Howlers and the enduring creepiness of Uncle Screwtape

Coming soon on May 16.

Dean Koontz's "Odd Thomas" Series

Ever since reading Flannery O'Connor's literary work, I realized that of all the novels and series that I have read outside of this class only one novel series has truly used the grotesque in such an effective manner as she. Enter in the Odd Thomas series by Dean Koontz.

Dean Koontz, like many of the main characters that we have read in previous novels, converted to Catholicism as a result of his love for his wife, Gerda, who was Catholic. He became more and more intrigued and inspired by Catholicism and finally converted in college. He has become an icon for mystery and supernatural fiction writing, even making it on to the New York Times bestseller list for hardcover 13 times as number one. Now, as he continues to grow in faith and write more popular novels, one can see his faith permeate through his literary work and create such wonderful stories like "Odd Thomas."

Odd Thomas is quite a peculiar character. He can see ghosts and the supernatural in the world around him, offering an insight into the wicked and evil that is present in the world, while simultaneously accentuating  the beauty and wonder of the world and of many people in it.

First reading the starting novel, aptly named "Odd Thomas," I had a hard time diving into the story as I do when reading the work of other well known others authors like Clive Cussler. However, action suddenly appears (quite unlike the Moviegoer) and the rest of the novel becomes enrapturing and quite thrilling. After taking this English course, the Catholic themes and motifs that are present in this novel and the other novels in the series, become very interesting and easy to spot.

So, try this novel. I had a great time reading it, I really enjoyed thinking about it after, and I think you will too. Caution: If you are like me in how I was when I read this, make sure that you allot the next 6 hours, at least, as free time because I guarantee you will not want to put it down until it is finished.


Dean's Faith:
http://www.ncregister.com/site/article/2013

Dean's accomplishments (to name a few):
http://www.deankoontz.com/about-dean/

I Am Legend, I Am Will Smith

The idea of the movie I Am Legend as a Catholic film may not come across many minds. The idea is simple though, a Christ-like figure, Will Smith, all alone in the world. There are many Catholic elements throughout the film including: the family saying a prayer while evacuating the city and the main character denying the existence of God before undergoing a turnaround before the ending.

In the film at the beginning there is a truck with many signs on it that read "God still loves you." Which, at first may seem like a sick joke since there is only one person left in the city and many have been affected by the disease. It comes to be viewed as more of a theme for the end of the film though. The middle parts of the film do not address much Catholicism besides the prayer and a cross on a rear-view mirror. Suddenly though, God is at the forefront of the film. The woman, Anna, comes to the movie and mentions that the world is quieter now, which makes it easier to hear God. The film takes a crazy turn towards religion in the final part of the film.

Will Smith as a Christ-like figure may be difficult to understand without background. He plays a scientist whom is searching for a cure to the disease that has caused the mass evacuation of the city. He is making an attempt to save many people, he is willing to sacrifice himself for the betterment of the remainder of the world. These parallels make Smith a great comparison to Christ.

It's not very clear, but the posters on the
 right say, "God Still Loves Us"

It's a lot to wrap your head around, but upon several viewings of the film, you also will come to realize the Catholic aspects of I Am Legend.

Frank Cottrell Boyce

   Frank Cottrell Boyce: The Modern Catholic Spin on Things

    I really wanted imaginary friends as a kid. The idea of having my own personal somebody seemed quite appealing. I tried to convince my mom once that I had an imaginary friend that looked like a duck. It was a bit of a failure because I couldn’t even convince myself that Ronny was right there—he’s right there, Mom. Sheesh. So imagine my wild envy of people, who had “real” imaginary friends or in the case of Millions’ protagonist, imaginary friends that were saints. So cool. Frank Cottrell Boyce, the British Catholic writer behind Millions, gives those invisible buddies a whole lot more depth and hilarity when he has St. Clare of Assisi crouched quite comfortably in a cardboard fort. Did I mention she’s also smoking a cigar? She’s a regular chimney. When our young hero looks at her skeptically, she glances to the sky and says, “You can do whatever you like up there.” St. Clare is not the only heavenly appearance, other saints pop up and give their opinions and support for the protagonist’s moral dilemmas throughout the novel. My favorite scene involves St. Joseph, but I won’t spoil the surprise.  

