RevCyn

-- Some spoilers herein --  My daughter's teacher told me of some books she's been reading to my daughter's class this year -- Among the Hidden and Among the Impostors from the "Shadow Children" series by Margaret Peterson Haddix.  The stories are dystopian futures for youth readers, not unlike The Hunger Games or  Divergent , but for a slightly younger audience.  In Haddix's Shadow Children books, third children are illegal in this post-famine totalitarian state.  The first two books follow the story of Luke, a third child.  In the first book, he's in hiding in his family home.  In the second, he's at a school under a fake ID.  What struck me, when reading these books, is that the main character, Luke, fails to act.  Unlike many science fiction and fantasy books where the main character becomes the central character in the struggle for justice or freedom, Luke, at least in these two books, does not.  In the first book, he's invi...

**SPOILER WARNING** This is what is on my mind this morning, as I come back from a weekend where I went out to the movies twice, once to see Catching Fire and once to see the Doctor Who 50th anniversary special.  There's a common thread that runs through both the recent Doctor Who seasons and the Hunger Games trilogy, and that is the effects of war on the survivors and the ethical struggles before and after making a decision to kill innocents in order to end a war. It's not really in Catching Fire that this question occurs; it's actually in the next book, Mockingjay .  In it, there are two parts that I'm thinking of -- first, there's the decision by District 13 to bomb children and aid workers to advance the rage against the Capitol.  Here's the description of when Katniss learns about the weapons that will eventually be used in that way: This is what they’ve been doing. Taking the fundamental ideas behind Gale’s traps and adapting them into weapons ag...

I was once a big Orson Scott Card fan.  The number of Orson Scott Card books I own may still outnumber any single other author on the dozens of bookshelves in my home.  I read his works voraciously in college and in my early 20s.  I read the Ender saga, the Alvin Maker series, the Homecoing Saga, and assorted other books and short stories of his.  I recently re-read Ender's Game and still enjoyed it.  At some point in reading his books, however, I suddenly stopped, because I felt like I was reading the same story over and over again -- the same boy messiah saving the human race -- and I disagreed with the theology underpinning it.  But I enjoyed all those stories of his up until that time.  I still do, when I read them.  I recently re-read Ender's Game and found myself wanting to read them all over again, or start reading the later books in the series that I never read, or the Shadow Saga. But between the time I was the big Orson Scott Card ...

I had a great time at SUUSI this year leading a workshop on Science Fiction and Fantasy and Religion.  One favorite part of the class was the great reading/viewing list we generated.  I hesitate to some degree to share it with those who weren't part of the class.  On the other hand, it's such a great list of works that others may find engaging.  Please be mindful that this is partly a result of where our particular conversation wandered.  The categories that are short are usually so because they are categories we didn't get to, so they just have my starter items in them.  And yes, there are a couple of things slipped in there that you might not consider SF/Fantasy, but which were a part of our discussion. Science Fiction and Fantasy and Religion Works SUUSI 2013 Workshop #152 – Cynthia Landrum The Nature of God Avatar (Film) The Parable of the Sower and The Parable of the Talents – Octavia Butler The Mists of Avalon – Marion Zimmer Bradley...

I spent last week at the minister's study group, Ohio River Group , that I attend each year (I've missed only once since joining in 2005).  This year's theme was "Space," and during our meeting a growing list of science fiction suggestions was posted by its members on the white board.  What follows here is that list, with my own personal notations when I have any.  For confidentiality's sake, I am not posting either who posted these works, nor some of their own comments about why that went up on our white board. Robert Sawyer: Starplex , Calculating God , Factoring Humanity , and Flashforward Of the things on this list that I haven't read, these will be first on my list. Margaret Atwood: Oryx and Crake: A Novel , and The Year of the Flood I've read some of Atwood's works (including The Handmaid's Tale , of course), and would consider myself a fan of hers.  I will be adding these two to my reading list, as I also heard a really...

         I was deeply disturbed when Caylee Anthony went missing and mourned her death.  I know why, too.  She was of a similar age to my own daughter, and at least one person told me that Caylee reminded this person of my own daughter.  Caylee's big brown eyes, in particular, do have a resemblance.          I cried when I read about Christina Taylor Green , who was 9 years old when she died in the shootings in Tucson.  She, too, reminded me of my daughter, a precocious, politically-involved, brown-haired, brown-eyed girl.           I know why I mourned these little girls who, for a moment, caught our nation's attention.  They were innocent, beautiful, and gone too soon.  And they were in the media spotlight -- beautiful little girls -- white little girls.  Their deaths were horrible, outrageous, and made us sad and also furio...

I've been thinking about Bladerunner (aka Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick) lately.  In Bladerunner , there are androids ("replicants") which look fully human.  There's one way to really tell if someone is human or android, and that's to subject them to a specific test.  The test measures emotional responses to questions about animals--eating animals, wearing animals, animals in pain.  Here's a link to a scene showing it from the movie with Harrison Ford (embedding disabled).  Why have I been thinking about this scene so much?  Seeing the images of the animals in the Gulf Oil Spill (like these from the Boston Globe ): It seems to me that our response to this situation is a test of whether we're human or not.

Now for a break from UUA politics... It's no secret that I'm a big nerd.  And like many other nerds or geeks, I love science fiction and fantasy, in movies, television, and books.  And as a minister geek, I love how there's so much in the genres of science fiction and fantasy that explores religion in really interesting ways, such as the complex religion that emerged in the Star Trek universe in Deep Space Nine, or the way Orson Scott Card took the hero's action of Ender in Ender's Game and turned it around and Ender became the Speaker for the Dead; or the way Philip Pullman takes on religion in the His Dark Materials series.  One of my favorite scifi books that creates a wonderful religion is The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler.  It's very rich--God is change.  One of my favorite movies is Cosmos , which I know a lot of people who loved the book didn't like, but I really liked the way it dealt with religion and didn't make it oppositional to...