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Why fairy stories still matter, in an age of secular myths and marvels

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Why fairy stories still matter, in an age of secular myths and marvels

Demons appear on movie screens all the time, but poet Richard Rohlin is convinced he has actually seen them at work when counseling young people whose search for meaning has driven them deep into experiments with sex, drugs and the occult.

"The stories that I can't tell would curl your toenails," he said, speaking at the Eighth Day Institute in Wichita, Kansas. "If you think that these spiritual realities are not still with us, you are deluding yourself. ... The magic is coming back into the world. Something is happening and it is not an unqualified good."

The young people he works with in Dallas are not interested in sermons and detailed descriptions of why their lives are broken. But they are open to fantasies, myths and tales -- ancient and modern -- about unseen, spiritual realities that interact with their lives.

Millions of Americans know where to find stories about angels, demons, warriors, seers, giants, demigods and heroic kings and queens. They head straight to movie theaters and cable television, where they find entire universes of content offering visions of fantastic worlds. The last place they would seek inspiration of this kind is in churches.

The irony is that some of these works draw inspiration from the fantasy classics celebrated in the ecumenical Eighth Day Institute's annual fall celebration of The Inklings, a mid-20th Century circle of Christian writers in Oxford, England, that included C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and others.

This year's lectures focused on Scottish writer George MacDonald, often called the "grandfather of the Inklings," who is best known for "Phantastes," "The Golden Key," "Lilith" and many other works. The festival included Celtic and folk musicians, along with workshops on topics such as "The Art of Making Mead" and "Publishing for the Moral Imagination."

The goal of MacDonald and The Inklings, noted Rohlin, was to reclaim an older vision of life in which physical realities corresponded to spiritual realities and nothing was considered purely material. The real divide was between "the seen and the unseen," not between the "spiritual and the material."

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Apostasy? That word led Bishop FitzSimons Allison out of the Episcopal Church

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Apostasy? That word led Bishop FitzSimons Allison out of the Episcopal Church

It has been three decades since the Rt. Rev. C. FitzSimons Allison took his first step away from his life as one of the Episcopal Church's strongest evangelical voices.

That tentative move took place in a small-group discussion during an Episcopal House of Bishops meeting in Kanuga, N.C., during his final year serving as the 12th bishop of the historic Diocese of South Carolina. The topic that day was, "Why are we dysfunctional?"

Allison attacked Episcopal priests and seminary professors who were openly proclaiming their faith in an ancient, erotic, divine spirit "older and greater" than the God of the Bible. There was, Allison said, a clear, ancient word for that -- "apostasy."

Other bishops said they had no problem accepting clergy who were testing the boundaries of ancient Christian doctrines.

After that clash, Allison remained in his pew and declined to share the consecrated bread and wine during a Holy Eucharist with the entire House of Bishops. He didn't publicly discuss this act of broken Communion for several years, but his silent protest was a poignant symbol of early cracks forming in the global Anglican Communion.

Now the 95-year-old bishop has officially resigned his status as an Episcopal bishop, making his departure official. Two weeks ago, he wrote U.S. Presiding Bishop Michael Curry to clarify that he had been received into the Anglican Church in North America -- a body recognized as valid by many Anglican bishops in Africa, Asia and the Global South, but not by the Archbishop of Canterbury or leaders in the U.S. Episcopal Church.

"Some people said that I didn't need to do this, because everyone knows where I stand," said Allison, reached by telephone. "But I felt, the way things have been going, that I still needed to make things official. That's just the way I am."

Allison was ordained as a priest in 1953 and then received a doctorate from Oxford University.

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Loretta Lynn's art put rhinestone feminism and Gospel truth in the same package

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Loretta Lynn's art put rhinestone feminism and Gospel truth in the same package

On many Sundays, Loretta Lynn sent her social-media followers a thought for the day from Scripture.

Two days before her death at her ranch in Hurricane Mills, Tenn., the 90-year-old country-music legend posted two verses, repeating the second verse to stress her point.

