Believers

Believers

“The Devil and Father Amorth” — Comparing A Possessed Voice with Janis Joplin using a Spectral Frequency Display

By Terence Gillespie August 29, 2018

If you’re interested in the topic of exorcism, the documentary, “The Devil and Father Amorth,” is worth your time.

It’s a professionally made documentary primarily due to the thoroughness of the director. He interviews a broad sample of observers (and participants) around the exorcisms. And, despite his expertise, the director removes all effects and technical obstacles from his subject rather than add layers of them as he did in “The Exorcist.”

If you’ve watched the clip, you’ve heard the voice of one of the possessed women (Christina) at 1 minute, 12 seconds into the above trailer.

I consistently hear three voices every time the one being exorcised cries out. If this is, somehow, faked by the director, it discredits the documentary. However, I don’t suspect there was any sound editing of the ladies voice. To satisfy my own curiosity of the makeup of these “voices,” I captured many of them from the documentary, and you can see their spectral frequency prints, below.

Dissociative Trance Disorder?

When the director interviews a room full of five doctors of various expertise, he’s quickly referred to what the doctors say is “a recognized diagnosis, worldwide”: Dissociative Trance Disorder.¹ From the abstract of that paper:

Although dissociative trance disorders, especially possession disorder, are probably more common than is usually though, precise clinical data are lacking. Ten persons undergoing exorcisms for devil trance possession state were studied with the Dissociative Disorders Diagnostic Schedule and the Rorschach test. These persons had many traits in common with dissociative identity disorder patients. They were overwhelmed by paranormal experiences. Despite claiming possession by a demon, most of them managed to maintain normal social functioning.

You can read the full paper, online.

Bishop Barron Isn’t Ready

Robert Barron, a Catholic bishop in Los Angeles, says he wouldn’t speak to the devil like Father Amorth because he’s not at that spiritual level:

Speaking to the devil like Father Amorth? I would never dare do that. I’m not there, spiritually, I think it’s a very dangerous thing…it’s dangerous ground. You have to be really, really, Holy. . . I’m not ready for that; I’d be afraid.

Jeffrey B. Russell’s Says it Best

One of the most insightful comments in the documentary is by Jeffrey Burton Russell, author of “The Prince of Darkness.” Jeffrey says that possession is merely the seizure of your body.

The way they take over your soul is by tempting you to sin. That’s how they get you because you’re using your free will to do evil.

Spectral Frequency Displays

As a musician, I have a good ear for sounds and the ability to distinguish between them.

For example, you know that feeling you get when you’re watching a movie and can’t quite place the voice? I rarely experience that since the person behind the voice is evident to me (If I know who they are in real life.)

To make a more objective visual image, however, I used the Spectral Frequency Display in Adobe Audition to show the “print” of the voices in this documentary.

For reference: human speaking voices for men range from ~85 – 180hz and for women, 165 – 255 Hz. Frequencies above this are usually attributed to harmonics, room echo, or non-vocal-cord sounds produced by the throat. All of those elements are present in the voice prints, below.

The vertical axis is frequency, and the horizontal axis is time. The brightness represents the loudness of the sound source in that frequency range. The bright yellow areas are the primary sound, the orange and purple are harmonics, echo, or non-vocal-cord sounds. The black areas are silent.

Here’s the director’s voice asking a question:

Here’s Christina answering the Director’s question:

Father Amorth praying:

Father Amorth makes a guttural sound during prayer:

Family praying together:

Christina’s first “possessed” voice:

A six-second segment of Christina’s possessed voice:

When looking at the prints of Christina’s voice during the possession, it becomes apparent why it gives the impression of either three or four voices. Two frequencies are pronounced enough to be heard separately at 1k and below. Two more are at 2k-4k. Her first print is also extraordinary in that it emits harmonics >16khz. No other voice in the documentary does that.

But look at the print when Father Amorth makes a guttural sound during prayer. Strong harmonics appear three or four times just below 3k Hz. This is an important comparison because Father and Christina are in the same room at the same time.

For an additional comparison, I’ve recorded two isolated voice tracks of Janis Joplin. The recordings attempt to isolate only Janis’ voice to be as similar as possible to the Father Amorth and Christina.

Janis Joplin, Clip #1:

Janis Joplin, Clip #2:

”Dissociative Trance Disorder: Clinical and Rorschach Findings in Ten Persons Reporting Demon Possession and Treated by Exorcism” by Stefano Ferracuti, Roberta Sacco, and Renato Lazzari, Dept. Of Psychiatry and Psychological Medicine, University of Rome “La Sapienza.” Journal of Personality Assessment, 1996, 66(3), 525-539, Copyright 1996, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. ↩

Apologetics

How To Search Every Naked Bible Transcript by Keyword in 5 Seconds or Less

By Terence Gillespie May 27, 2018

Dr. Heiser’s Naked Bible podcast is one of my favorites. With 215 episodes and climbing it’s become a challenge to find which episode mentions a topic of interest. Thankfully, there’s a transcript made of each episode. But how do you search the content of hundreds of separate files?

Like this:

Please support the NB podcast and download the transcripts from Dr. Heiser’s website as they come out. If you need a jumpstart, I’ve put zip files on the Divine Council Forum with all transcripts as of May 24, 2018. I won’t be keeping these up to date so download new transcripts from the NB Podcast site.

