It’s that time again. After successfully funding Fiery Crash’s In Clover through Kickstarter earlier this year, the Nehemiah Foundation is ready to release our seventh sponsored album of music—Warbler’s sophomore record, Sea of Glass.
And we need your help. Here’s the Kickstarter video to get you started:1
Global annihilation. Epistemology. Belief. Hope for the future. No, we’re not talking about a Bible conference on eschatology. We’re talking about the latest summer blockbuster from Disney. Tomorrowland is certainly similar to most summer blockbusters. It has action, explosions, adventure, suspense, and all the other things you would expect. But it also has a defined, at times even heavy-handed, moral riptide that has been generating some unusual conversations.
I use moral somewhat loosely, however. This is the Disney version of morality. And it has almost nothing at all to do with religion, narrowly defined. Strangely enough, in a movie this preachy, there isn’t even a single mention of Christians. Or a religious believer of any kind, really. Even in the all-inclusive, ham-fisted, politically correct finale montage, not one religious person is included as a “dreamer.” I guess the brave new world of the dreamers is peculiarly free of religion. Or is it?
Have you ever wondered why most Christian movies fall so flat? The vast majority of the Christian films produced in the last few decades rank among the worst movies ever made. In fact, at least one of them, Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas, had the dubious honor of being IMDb’s worst-rated movie of all time. (It’s currently tied for last.) It nearly swept the Razzies in 2014 too. One of its wins was for Worst Screen Combo: Kirk Cameron & His Ego. Ouch.
Some of the mockery and scorn leveled at Christian movies certainly stems from ideological differences. Most of the people who call Christian movies “lame” and “preachy” don’t belong to the choir. But as I’ve written before, much of the criticism leveled against Christian movies is completely legitimate, and we should take it seriously.
If you’re anything like most artists, and you probably are, you have a desire to become a great artist—a master. I have found very little information on how one goes about doing that. Most people talk like you either have genius in you or you do not. Though there may be some truth in this idea, mostly in terms of God’s discretionary privilege to grant gifts as he wills, this article will lay out the three stages of learning that every virtuoso without exception has had to attain. What God has given each of us in terms of raw talent is his business. But your self-awareness, discipline, and commitment to growth is your business. Let’s get to it.
Imitation is the beginning of any learning process. The first step in becoming a master is imitating the masters. If you are a painter, that means trying to mimic the methods, subjects, and styles of famous paintings. You find out what you can about how the masters used light, color, brush types and strokes, formats, and media. And you copy them.
This is the fifth installment in the “Whatever” series on a biblical view of the arts, drawn from Philippians 4:8. If you missed the last four articles, you can read them here: Whatever is True, Whatever is Honorable, Whatever is Just, and Whatever is Pure.
It would be easy to assume that no one needs instruction in what is lovely. Many consider this to be a matter of personal taste without any need for study, discipline, or assistance. This perspective is, however, not biblical. While no particular human aesthetic can claim to have a corner on loveliness, Paul would not have included this phrase in Philippians if loveliness were entirely arbitrary. If anything could be lovely depending only on your taste, what would be the point of directing people to lovely things? We already like what we think is lovely—no instruction or commandment required.
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