      If you consider yourself far too grown up for a child-directed, saint-infused escapade then you may want to skip Boyce’s novels and check out the movie/television screenplays that he has recently put together. In 2008, he wrote “God on Trial” for the BBC. It describes the radical story of Jewish Holocaust victims putting God on trial for murder.  While the film makes some rather shattering denunciations of God, apparently it failed to shake Boyce’s beliefs. After he prepared and wrote the screenplay, he said,  “How could [my faith] be vanquished by sitting in a room reading some books about it, when I was reading the words of people who had been through that and come out with their faith burning in them?”

If you would like to watch "God on Trial," it's available in its entirety on youtube. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7XCnJBTfZM

Source

<http://www.scotsman.com/news/frank-cottrell-boyce-keeping-the-faith-1-1088475> 
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7XCnJBTfZM>

Pass the Wine

Pass the Wine

Film Review of Julian Jarrold's Brideshead Revisited

             Perhaps because my expectations had been brought so low by popular opinion, I was fully propped up and ready to loathe Julian Jarrold’s Brideshead Revisited. But for the first half hour, I almost liked it. Sumptuous and green, the Oxford and Brideshead of Charles and Sebastian’s summer lets the light hit them in such a way as to turn the stones magical and nearly transportal.* As Charles whips by his pompous cousin Jasper, he happily ignores his relation’s “wise” words and enjoys the company of Sebastian, who offers him a life of idyllic proportions. Little details were carefully included in the first scenes that as a reader of the original novel were deeply appreciated. The skull in Charles’s room at his father’s home sits in the window, a reminder of Charles’s attempts at being a thoughtful college boy. The immense size of Sebastian’s apology note to Charles serves to emphasize his childlikeness. Even Julia’s severe haircut comes straight from the pages, and the immense collection of wine and champagne that Sebastian and Charles happily guzzle fit quite contentedly in what I imagined.

            But there is a distinct moment when the director and screenwriters seem to have lost their grip on the story of Brideshead. When the collection of characters moves beyond Sebastian and Charles to adding the rest of the family, the story begins to lose its power. Don’t get me wrong. I think that in physical attributes the actors look very much how I imagined the characters. Emma Thompson as Lady Marchmain captures the essence of elegance with her silvered curls and direct gaze. Bridey, I would still happily punch in the face. With Cordelia, however, I would like to unleash some holy vengeance upon whoever thought to destroy her character. In a story desperately in need of levity, someone saw fit to destroy perfectly good satire and dialogue. Cordelia may be a strange little creature, but there was no reason at all to make her a dislikeable, mousy presence. This trio piles out of their shiny car between the fountain and Brideshead, and something is immediately off because Sebastian very clearly expresses his dislike and discomfort. The audience is automatically set up to dislike them all, and they are given no opportunity to understand the other characters or care for them—an emotional connection burned.

            Now there is the matter of Julia. I didn’t mention this earlier because I was so enamored by the prettiness of the first half hour, but the screenwriters made what I considered at first a forgivable mistake. Then I realized an hour or so in that the mistake was about to push Evelyn Waugh’s carefully crafted love story into gushy territory. The novel is a flashback bookended delicately by the present day narrator Charles. The movie does commit to the flashback, but instead of going straight to the college days, it skips to the middle of the novel when Charles sees Julia again. Whatever, I thought, seeing Julia on the ship is not terribly inaccurate. But it took watching the movie in its entirety to see how that additional flashback is practically a red herring in terms of the original story. By showing Julia before Sebastian, I paid less attention to the relationship between Charles and Sebastian and was constantly trying to pick apart the moments between Charles and Julia. It was too easy to write off everything that happened between Charles and Sebastian as a phase. And it’s not like Charles’s and Julia’s relationship was exempt from distortion either. When I mentioned Hollywood's gushiness earlier, I wasn’t kidding. Some jerk actually gave Charles and Julia the oh-so-tearful conversation of, “But when we kissed—.” “Charles, please.” “Why? It was wonderful.” “I know….but I have no choice.” Seriously. The book's relationships were so much deeper than the movie could portray, and by cutting up Waugh’s dialogue for the sake of brevity and not clarity, the conversion of Charles’s can hardly be believable. He may dip his hands in the water, stare at the flame of the chapel candle, and barely smile, but it makes almost no sense without those Catholic conversations, struggles, and grace-filled love.

*I just made up this word. If there is any question as to what it means, please ask.

