“From the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God. May you be strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy, giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son,
in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.“He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace
by the blood of his cross.“And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him, if indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast,
not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard.”—Colossians 1:9-23 (ESV)Laminin is a cell adhesion protein, one of a family of proteins which, according to Wikipedia, are “an integral part of the structural scaffolding in almost every animal tissue”; the article also says that “Laminin is vital to making sure overall body structures hold together.” Or, as a molecular biologist in Texas once put it to Louie Giglio, a story he tells in the clip embedded below, laminin is “like the rebar of the human body . . . the glue of the human body.”Now, a great many folks out there already know this story, due to the wide audience the Passion conferences have had, so while this was new to me, it isn’t to many; but it’s still quite remarkable. Take a look—here’s the molecular structure of laminin:
So in other words, this molecule that’s vital to holding us together . . . is cross-shaped. The structure of our bodies, at a deep and fundamental level, is cruciform. What’s more, as my delightfully perceptive wife points out, it echoes the Trinity, as it’s a cross made up of three parts.God has left testimonies to himself buried all through creation, little embedded parables for those who have eyes to see his hand and ears open to hear his voice; this, I believe, is one of them, just a little witness to and reminder of the truth Paul articulates in Colossians: Jesus Christ is the one who holds all things together. This is a spiritual truth, but it’s also a far greater truth about our whole world: Jesus is the one who holds everything together, who holds it all in his hand and sustains it all by his will. He’s the one who keeps the planets orbiting their suns and the suns moving in the vast dance of the cosmos, and the one who keeps protons bound to neutrons and electrons spinning joyfully in their orbitals; all that exists, including us, exists because he continues to will it to exist, because he holds it in his mind and heart and remembers it to itself. And in our own bodies, we have a little echo of that fact, a little parable to point us to that truth, in the tripartite cross-shaped molecule that is “the rebar of the human body.”Thanks, Hap, for teaching me that.
Author Archives: Rob Harrison
National Geographic‘s thirty pieces of silver
Remember the big media story a while back about the Gospel of Judas? Remember the stories about how Judas was really a good guy? It appears now that the text (which is in any case a late Gnostic text, and thus not as significant as some people wanted to make it) was seriously misrepresented—and that National Geographic is in large part to blame. It’s clear they wanted to make use of Judas for their own purposes, and that one of those purposes was to make their thirty pieces of silver off him. They wanted the media splash, they wanted headlines like “Ancient Text Says Jesus Asked Judas to Hand Him to the Romans” (that one courtesy of the Arizona Republic), and they wanted the profits that came with that, courtesy of the high-profile documentary, the DVD sales, and the book sales. And if proper scholarly procedures, and with them proper scholarly standards, went by the wayside as a result—taking a proper scholarly concern for accuracy and truth with them—then so be it.
On a lighter note
I don’t know how many of the folks who read this blog will care one way or the other that Paul DePodesta, special assistant for baseball operations for the San Diego Padres and former GM for the Los Angeles Dodgers, started a blog this month, but I did think even those least interested in baseball would appreciate its title: It Might Be Dangerous… You Go First. (And if you do like baseball, this promises to be a great place to read about it.)
Skeptical theism
I linked to this by the by in my previous post, having discovered that it was up while I was looking for something else, but it really deserves its own: Edward Tingley has a stellar article in Touchstone called “The Skeptical Inquirer: If Only Atheists Were the Skeptics They Think They Are,” which I commend to your reading. It is, drawing on Pascal, a devastating frontal assault on the idea that the absence of scientific evidence for God is an argument against the existence of God. As Dr. Tingley says, “Skepticism raises the question, Is there any way forward after we have given up on material evidence? It certainly doesn’t answer it.”
Here are a few brief excerpts from the essay to whet your appetite:
Unbelievers think that skepticism is their special virtue, the key virtue believers lack. Bolstered by bestselling authors, they see the skeptical and scientific mind as muscular thinking, which the believer has failed to develop. He could bulk up if he wished to, by thinking like a scientist, and wind up at the “agnosticism” of a Dawkins or the atheism of a Dennett—but that is just what he doesn’t want, so at every threat to his commitments he shuns science.
That story is almost exactly the opposite of the truth. . . .
There are skeptical theists; Pascal was one. Skepticism and theism go well together. By a “skeptic” I mean a person who believes that in some particular arena of desired knowledge we just cannot have knowledge of the foursquare variety that we get elsewhere, and who sees no reason to bolster that lack with willful belief. . . .
