Scott Cairns: Attending to the presence of God

A poet whose work is as nourishing to me as any art I’ve encountered–Scott Cairns–is being featured in the Columbia Missourian.

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Breaking News Reviews

Paul, Apostle of Christ

Justin Chang of The Los Angeles Times puts the new Bible-based movie in perspective:

“Paul, Apostle of Christ may fall into that creakily venerable tradition of impeccably British-accented biblical pageantry, but from the first frame, Hyatt’s approach is marked by clear-eyed intelligence and a refusal of the obvious. It’s telling that Paul’s dramatic moment of conversion on the road to Damascus, which a different movie might have saved for the climax, is relegated to a few quick flashbacks. This is a movie about the challenge of remaining true to one’s beliefs after the spiritual high has worn off, the miracles have ceased and God seems to have fallen silent.”

A Wrinkle in Time

“Here is a sentence I did not expect to write: The film’s portrayal of the otherworldly Mrs. Ws — Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who and Mrs. Which — makes the depiction of the Holy Trinity in The Shack profound and numinous by comparison.”

– Steven Greydanus (Decent Films)

Quotable

“Democracy, in its essence and genius, is imaginative love for and identification with a community with which, much of the time and in many ways, one may be in profound disagreement. … When definitions of ‘us’ and ‘them’ begin to contract, there seems to be no limit to how narrow these definitions can become. As they shrink and narrow, they are increasingly inflamed, more dangerous and inhumane. They present themselves as movements toward truer and purer community, but, as I have said, they are the destruction of community. They insist that the imagination must stay within the boundaries they establish for it, that sympathy and identification are only allowable within certain limits. I am convinced that the broadest possible exercise of imagination is the thing most conducive to human health, individual and global.”

– Marilynne Robinson, “Imagination and Community,” in When I Was a Child I Read Books

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“I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won’t contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That’s what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act.”

– Orson Welles

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“I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it under water for every part that shows.”

– Ernest Hemingway, in a Paris Review interview by George Plimpton, 1958

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For more of the quotable wisdom that captures the vision of Looking Closer, check out The Looking Closer Book of Wisdom.

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Looking for Looking Closer’s archive of film reviews?

Here it is.

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What is a “nous”? What does “theoria” mean?

These two words are at the heart of Looking Closer’s vision.

Scott Cairns: Attending to the presence of God

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Scott Cairns: Attending to the presence of God

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