Posts Tagged ‘resurrection’

The 1956 French film A Man Escaped is a taut, tense drama of a resistance fighter imprisoned in Lyons by the occupying German forces during World War II. Based upon historical events, with minimal dialogue and an effective but sparse soundtrack, the film focuses on one man’s seemingly hopeless single-minded determination to escape.

In this sense, A Man Escaped is an outstanding suspense movie of the prison escape genre.  However, Robert Brisson, whose efforts won for him the Cannes award for Best Director, offers us much more than a great nail biter. In his hands the story becomes a metaphor for hope and freedom. Read the rest of this entry »

Friday my good friend Rodrigo Chavarría died.  A pleasant day out with my wife was suddenly changed as I checked our telephone messages.  Rodrigo was dead a friend’s recorded voice told us.  My wife wept, indeed howled, with grief.  I remained silent.  Later I wept, but the feeling throughout the day, and still this morning, is one of weight and numbness. Read the rest of this entry »

The ancient Greeks tragedies saw all of man’s efforts overruled by cruel and blind fate.  Karl Marx said man was subject to economic determinism.  B.F. Skinner contended that human behavior was determined by genetics and environment.  For atheistic existentialists, like Sartre, the human condition is to be trapped in a meaningless universe from which there is no escape.   Both fairy tales and the Bible disagree. Read the rest of this entry »

            One of the challenges of a Christian aesthetic or theology of beauty is the cross of Christ.  Hymns, paintings and sculptures have its beauty as their subject.  Crosses are some of the most beautiful jewelry in the world, but how can such a brutal event as the crucifixion of Jesus be seen as beautiful?  Read the rest of this entry »

            In the first two parts of this series, “Recognizing the Risen Lord,” we saw that the risen Lord is recognized by identifying him with the crucified Christ and that this fact is so contrary to the human heart’s desires that God’s grace is necessary to grasp it.  In this post we shall examine how the identification of the crucified Jesus with the risen Lord contradicts human religion. Read the rest of this entry »