Review: The Golden Compass

by Geoff Ryan

I

watched The Golden Compass the other night accompanied by my younger brother and two friends. All three of these other guys were, or had been in their youth, avid readers of fantasy novels. One had read all three books in Philip Pullman’s trilogy, of which The Golden Compass is the first. They are also Christians: one a minister in training and one a youth pastor, both evangelicals. My brother is an occasional Anglican.

Afterward, the consensus among the four of us was that overall, the film was rather tedious (I fell asleep at one point) and ended in such an obvious set-up for the sequel that we felt a bit like marketing victims. The special effects were seamlessly brilliant. However since the advent of computer animation magic, such has become so commonplace, even in relatively low-budget productions, that it is now taken for granted. No big deal. The acting was OK. Daniel Craig makes a couple of cameo appearances but otherwise didn’t really come out to play much, presumably saving himself for the next two installments. Nicole Kidman is an alluring blend of seductive menace and heartbreaking beauty, but is impossibly tall and thin in comparison to everyone else (this was the best special effect of the whole film, in my opinion). The newly-discovered-child-actress, Dakota Blue Richards, is the type of child actress who is so obviously comfortable performing that you wonder if she was born naturally like the rest of us or simply created in some Hollywood laboratory.

› Continue reading

a mustard seed faith

abundant possibilities

The sign says “Sanctuary West”. Although the lettering is the same, the sign itself is brighter and bolder than the tired, faded old thing gracing the main building on Charles Street. It sits atop a large ground-level loading bay door in the middle of an innocuous strip of industrial units on a strangely mixed street in Toronto’s west end. (186 St. Helen’s Avenue, if you want to visit.) Peering across the opposite curb and through the bay door, half rolled up on this beautiful June morning, is a row of small, neat family homes. And that’s appropriate, since what goes on inside Sanctuary West has as much to do with growing people, nurturing all those good things we mean when we say “home,” as it does with producing fine wooden products. › Continue reading

Photo essay | Cyclone Sidr

theRubicon’s editor - Bramwell Ryan - has been volunteering for The Salvation Army in Bangladesh for the past three weeks. Ten days ago Cyclone Sidr hit the country and Bram started covering the Army’s relief efforts, supplying content to IHQ. Here, in a special post for theRubicon, he shares some thoughts, a photo essay and a radio documentary.

T

his is Jacob’s land, where prayer is almost a contact sport. In Bangladesh, they wrestle with the Almighty. They weep, punch the sky, wave a fist, shake and rock back-and-forth. They all pray at once, voices of old and young rising like a wave, a torrent of sound that beats against the night.

Do they hammer at the doors of heaven because they understand the fragility of life? That with millions living on land where people shouldn’t live, prayer is the thread that weaves their thin fabric of hope.

Could it be that anyone who wrestles that hard with God comes away wounded? And that Bangladesh’s wound is that it is always in the eye of the storm? Could it be that, like Jacob, they will overcome…

Click on the image to see photographs and listen to a documentary (runs: 5:17) by Bramwell Ryan.

Apocalypse now

Has pop culture’s preoccupation with doomsday theories blinded us to the true meaning of Revelation? by Russell Rook

T

hey tell me everybody’s read it! Well, almost everybody. So what’s a Christian to do when the latest pop-cult in English literature leaves you feeling uneasy and, at times, deeply disturbed. Now I know that it’s only fiction, a harmless piece of fun demonstrating, after decades of secularism, that we are all becoming spiritual again. But isn’t there something more sinister at work? The whole phenomenon is evidence enough of a universal dissatisfaction, a cosmic pang of hunger for a magic powerful enough to fulfil our deepest appetite. What’s more, I am convinced that this existential gap, this space into which we toss our ultimate questions and quest for meaning, is always God-shaped, regardless of the author. Having said all this, the books still unsettle me. It’s their emphasis on witchcraft and the demonic, as opposed to redemption and healing, their all-pervading sense of imminent judgement and, most of all, the framing of a plot whereby evil appears as prominent as goodness and, at times, even pre-eminent.

