil in the world, or to distract them from challenging the injustices they face. Given the horrendous religious hyprocrisy he witnessed as a youth, Marx's view is understandable.

But as Gary Thomas puts it, "Marx had it exactly backwards, at least as far as his words pertain to Christianity. Opium deadens the senses; Christianity makes them come alive." The Lady's peers were too sedated with casual sex, alcohol, and shallow materialism to feel the weight of what many of their ancestors suffered. Secularism had stripped them of any intellectual basis for recognizing evil or being concerned about injustice and blinded them to any reality greater than themselves. Lives filled with thoroughly selfish pursuits had deadened their hearts.

Jesus never promised a life free from suffering. Throughout Scripture, we are commanded to look beyond our lives and have compassion for others. We are told to weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice. We are encouraged to embrace suffering. We are told to truly love others, and in doing so we open ourselves to being hurt and suffering their own hurts. In embracing Jesus, our conscience is awakened by the Holy Spirit, and suddenly the things over which God weeps, which we could formerly ignore, now grip us emotionally. The people who were formerly a means to an end are seen as priceless creations whose every degradation by sin is an atrocious attack on their dignity and humanity. Those silver-tongued television preachers who sell a "prosperity gospel" in which God is a means to our own ends and Jesus came to make us happy and comfortable have distorted the gospel beyond recognition.

I mentioned the final room of the museum. The walls are filled with hundreds of binders, containing everything that is known about the lives of all recorded Holocaust victims. In the center is a reflecting pool. Each visitor is asked to look into the pool and not leave the museum until he or she has forgiven every one of the perpertrators of this monstrous evil. Forgiveness has been described as the most unnatural act in the world. For those such as Richard Dawkins who excuse evil as mankind merely "dancing to his genes," for the social scientists and philosophers who try to offer some sort of "good, rational explanation," or for those who see the world as under an ultimate anarchy where the only law is what the powerful can get away with, the concept of forgiveness is truly absurd. Perhaps those who strode so nonchalantly through the Holocaust Museum spent no more than seconds in the final room because they truly had nothing to forgive.

But The Ladydid have something to forgive. She not only acknowledges the reality of evil--and has a good basis for doing so--she follows Someone who commanded his followers to forgive "seventy times seven." Someone who forgave his own executioners as they crucified him despite his manifest innocence. Someone who demanded that we love our enemies, observed that "he who is forgiven little loves little, but he who is forgiven much loves much"--and then proclaimed that we were all in need of much forgiveness.

Jesus said, "I came that they may have life and have it abundantly." Not only abundant joy, but abudant sorrow. Not only a heart that exhuberantly celebrates what is good and loves with abandon, but that is broken over evil and compassionate to those who suffer. But for those who prefer opium, our entertainment-driven culture and atheistic philosophies offer anaesthesia for the heart and mind.