Lynn's final Instagram post said: "Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God. John 3:20-21"

The feisty superstar experienced plenty of darkness and light and shared the gritty details in a career that changed the role of women in Nashville. Lynn was raised poor in the Kentucky hills and spent years in church pews before she started singing in honky-tonks. Her husband Oliver "Dolittle" Lynn struggled with alcoholism, but they stuck together in a union that inspired songs about love and loyalty, as well as break-ups and fist fights, such as "Don't Come Home A-Drinkin' (With Lovin' On Your Mind)."

Lynn vowed to tell the truth about both sides of her life. She loved to sing hymns and gospel music, while critics hailed the rhinestone feminism of her hits such as "You Ain't Woman Enough," "The Pill," "Rated X" and "You're Looking at Country."

In her "Coal Miner's Daughter" memoir, Lynn described her faith journey: "I believed it all, but for some reason I was never baptized. After I started in music, I got away from going to church and reading the Bible. I believe I was living the way God meant me to, but I wasn't giving God the right attention."

In that same 1976 memoir, she added: "I'm trying to lead a good Christian life, especially since I got baptized two years ago. So there ain't too much spicy to tell about me -- just the truth." Christian Chronicle editor Bobby Ross, Jr., noted that she later added a strong kicker to that: "Nobody's perfect. The only one that ever was, was crucified.”

Anyone who explored the details of Lynn's life and music knew that she wasn't a good fit in the "elite feminist establishment" or among advocates of a "status-quo idea of domesticity," noted Russell Moore, Christianity Today's editor in chief.

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Old enough? Faith, family and America's falling marriage statistics (Part I)

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Old enough? Faith, family and America's falling marriage statistics (Part I)

For decades, viewers have enjoyed the Japanese reality-TV series "Old Enough!" in which preschool children venture into the streets alone to run errands for their parents.

What if American women asked their live-in boyfriends to stop playing videogames, leave their couches and run errands? In the Saturday Night Life sketch "Old Enough! Longterm Boyfriends!" guest host Selena Gomez asked her helpless boyfriend of three years, played by cast member Mikey Day, to buy her eyeliner and two shallots.

This man-baby ends up in tears with a big bag of onions and "a blush palette for African-American women." The frustrated girlfriend says she may need a mid-morning glass of wine.

There was wisdom in that comedy, for pastors willing to see it, said sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia.

"There's a whole class of young men who are not flourishing personally and professionally. … The systems have broken down that help raise up attractive, successful men. Churches used to be one of those support systems," he said, reached by telephone.

"The future of the church runs through solid marriages and happy families. The churches that find ways to help men and women prepare for marriage and then encourage them to start families are the churches that will have a future."

The crisis is larger than lonely, under-employed and Internet-addicted men. Rising numbers of young women are anxious, depressed and even choosing self-harm and suicide.

The coronavirus pandemic made things worse, but researchers were already seeing danger signs, noted San Diego State psychology professor Jean Twenge, in a recent Institute for Family Studies essay. She is the author of the book "iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy -- and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood -- and What That Means for the Rest of Us."

"Something began to go wrong in the lives of teens about 10 years ago," she noted.

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1991 and 2022 columns: Mysteries lingered about religious views of Mikhail Gorbachev

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1991 and 2022 columns: Mysteries lingered about religious views of Mikhail Gorbachev

It isn't every day that one of the creators of a political thriller gets to ask its real-life protagonist to evaluate the novel's plot.

But that happened when the late Billy Wireman, president of Queens University in Charlotte, N.C., handed the last Soviet Union leader a copy of "The Secret Diary of Mikhail Gorbachev." The 1990 novel was written by journalist Frye Gaillard, based on a Wireman idea.

The plot: There were spiritual motivations behind "glasnost" and "perestroika," Gorbachev's risky ideas to restructure Soviet life. But furious KGB insiders -- including a would-be assassin -- managed to steal Gorbachev's diary, in which he confessed his Christian faith.

Wireman wrote down Gorbachev's response after hearing the book's premise: "You must have been reading my real diary."

This faith question never vanished, no matter how often Gorbachev reaffirmed his atheism, while also stressing his respect for the beliefs of his Communist father and devout Russian Orthodox mother. His maternal grandparents hid holy icons behind their home's token Vladimir Lenin portraits.

