Devil’s Advocate

In the film, Devil’s Advocate (1997), human free-will plays a very important role. It has implications not only for whether humans tend to be good or evil, but also on how culpable God is for the evil that committed by humans. One of the devil’s sons by a mortal woman, Kevin Lomax, must choose whether or not to impregnate his half-sister, Christabella Andreoli, to produce the Anti-Christ, which John Milton, who is the devil, wants so much. In Christian theology, both the extent of free-will and how tainted it is from the Fall have been debated. Even within Augustine’s works, his thought changes. The one thing that cannot be asserted is that free-will both does and does not exist. Also, that so many greedy people have been so destructive of democracies and even the planet does not necessarily mean that God is responsible or that humans are not capable of choosing to do good over evil.

The full essay is at "Devil's Advocate."

The Vatican Tapes

After The Omen (1976), which was released just two years after the sardonic U.S. President, Richard Nixon, had resigned in utter disgrace from the presidency amid much economic and political pessimism in the 1970s generally, moviemakers got busy on stories involving demon-possession. The 2015 film, The Vatican Tapes, begins as an apparent demon-possession case and thus seems not to stand out among other such films, but towards the end of the film, when the demon-possessed young woman suddenly breaches the bounds of the sort of supernatural feats of which demons are capable, the true significance of her case emerges with stunning clarity. For that which possesses and kills the young woman is none other than the Anti-Christ, and that figure is in a wholly different league than demons.

The full essay is at "The Vatican Tapes."

Religious Liturgy and the Wholly Other

In the Zhuangzi, how can Zhuangzi possibly know that the fish are happy? To know what it is like to be a bat, a person must be a bat. This is not to say that we disagree with bats. Sonar represents the “sheer otherness” of a bat. In Christianity, how does eternal joy and bliss differ from happiness? Happiness is not a theological concept. There are different kinds of experience, and it follows that they have different kinds of truth-claims. To treat every such claim as the same kind of thing is premised on conflating domains of human experience that are qualitatively different. I contend that the domain of religion is both distinct and unique. Our ordinary ways of describing the world and even ourselves are not well-suited to our endeavors in the domain of religion.

The full essay is at "Religious Liturgy and the Wholly Other."