› Continue reading

Resurrected writers: Carpenter

The dead still speak
An occasional series by Maxwell Ryan

M

uch of the thrilling history of The Salvation Army is found not in the tomes of official history (although they should not be neglected), but in the many biographies that capture the life and times of the biographical subjects. All that constitutes the Army - policy, evangelism, administration, salvation, holiness and much else - are found in the countless biographies that flooded from busy Army presses in its earlier days. Among the most prolific and skillful biographers was Minnie Lindsay Carpenter, wife of General George Carpenter, who led the international Salvation Army from 1939 to 1945.

Minnie Carpenter (right) with her husband General George Carpenter & their daughter Stella

› Continue reading

Two from Taube

Poems by Jonathan Taube

La Portada, Antofogasta

Today I saw the ocean stretch on for an eternity

Today I spit in the Pacific and gave myself away to it all
Layers of rock and curtains of sheer cliff so immense
all of it so much like the skin of a fingertip
The water rushing through its cracks and crevices
The white noise of the ocean’s approval
You’re there somewhere
I’m mostly sure most days
I’m mostly sure we’re all we have together

› Continue reading

Solitude & Sin… Yet again

Three poems by Adely Thélus Charles

SIN?

Like a villain it stalks us day & night;
Seducing everything in its sight.
Diggin’ our grave it its mission,
For it will find no better satisfaction.

A sinful life resulting in eternity in Hell,
Shouldn’t be our destiny.
For God didn’t put us under a spell,
Knowing that His promise is life eternally.

Salvation is free to those who are lost,
For Jesus Christ definitely paid the cost.
Oh! What a day that will be,
When the Son of man comes and sets us free.

September 1st, 2000

› Continue reading

Resurrected writers: Chesterton

The dead still speak
An occasional series by Maxwell Ryan

H

e was a large man in every way. He stood 6 feet 4 inches and weighed almost 300 lbs. He usually wore a cape and a crumpled hat, with a swordstick in hand, and had a cigar hanging out of his mouth. To some, he was also larger than life. And in literary and religious circles there is still disagreement about his place in history, even though he died more than 70 years ago (1936). During his 71 years of energetic and creative life he wrote around 80 books, several hundred poems, some 200 short stories, 4,000 essays, and several plays. He was a literary and social critic, historian, playwright, novelist, Roman Catholic theologian and apologist, debater, and mystery writer (he created the eccentric and lovable amateur detective, Father Brown). Though he wrote a number of volumes on philosophy he was always proud to remind people that he was first and foremost a journalist.

› Continue reading

Resurrected writers: Brengle

The dead still speak
An occasional series by Maxwell Ryan

O

ne of the most neglected of foundational Salvation Army writers is Samuel Logan Brengle. Outside the Army in holiness circles and among people who are serious about their spiritual life his writings are sought after, read, quoted and cherished. But in the wider Salvation Army, apart from the United States, he is considered to be passé, too old-fashioned and unrealistic in his ideas about holiness. This, of course, is a tragedy for the Army, and an indication of how far we have moved from one of our denominational distinctives.

Even though the Army appears not to have abandoned its 10th doctrine, it has been reinterpreted a number of times so that its original intent and Brengle’s exposition of it have been weakened.

› Continue reading

Resurrected writers: Underhill

The dead still speak

An occasional series by Maxwell Ryan

I

n my library is a well-worn paperback that, according to my notations, I read during Lent in 1998, and again during Lent in 2007, though I have dipped into it occasionally at other times. The 105-page book is Lent with Evelyn Underhill, edited by an American priest, G. P. Mellick Belshaw, published (and reprinted) in 1964.

Who, you might ask, is Evelyn Underhill? She was a Christian mystic who, during her lifetime (1875 – 1941), was one of the most widely-read writers on the spiritual life in the first 50 years of the 20th century.

› Continue reading