Gorbachev died on August 30 at age 91 and his funeral was held in the Pillar Hall of Russia's House of the Unions, after President Vladimir Putin denied him a state funeral. He was buried next to his wife Raisa, who died in 1999 of cancer, in the cemetery of Moscow's Novodevichy Convent.

"Regardless of the geo-political realities of that era, there was something going on inside Gorbachev," said Gaillard, writer in residence at the University of South Alabama in Mobile and former Southern editor of The Charlotte Observer. He is the author of 30-plus books, including "A Hard Rain: America in the 1960s," which won the 2019 F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Prize.

"Why did he do it? That's the question that won't go away," Gaillard added. "That's what has fascinated people for decades and it still does. We may never know now that he's gone. … But all that speculation about his beliefs is at the heart of the book."

Gaillard traveled to the Soviet Union before writing the novel and filled many notebooks with information and images from Soviet and American insiders who, in private, were asking similar questions about Gorbachev. Russian Orthodox leaders believed his mother's faith was crucial.

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Where is heaven? Ancient believers have answers for that modern Sam Harris question

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Where is heaven? Ancient believers have answers for that modern Sam Harris question

When cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin returned to earth in 1961, after the first manned spaceflight, Soviet leaders claimed he said: "I went up to space, but I didn't encounter God."

Venturing into similar territory, superstar atheist Sam Harris rocked cyberspace during a recent Triggernometry YouTube appearance in which he discussed Donald Trump, faith elements in "wokeness" and the flocks of Americans who insist on believing in heaven.

Political Twitter screamed when he said there was "a left-wing conspiracy to deny the presidency to Donald Trump. … Absolutely, but I think it was warranted."

But comedians Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster pushed back, asking if Harris was justifying moral relativism. Perhaps today's truth wars, the Triggernometry team suggested, were linked to a famous G.K. Chesterton quip: "When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything."

During the ensuing discussion, Harris offered another viral soundbite: "Where is heaven, exactly, given that we have multiple telescopes up there beaming back tens of billions of years' worth of information?" Yet millions of Americans still embrace the supernatural claims of an ancient faith, including that Jesus will return to "raise the living and the dead."

"You'd be surprised by the number of percent of sober, non-Bible-thumping people who would say 'yes' to that question," he said. "They might be Christian, they might be, listen, 'I love the Bible. It gives me a great moral framework. It gives my kids a great moral framework. This is the tradition I'm identified with. This is all super important to me' -- but that's kind of as far as it goes. Right? Like, I'm not going to make magical claims about flying saviors who are literally going to come down from … heaven."

While the Twitter masses raged, the French-Canadian iconographer and writer Jonathan Pageau recorded a video essay on his "The Symbolic World" channel about why materialists and religious believers keep debating the meaning of terms such as "heaven" and "earth."

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Ron Sider's struggle: Trying to be 'completely pro-life' can upset lots of Americans

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Ron Sider's struggle: Trying to be 'completely pro-life' can upset lots of Americans

It was the kind of Pope John Paul II quotation that was powerful and prophetic -- but hard to print on a political bumper sticker.

"America will remain a beacon of freedom for the world as long as it stands by those moral truths which are the very heart of its historical experience," he said, during his 1999 U.S. tour. "And so, America: If you want peace, work for justice. If you want justice, defend life. If you want life, embrace truth -- the truth revealed by God."

One American activist who paid close attention was Ronald J. Sider, a Mennonite theologian who was already several decades into a career built on asking Americans to ponder precisely that equation.

Politicians on left and right would cheer as John Paul attacked the modern world's "culture of death," said Sider. But, in private, Democrats and Republicans would groan.

"People on the left will love what he had to say about the death penalty and racism and caring for the poor," said Sider, when I reached him by telephone. "But many liberals are going to squirm because he ties these issues directly to traditional Christian teachings on abortion and euthanasia and family life. Meanwhile, some people on the right will squirm because the pope made it very clear that he links these pro-life issues to the death penalty and poverty, sickness, hunger and even the environment."

Sider added: "We live in an age of incredible relativism in this society and even in the church. We live in a land that seems to have lost its way."

These kinds of tensions defined Sider's own struggles as a hard-to-label political activist and ecumenical leader. He died on July 27 at the age of 82.