Evidence is just not available to demonstrate the existence of God, said Pascal, who called himself one of those creatures who lack the humility that makes a natural believer. In that, he was of our time: We are pretty much all like that now. Three hundred and fifty years ago he laid out our situation for us: Modern man confronts the question of God from the starting point of skepticism, the conviction that there is no conclusive physical or logical evidence that the God of the Bible exists. . . .
This is where the modern person usually starts in his assault on the question, Is God real or imaginary?
This is base camp, above the tree-line of convincing reasons and knock-down arguments, at the far edge of things we can kick and see, and it is all uphill from here. Thus, it is astounding how many Dawkinses and Dennetts, undecideds and skeptical nay-sayers—that sea of “progressive” folk who claim to “think critically” about religion and either “take theism on” or claim they are “still looking”—who have not reached the year 1660 in their thinking. They almost never pay attention to what the skeptic Pascal said about this enquiry.
Instead, the dogmatic reflex, ever caring for human comfort, has flexed and decided the question already, has told them what to believe in advance of investigation and rushed them back to the safety of life as usual.
The modern thinking person who rightly touts the virtues of science—skepticism, logic, commitment to evidence—must possess the lot. But agnostics are not skeptical, half the atheists are not logical, and the rest refuse to go where the evidence is. None measures up in these modern qualities to Pascal.
I encourage you to read the rest—it’s truly a superb piece.
Thoughts on the nature of Christian faith
What people don’t realise is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe.
In his comments on the song inspired by this quote (video and lyrics below), Steve Taylor wrote,
The cost of discipleship—the ideal of taking up your cross everyday and following Jesus—makes it hard to believe, because Christianity demands things from us that we don’t naturally want to give. In the words of playwright Dennis Potter, “There is, in the end, no such thing as a simple faith.”
This is pure truth, at least as regards Christianity. In the broadest possible sense, believing is easy: everyone believes something, because we have to. We can’t ground our lives on reason alone, because a chain of reasoning requires a starting point; however far back you reason, that starting point recedes still further. We can’t use our reasoning to provide that starting point, because we’d end up with circular reasoning, however great the circle might be. Our reasoning has to begin from ultimate premises which we cannot prove—such as “There is a God,” or “There is no God”—but can only take as faith commitments. Once we’ve done that, we can interrogate those premises, and the conclusions we’ve drawn from them, and see if the whole thing is rationally consistent, if the beliefs we’ve developed are logically coherent with each other and accurately descriptive of the world as we know it; but we cannot remove the necessity of faith undergirding our reasoning. Indeed, even reasoning is in some sense an act of faith—faith in our ability to reason, and in the viability of reason itself. As St. Anselm put it, reason is faith seeking understanding.
That said, while believing something is easy, believing in Christ isn’t. Far from it, in fact. And this isn’t for the reasons atheists and others want to advance, about the problem of evil and the problem of miracles and suchlike; “scientific” objections like the latter are ultimately just assertions (no, science hasn’t disproved miracles, you just want to believe it has), while philosophical and existential objections ultimately tell against atheists just as much as Christians. (If you think evil is a problem for Christians, just stop and consider the problem it poses for atheists. It’s a different kind of problem, but no less real for all that.) I’ve known people whose decision to believe in Christ rested on logical argument, but very few; and I’ve never known anyone who was actually driven to atheism by reason. (Thus the philosopher Edward Tingley, comparing modern atheists unfavorably to Pascal, writes, “Agnostics are not skeptical, half the atheists are not logical, and the rest refuse to go where the evidence is.”) Rather, in my experience, the main reason people choose not to believe in Christ is because they don’t want to. As Chesterton wryly observed,
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found difficult and left untried.
The reason for this is that the Christian faith isn’t designed to meet our “felt needs”; it isn’t, as so many atheists smugly assume, just a matter of believing what we want to believe. As Flannery O’Connor put it, it isn’t a big warm electric blanket, it’s the cross—and we don’t particularly want the cross. We don’t particularly want a God who calls us to deny ourselves and take up our cross (which, you remember, was an implement designed to torture people to death) and then has the gall to say, “My yoke is well-fitted and my burden is light.” We can’t get to the point where we want that until we realize that our needs go much, much deeper than what we feel on the surface; we can’t get to that point until we realize that the burden of taking up our cross is in fact light compared to the burden of our sin, and that Jesus’ yoke is indeed well-fitted, not to doing what we want to do, but to doing what we need to do. Getting there, however, isn’t easy; it’s far easier to turn aside and believe something else instead.
