A busy first week of September

Yeah, I haven't posted anything since this past Monday. I've been that busy. Doing what, you ask? I didn't even have much sermon preparation to do this week because Pastor Brown is here this Sabbath.

With running Shelley around town for her various appointments, grocery shopping, cleaning, cooking, a couple of hours in devotionals and study, bookkeeping, catching up on news and world events, working a bit over at the church, etc. -- time just seems to fly by.

We had our first Ministerial Association meeting for the 2007-8 year this Tuesday. I'll be the association's Secretary-Treasurer for this year. This work is mainly taking minutes at our meetings, scheduling the Manor devotionals, and doing other clerical work that comes up.

And then on Tuesday I got a call asking if I could switch the Manor devotional for Wednesday with my scheduled day in a couple of weeks. Since I was open, I switched and went up to the Manor this week.

For a couple of weeks now, Shelley has been dancing with Heidi Lee's Leikarring dancers. School starts up towards the end of August, but cruise ships keep coming through September. The performances have to go on, so home schoolers with their more flexible schedules are in much more demand. Shelley had a few practice sessions, and now she's performing with the group. This morning, she performed aboard the Empress of the North (the ship that ran aground a few months back). I haven't actually seen her perform yet, though I finally saw her in a borrowed dress this morning.

During the Ministerial Association meeting, one of the pastors mentioned a movie releasing towards the end of this year by the title, The Golden Compass. It is based on a book of the same title. This is the first of a trilogy.

Anyway, concern was expressed about how this book/movie portrays Christianity negatively, it is supposedly an attack at The Chronicles of Narnia, the author hates C. S. Lewis, and it was implied that the whole book is dark, devilish, occultic, and evil. The consensus during the meeting was that the theater manager should be asked to decline this film if there is a choice, and if not, to not show the film when it comes through. (As you might recall, we have one movie each week that comes through.)

Sounding like the furor over Dan Brown and his The Da Vinci Code, I opted to take what I heard with a large grain of salt and see for myself what the books contained as well as reviews and also primary source materials such as the author talking about his worldview. (Wikipedia entries for Philip Pullman and related entries contain quite a bit of additional links under References and External Links at the bottom of each entry. That's what I looked into.)

Our public library had the entire trilogy available so I checked out the first volume and read it straight through (about 7 hours) on Tuesday night. I sensed that the author hadn't fully revealed his worldview yet, so I went the next day to check out the remaining volumes. I am partway through the third volume right now.

I'll probably have more to write about on this topic later, but suffice to say that like with The Da Vinci Code, in my view, the harsh criticism is not warranted. Yes, the author states he is an atheist and he is very critical of organized and institutional religion of all colors. But underneath I also read a criticism of government and politics, business and greed, and a lot of other things that I'd agree with. I think the biggest irony is that when critics, in the name of religion, demonize works like this and try to prevent their distribution, it only goes to show that the author's thesis just might have some merit... It makes me wonder how many of these critics have actually read all three volumes...

I could go on, but I think I should wait until I finish the third volume so that I have the full picture of how all the different elements fit together. Otherwise I might misrepresent the author by writing something that isn't quite accurate. And I certainly don't want to do that. I had a very different impression at the end of the first volume than I do now. Don't judge too quickly...