Suggested Reading: The Sun Also Rises (Ernest Hemingway)

Hey everyone,

After class today I did a little brainstorming trying to think of a great book by a Catholic author that we didn't touch on in class. I'm a huge fan of Hemingway, and I honestly cannot believe that he didn't cross my mind and that I had to brainstorm at all. (He was a convert to Catholicism during his first marriage to his wife Pauline, though he did leave the faith--friends of his after his suicide said he had "funny ties" to his faith) If you get the chance, a book called 'The Sun Also Rises' is really great. It's kind of Fitzgerald/Great Gatsby-esque in some ways, but a great book nonetheless. It's about Paris and the 'lost generation' (Binx Bolling, anyone?) dealing with this guy named Jake Barnes who is this expatriate journalist living in Paris. He's impotent following an injury in WWI, falls in love with this girl but there's no real chance of a lasting relationship, etc. Anyway though, the book is full of bullfights, anti-semitic remarks, prostitutes, etc. All of the things that make for great Catholic reading (kidding. totally kidding). Oh, I think I forgot to mention that it's actually split into three books, much like Brideshead Revisited.

Enjoy!

Lost in translation...

When thinking about how to break up the blogs for Shusaku Endo, we came up with the following topics: life and biography, his relationship and experiences with Catholicism, etc. Well, I am the “etc.” category. And how fitting! This blog post will talk about the supplemental reading assigned for tomorrow – or as I tend to write it in my planner, “Read Silence for tomorrow, etc.”

Before delving into the supplemental reading piece, it seems like maybe we should no a bit more about the author. The author happens to be Endo’s wife, Junko Endo. Well, after a trusty Google search, here is what I came up with about the life of Junko: she studied at Keio University, where she met Endo, they were married in 1955, and together they had a son in 1956. And that’s about it. Unfortunately, there is not too much information readily available about her life and scholarship. Fortunately, we do know that she actively wrote about Endo’s literature and defending his works after his death.

She authored the supplemental reading in response to an article by Father Yoji Inoue. The original article was published in an issue of Kaze (Wind), a Christian magazine, which meant that it likely reached a number of Christians that had already read Silence and cherished it. Junko knew that she had to correct the assumptions of Father Yoji Inoue and prevent his anecdotes from spreading like wildfire in a community that respected the literary works of Endo. Though they were the thoughts of an American priest, his bold statements and propagation of the message surely would have caught the eyes of many.

Who would have thought that one simple translation could make such an impact on how the story was interpreted? When I read the passage myself, I was confused as to why the fumie would be commanding Rodrigues to trample on him. I even entertained the idea that Rodrigues was hearing demonic influences that were encouraging him to apostatize. And that is not so uncommon in Catholic teaching – take Judas or any of the Bibilcal characters that Jesus casts demons out of, for example. However, after reading the article by Junko I now realize that when accounting for this translational error, the message of the fumie takes on an even more Catholic understanding. For if the original text in Japanese reads, “You may step on me.” instead of “Trample! Trample!”, then the actions of Rodrigues should be viewed in a different light. In that light, we see that the fumie or the voice of Jesus is reaching out to Rodrigues in his suffering. In response to the differences in translation and possible meanings, Junko writes:

“Some advise me to ask the English translator to revise the passage. Others maintain that the word "trample" more powerfully expresses the profound love of a mother who is ready to forgive even the harshest deed of her child. In the view of the latter, "Trample!" conveys the tension in that scene better than would weaker constructions such as "You may step on me." I have not formed a conclusion yet.”

 Personally, I think that the “You may step on me” gives a more Catholic understanding. In these words, Christ clearly offers himself for the sake of Rodrigues, just as He taught his disciples He would:

"For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him." – John 3:17

A Catholic understanding holds that the Passion of Jesus was saving grace enough for our sins, and Christ continually outdoes himself every time He offers himself for the sake of our well-being. Rodrigues ironically experiences this through his own apostasy.

What do you think about the different translations? Was Rodrigues just livin’ on a prayer (and hoping he was at least halfway there?) that he was doing the right thing or did he know that God was reaching out to him to ease his suffering through the fumie?

P.S. - I couldn't resist the Bon Jovi temptation. Apparently, it was the theme for the day. Enjoy!

----

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shusaku_Endo

http://www.enotes.com/sh-saku-endo-criticism/endo-shusaku

New American Bible: The Catholic Youth Bible