And before you start to object that the behavior of many Christians is another major reason why people turn away from faith, let me say that that’s just another example of the same problem: many of us in the church don’t want the cross either. Even for many within the church, it’s harder to believe than not to, and so it’s all too easy for us to choose not to. Instead, we find something else to believe in—a structure of behavioral rules, a set of political commitments, a system of how-tos for “the life you’ve always wanted”—and call that Christianity instead. The thing is, that kind of belief can build organizations, even big ones, and it can attract followers, even committed ones, and it can do a lot of things that impress this world—but what it can’t do is raise Christians. It takes a church to raise a Christian, and specifically, it takes a church that’s trying to be the church; and churches that take those kinds of approaches are trying to be something else. They are, essentially, counterfeit churches practicing counterfeit Christianity—and, in the process, stifling people who should be trading in slavery to sin for freedom in Christ, so that they wind up escaping one mold merely to be squeezed into another. Follow that out too far and you wind up with the kind of thing Taylor satirized when he wrote,
So now I see the whole design;
My church is an assembly line.
The parts are there—I’m feeling fine!
I want to be a clone!
You also wind up with the kind of church, and the kind of church member, that turns people away from Christianity, without those people ever realizing that it isn’t really Christianity they’re rejecting.
The bottom line here is that true Christian faith is not just intellectual assent to a series of propositions, nor is it a commitment to pursue what we consider to be good and helpful behaviors (though in some sense, both of those are involved): true Christian faith is a belief in a Person, and a commitment to follow that Person wherever he might lead us. To borrow from the old story about the Great Blondin, it’s not just a matter of agreeing that if we get in the wheelbarrow, he’ll be able to push us safely across his tightrope over Niagara Falls—it’s a matter of actually getting in the wheelbarrow and hanging on. It’s a whole-life commitment, giving everything we have to follow Jesus.
The great offense of the Christian life to us is that it’s not about us at all—it’s not about our goals, our desires, our felt needs, and how to get what we consider to be “our best life now”; it’s not about making us better able to go out and be our best selves, so that we can take the credit for what wonderful people we are. Rather, it’s about setting all that aside and casting ourselves on Jesus, living lives of radical abandonment to the grace of God, letting him have all the glory for what he does in and through us—and letting him decide what exactly that will be, and where, and when, and how. This is the only way to real life, but it isn’t easy; in fact, O’Connor and Taylor are right: it’s harder to believe than not to.
Harder to Believe than Not to
Nothing is colder than the winds of change
Where the chill numbs the dreamer till a shadow remains;
Among the ruins lies your tortured soul—
Was it lost there, or did your will surrender control?Chorus:
Shivering with doubts that were left unattended,
So you toss away the cloak that you should have mended.
Don’t you know by now why the chosen are few?
It’s harder to believe than not to—
Harder to believe than not to.It was a confidence that got you by,
When you knew you believed it, but you didn’t know why.
No one imagines it will come to this,
But it gets so hard when people don’t want to listen.Chorus
Some stay paralyzed until they succumb;
Others do what they feel, but their senses are numb.
Some get trampled by the pious throng—
Still, they limp along.Are you sturdy enough to move to the front?
Is it nods of approval or the truth that you want?
And if they call it a crutch, then you walk with pride;
Your accusers have always been afraid to go outside.They shiver with doubts that were left unattended,
Then they toss away the cloak that they should have mended.
You know by now why the chosen are few:
It’s harder to believe than not to.I believe.
Words and music: Steve Taylor
© 1987 Soylent Tunes
From the album I Predict 1990, by Steve Taylor
Have an honorable Memorial Day
This might be from a beer company, but it’s still right on. I grew up around the Navy, so I know our military’s far from perfect, but still: we should be proud of those who served, and those who are serving now; we as a nation owe them far more than we could ever repay, and we should never forget that.
Bridging the culture gap
Calvin Miller has an excellent piece up on the Christianity Today website called “Rethinking Suburban Evangelism,” which is of broader application than the title suggests. Though focused on “the push-button Zion of those who have made it and therefore have it made . . . the new Eden with little need for God: Paradise Found, where churches ulcerate themselves trying to sell self-denial to the pampered,” when he asks, “Can the urgency of the Cross ever be made real to those who cocoon in front of an entertainment center and insist on defining hell as dandelions and heaven as the proper side of town?” he’s raising a question that applies far beyond the bounds of suburbia—and his conclusion speaks to every ministry setting: “We become the most like Christ when our motivation is distilled love.”