Christianity Today listed Sider's classic "Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger" as one of the 20th century's most influential religion books. The flagship evangelical magazine also ran this headline with a cover story about Sider's career -- "Unsettling Crusade: Why does this man irritate so many people?"

Conservatives often noted that one of Sider's first forays into politics was creating Evangelicals for McGovern during the 1972 White House race.

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Open Bible to Psalms: What messages are seen there, but not in modern praise music?

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Open Bible to Psalms: What messages are seen there, but not in modern praise music?

It's hard to read the Psalms without encountering one of the 65 references to the Hebrew word "mishpat," which is usually translated as "judgments" or "justice."

The term appears 23 times in Psalm 119, in passages worshipers have sung for centuries, such as: "I will praise You with uprightness of heart, when I learn Your righteous judgments. I will keep Your statutes; Oh, do not forsake me utterly!"

But when Old Testament scholar Michael J. Rhodes dug into the Top 25 worship songs listed by Christian Copyright Licensing International, he found symbolic trends in the lyrics. For starters, "justice" was mentioned one time, in one song.

"The poor are completely absent in the top 25. By contrast, the Psalter uses varied language to describe the poor on nearly every page," he wrote, in a Twitter thread. "The widow, refugee, oppressed are completely absent from the top 25. …

“Whereas 'enemies' are the third most common character in the Psalms, they rarely show up in the Top 25. When they do, they appear to be enemies only in a spiritual sense. Maybe most devastatingly … not a SINGLE question is ever posed to God. The Top 25 never ask God anything. Prick the Psalter and it bleeds the cries of the oppressed pleading with God to act."

That's a long way from a Vespers Psalm promising: "The Lord sets the prisoners free; the Lord opens the eyes of the blind. The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down; the Lord loves the righteous. The Lord watches over the sojourners, he upholds the widow and the fatherless; but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin. … Praise the Lord."

When these issues surface in social media they often veer into debates about politics and social justice, noted Craig Greenfield, author of "Urban Halo" and "Subversive Jesus." A former dot-com entrepreneur, he leads the global youth ministry "Alongsiders International," based in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

The question, he said, is why so many worship songs focus on personal experience and feelings -- alone. This has been true with new hymns for several generations.

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Norm Macdonald: Wisecracks about big, eternal questions while his clock ticks louder

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Norm Macdonald: Wisecracks about big, eternal questions while his clock ticks louder

Comedians frequently take shots at taboo targets, but that wasn't what Norm Macdonald was doing when he addressed Down's Syndrome while solo recording what became the new "Nothing Special" on Netflix.

"I love people with Down Syndrome," said Macdonald, in a no-audience performance packed with his familiar pauses and bemused expressions. "I wish I had Down Syndrome, and I'll tell you why. They're happy. You know what I mean? …

"What's wrong with that? … People get mad at them … and they pity them. Now, who's the bad person in that scenario?"

The former Saturday Night Life star -- who died September 14 after a secret nine-year fight with cancer -- recorded nearly an hour of material during the coronavirus pandemic, before yet another operation in the summer of 2020. He said he "didn't want to leave anything on the table in case things went south."

This Netflix finale offers fresh musings on mortality and morality that, with Macdonald's blunt language and haunting images, evolve into meditations on how modern people deceive themselves. The X-factors in his art were religious faith and his love of literature ranging from Mark Twain to Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

"Macdonald showed respect for basically everyone, with the exception of himself and people like O.J. Simpson and Bill Clinton," said Rich Cromwell, a television professional and essayist for The Federalist. "He was not a Christian comedian -- that's clear. But that was part of who he was, and he treated faith with respect. …

"This Down's Syndrome material is a perfect example. He didn't turn that into an overt argument about abortion, but it's clear that he is saying all life is worthy of respect, even if some people don't judge that life to be worthy. He's saying people with Down's Syndrome are God's children, no matter what."

"Nothing Special" ends with an A-list reaction panel -- David Letterman, Adam Sandler, Conan O'Brien, Dave Chappelle, David Spade and Molly Shannon -- who knew Macdonald as a friend and colleague. This special was full of "third-rail stuff," noted O'Brien.