Moral arguments and the political process
I have believed for quite some time, as have many others, that one of the biggest problems with public discourse in this country is the insistence by folks on the left that religious and moral arguments are illegitimate in the public square; there are voices on the left who have sought to challenge this idea in a constructive way (as Sen. Obama did two years ago) but they’ve been few and far between. (There have been rather more who have followed the invidious lead of Jim Wallis in arguing that such arguments are permissible if they support liberal conclusions.) The idea that liberals should take the moral and religious arguments that undergird conservative positions seriously and engage them accordingly has mostly been anathema to folks on the left.
That’s why it was so encouraging to see Austin Dacey’s book The Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life, which came out two months ago from Prometheus Books. Fr. Richard John Neuhaus commented quite positively on the book at the time, writing,
On almost all the hot-button issues—abortion, embryo-destructive research, same-sex marriage, Darwinism as a comprehensive philosophy, etc.—Dacey is, in my judgment, on the wrong side. But he is right about one very big thing. These contests are not between people who, on the one side, are trying to impose their morality on others, and people who, on the other side, subscribe to a purely procedural and amoral rationality. Over the years, some of us have been trying to elicit from our opponents the recognition that they, too, are making moral arguments and hoping that their moral vision will prevail. But in the world of secular liberalism, morality is the motive that dare not speak its name. Austin Dacey strongly agrees. I expect he would not agree that the secularist moral vision entails a quasi-religious understanding of reality, but one step at a time, and The Secular Conscience is a critically important first step. . . .
Dacey recognizes the gravely flawed view of John Rawls that public decisions must be advanced by public reasons recognized by all reasonable parties. That is not the case with most questions requiring political decisions. He writes:
“A policy can be justified when it is favored by a convergence of citizens’ varying reasons, without there being any consensus on those reasons themselves. And there is no reason why the claims of conscience can’t be a part of such convergence. . . . So long as our reasons converge, the decision is justified to each of us and the ideal of legitimacy is preserved. There is nothing necessarily illegitimate about conscience.” . . .
On many questions of great public moment, most of us will disagree with Austin Dacey. At the same time, he should be recognized as an ally in his contention that these are moral questions that must be addressed by moral argument.
Two months later, the New York Times’ Peter Steinfels has taken note of the book (and also, incidentally, of Fr. Neuhaus’ comments on it); and though it seems clear that his main concern is whether Dacey’s approach will in fact benefit the liberal agenda, he lets Dr. Dacey have his say. This is important, because while Dr. Dacey, too, seeks to strengthen secular liberalism, he believes that having “a fundamental conversation” is important enough to risk the possibility that it might not produce the results he wants.
The most interesting part of Steinfels’ article, at least to my way of thinking, is the last paragraph:
“The Secular Conscience” glows with Mr. Dacey’s confidence in John Stuart Mill’s principle that every idea should be “fully, frequently and fearlessly discussed,” lest it “be held as a dead dogma, not a living truth.”
The thing that interests me about that is the implicit admission that secular ideas can be dead dogmas just as easily as religious ones can; which is a truth that points to the big admission that secularists need to make, that secularism is in fact a faith like any other, and no more rational than other types of faith commitments (though there are certainly forms of both religious and secular faith which are less rational). That way lies the recognition, which we all need, that we should regard those with whom we disagree as equals with whom we should argue with respect and from whom we have much to learn, rather than as inferiors whom we may freely mock, berate, or dismiss. If Dr. Dacey’s argument leads eventually to secularists abandoning their self-assumed (and self-congratulatory) assurance of superiority to argue with their opponents humbly rather than dogmatically, he will have done our culture a great service indeed.
HT for the NYT article: Presbyweb
Ten random things that make me happy
Pauline at Perennial Student posted her list, and it turns out it’s a meme that’s been going around (having started here, as best as I can tell), so I figured I’d pick it up and send it on; a little light-heartedness is good for the soul. Most of these things aren’t really all that random, or unique to me, either, but never mind.
- Worshiping God
- Holding my wife
- A little-girl hug from one (or more) of my daughters
- Playing “my bunny!” with my youngest daughter
- Preaching—when it’s going well
- Singing along with the music while I’m driving
- Rereading a well-loved book
- Baking a pie—if the crust behaves (if not, there is frustration along the way)
- Watching one of my girls learn something
- Sunshine on a windy day
Prince Caspian
Last night, my wife and I went out to see Prince Caspian—it was our first movie date in years (it’s nice to be able to go to the movies again)—and we loved it. I know there’s been a lot of back-and-forth about the movie vs. the book; Frederica Mathewes-Green was actually so bold as to say the movie tops the book, while other voices have, much more predictably, argued the opposite. Douglas Gresham, Lewis’ stepson and the movie’s co-producer, said in an interview with CT that the movie “portrays probably even more strongly than the book the essential message of Prince Caspian,” even as he concedes that the book itself isn’t all that strong. I wouldn’t go as far as Mathewes-Green, who calls it “a dud”—I think she needs to read Michael Ward’s book Planet Narnia, which I’m looking forward to reading (soon, I hope)—but I do think it’s the weakest of the books; in reading it to my older girls recently, I really felt the force of the anticlimax.In light of that, while I don’t want to wade into the fray over comparing the book and the movie (in part because I don’t want to take the time to write a fully coherent review essay, just the movie-review equivalent of a notes column), I do want to offer observations in praise and support of the movie. Warning: spoilers ahead (I will pull no punches); don’t click “Read More . . .” if you haven’t seen the movie.First observation: I thought the filmmakers took the Pevensies’ dislocation and its effects far more seriously, and thought about its effects a good deal more, than Lewis did. Kudos to them on that. The introduction of the Pevensies, with Susan very much feeling a misfit and Peter getting into a fistfight because he can’t adjust back to being a kid under (often-capricious, unjust) authority after spending however many years as High King, is spot-on, and lays the groundwork for much of what follows. Going from being adults and sovereigns in Narnia back in a moment to being English schoolchildren must have been like throwing the car into reverse at freeway speed; if you understand the Pevensies as actual human beings going through that experience rather than as figures in an allegory, that would be a traumatic moment that must have had noticeable long-term effects. (To put it mildly.) I appreciate the filmmakers noticing.I especially appreciated the way they used it in character development, and especially with Peter and Susan. Peter has been struggling to adjust to not being High King, the general and warrior and statesman who is above all others under the law; for him, getting back to Narnia is, more than anything, about being back in charge, back on top. He’s not willing to defer to anyone, or even to treat anyone as an equal (including Caspian, even though Caspian knows the situation far, far better than he himself does), and he’s not willing to wait for Aslan, since to do so would be to acknowledge that even in Narnia, he is a man under authority. He doesn’t see Aslan when Lucy does because he doesn’t want to—he wants to do it himself; Lucy’s right, he has indeed forgotten who really defeated the White Witch, and he’s done so deliberately, out of pride. This drives him to put his faith in himself and his own judgment rather than in Aslan, with terrible consequences. He must be humbled, and have his faith properly oriented once again, before he can triumph; thus the capstone to his work is his surrender of his sword to Caspian, the final acknowledgement that it’s Caspian who now rules in Narnia. In that, he has learned what he needed to learn, and returns to England a second time actually ready to transition back to living there.Susan, by contrast—and by explicit, conscious (or semi-conscious) reaction against Peter—holds herself aloof from Narnia; she too, as Lucy tells her, doesn’t see Aslan until the end because she doesn’t want to. In her case, however, it’s not because she doesn’t want to submit to him, but rather because she doesn’t want to surrender to him; she’ll enjoy being in Narnia “while it lasts,” but she knows it isn’t going to and she’s guarding her heart against it. In this, I think, the filmmakers are laying the groundwork for her defection from the friends of Narnia which is revealed in The Last Battle—groundwork which is, I think, implicit in the book, but which is shown more clearly in the movie. (I might add, by the way, that I’ve never felt “Oh, wasn’t it fun when we used to pretend” was at all reasonable to have Susan say; her decision to turn her back on Narnia made sense to me, but not that she would actually forget, or come to believe it had never been real.) She refuses to fully yield to the reality of Narnia, choosing to protect herself by holding back from it; as a consequence, where Peter moves through their dislocation and comes out the other side, she pulls back from it. Where Peter has learned all Narnia can teach him, she has merely learned all she can learn.Second observation: I’ve seen complaints that the spiritual meaning of the book is lost in the movie. Now, I’m just a simple country preacher, so maybe I’m just not smart enough, but I’ve never been all that sure what the overarching spiritual meaning of the book is. It’s one of the reasons I’m looking forward to reading Planet Narnia, in hopes of seeing more in Caspian than I have to this point. As far as the book’s message about faith goes, though, I think it’s actually strengthened in the movie, because Peter and Susan’s character arcs through the movie play into that. Peter’s journey is especially relevant, because he starts off explicitly putting his faith in himself rather than in Aslan, and it blows up in his face; it’s as he shifts to trusting and serving Aslan rather than himself and his own ego that things start to get better.The climax of the movie, I think, is the summoning of the White Witch. Caspian has the wits, when she actually appears, to resist taking the last step to set her loose, and then the appearance of the Pevensies brings the whole plot crashing down—except that Peter allows himself to be half-seduced by the Witch. She’s cunning enough to offer help, to present herself as an ally who would follow him, and despite the fact that he ought to know better, he’s tempted. He still doesn’t want to let go, he still wants to defeat Miraz’ army himself and take the credit, and he’s actually willing to consider allying himself with the Witch to do it (even if it means lying to himself that he can trust her). Fortunately, Edmund isn’t going to make that mistake twice, and saves the day; and at that point, Peter seems to stop, take a good look at himself and how he’s acting, and realize that he’s been putting his faith in the wrong place. From that point on, he lets Lucy have the key role, and dedicates himself to buying the time for her mission to succeed.Third observation: as Philip noted over at The Thinklings, the filmmakers do a lot more with Edmund, and give him a lot more scope to act, than Lewis did. His decisive action to save his brother (and all Narnia) from the White Witch is the high point, and I think adds another dimension to the Christian message of the story. In the Pevensies’ first visit to Narnia, after all, Peter was the golden boy, while Edmund fell to temptation as the White Witch appealed to his pride; but that very success makes Peter vulnerable this time, to the point that he nearly falls to the same temptation that ensnared his brother, while Edmund is humbler and therefore wiser. This really underscores the story’s argument for faith, I think, making it clear that pride and faith in ourselves is a false path, while humility and faith in the true God is the only real way forward. It’s telling that in the last charge, the battle cry is no longer “For Narnia!”: it’s “For Aslan!” And though it’s Peter who leads the way, and Lucy who makes the way, it’s Edmund who shows the way; and, of course, it’s Aslan who is the way.Fourth observation: I have to differ with Renaissance Guy’s complaint that “the characters just do their own thing and don’t work together much or discuss their problems to determine cooperative solutions, which definitely departs from the story Lewis wrote.” That is indeed a problem when Peter shows up and takes over—and the result is a terrible defeat. As Peter is humbled, that changes; we don’t see the discussion that produces the plan that wipes out the Telmarine cavalry at the Battle of Aslan’s How, but it’s a fairly complicated plan that depends on considerable coordinated effort and mutual trust. The fact that failure to cooperate produces disaster, while working and planning together and trusting one another produces success, is very much in line with the story Lewis wrote; and that arc is a lot more realistic, to boot. After all, trust doesn’t usually come all that easily; it has to be built up, and we have to learn (and re-learn) our need to trust one another.Fifth observation: I think the movie gives us a much better and more believeable Caspian than the book. Having him older, right on the cusp of his majority, is not only better for the plausibility of Dawn Treader (as Gresham notes in the interview), it’s better for this story as well. I’m not sure I buy Doctor Cornelius having taught him so much less about the Narnians, but it’s clear that he’s much more prepared to be king, and this is good for the story. In the book, Caspian is a fairly passive figure, taken all in all, and really too young to be what the time demands that he be; that’s why the summoning of the Pevensies is necessary. They essentially return to re-establish their own reign, serving as a sort of rightful king by proxy, then pass it on to Caspian. In the movie, Caspian is already on his own two feet, raising the Narnians as an army against the usurper; he may be a king in exile, but he is very much a king. The Pevensies are needed for the benefit of their experience (mixed blessing though that is) and of their relationship with Aslan (which in the movie is to say, primarily, Lucy’s relationship); their blessing is valuable to give Caspian and his dynasty full legitimacy in the eyes of the Old Narnians, but it isn’t necessary to make him what he already is. Indeed, Peter’s surrender of his sword at the end probably does more for Peter, enabling him to let go of being High King (after all, his reign ended abruptly; one could say he needed more closure than that), than it does for Caspian.Sixth observation: not a major point, but there are a lot more Telmarines in the movie than in the book, as there ought to be after all that time. The book gives us perhaps the smallest-scale coup I’ve ever heard tell of; in the movie, the sheer size of the task set before Caspian can be clearly seen, as it should be.That’s just a few observations; I may have more to post later, but that’s enough to be going on with now. Taken all in all, though, I have no compunction in saying that, while no doubt the filmmakers could have done better, I think we can and should be happy with the job they’ve done.