Searching Filenames is Easy; Searching File Content is Hard

Searching the contents of hundreds of files is no easy task. The two best (only?) tools for this are Adobe Acrobat Pro and DevonThink.

Acrobat Pro

With Acrobat Pro, there are two options to search multiple pdfs: search a directory or search an index. My searches take five seconds without an index and two seconds with an index. I haven’t used Acrobat to search more than 200 files in a directory but presume the lag time will increase files increase.

DevonThink

DevonThink searches return instantly. An index is built and updated as files are imported and the search time for 215 NB transcripts is not discernible. I have another directory with 1900 files of similar size and the search time for that directory is also indiscernible. Wow.

Recommendation

Both Acrobat and DevonThink are crucial to my workflows. If I had to choose one tool for this job, however, it would be DevonThink. Searching the contents of thousands of files is what it’s designed to do, and it does it exceptionally well. If you need to perform searches like this on a routine basis, the $149 cost is a no-brainer. It comes with the best OCR conversion engine (ABBYY FineReader) which costs more than DevonThink itself, go figure.

Adobe seems to overprice the standalone purchase of their software to encourage users to choose a subscription, instead. Since I use six of the tools in the Adobe CC suite on a routine basis, the $50/month is justified. Your mileage may vary.

Apologetics

Transcript: God Exists — John Lennox

By divinecouncil April 28, 2018

This transcript is of John Lennox presenting his case for the existence of God at the Oxford Union in 2012.

The excerpts, below, are a sample of the transcript.

God Exists

And as we look at the rise of science in the 16th and 17th centuries, Alfred North Whitehead and many others commented, that men became scientific because they expected law in nature and they expected law in nature because they believed in a lawgiver.

So, ladies and gentlemen, I’m not ashamed of being both a scientist and a Christian because, arguably, Christianity gave me my subject.

What I am amazed at is that serious thinkers today continue to ask us to choose between God and science. That’s like asking people to choose between Henry Ford and engineering as an explanation of the motor car.

When Newton discovered his law of gravity he didn’t say I’ve got a law, I don’t need God. No, he wrote the Principia Mathematica, arguably the greatest work in the whole history of science, because he saw that God is not the same kind of explanation as a scientific explanation. God doesn’t Compete. Agency does not compete with mechanism and law.

It reminds me a little bit of GK Chesterton who said, “It is absurd to complain that it is unthinkable for an unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing and then to pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything.”

Leading philosopher Alvin Plantinga of Notre Dame says, “If atheists are right that we are the product of mindless, unguided natural processes then they have given a strong reason to doubt the reliability of human cognitive faculties, and therefore inevitably to doubt the validity of any belief that they produce including their atheism.” Their biology and their belief in naturalism would, therefore, appear to be at war with each other in a conflict that has nothing at all to do with God.

As modern science sprang from Judeo-Christian sources, so did the concept of human equality. Listen to atheist Jurgen Habermas, arguably one of Germany’s leading intellectuals. He said that “Universalistic egalitarianism from which sprang the ideals of freedom and collective life and solidarity, the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love.”

This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of continual critical appropriation and reinterpretation. To this day there is no alternative to it. Everything else is just idle postmodern talk.

Art

A Christian ‘Drudge Report’

By divinecouncil April 10, 2018

Adam Ford, the man behind The Babylon Bee, has started a Christian “Drudge Report” called the “Christian Daily Reporter.” If you enjoy Adam’s comics and humor on “The Bee,” you might be interested in the daily news articles Adam finds important enough to share with other believers.

At the bottom of the Christian Daily Reporter page, Adam links to a manifesto where he explains the motivation and purpose of his new website. His two headers say it all:

Stop letting Facebook and Google dictate which news and opinions you are allowed to see.

The Christian Daily Reporter is a source for the most important news and content from a Christian perspective — and it lives outside the tech-giant information choke hold.

Divine Council

‘A Hymn to Jesus the Conqueror’ by Zechariah

By divinecouncil April 1, 2018

Storytelling

Two Movies: ‘Paul, Apostle of Christ’ & ‘Full of Grace’

By divinecouncil March 19, 2018

These two movies are from the same director, Andrew Hyatt. “Paul, Apostle of Christ” is coming out this Friday the 23rd, see the trailer and behind the scenes videos, below.

Another Christian movie from Andrew Hyatt, “Full of Grace” has been posted online in its full-length since November of 2016.

Paul, Apostle of Christ

“Risking his life, Luke ventures to Rome to visit Paul — the apostle who’s bound in chains and held captive in Nero’s darkest and bleakest prison cell. Haunted by the shadows of his past misdeeds, Paul wonders if he’s been forgotten as he awaits his grisly execution. Before Paul’s death, Luke resolves to write another book that details the birth of what will come to be known as the church.”

Behind the Scenes

EWTN Interview Jim Caviezel, Raymond Arroyo

Full of Grace

Released in October 2015, this movie has been posted online for quite a while so I infer this is the producer’s preference. I have not seen the whole movie, yet, but am encouraged by this review.

“Mary of Nazareth spends her final days helping the church regain its original encounter with the lord.”

Full Movie

Believers

Transcript: The Post-Christian Future, Part 2 — Michael Heiser

By divinecouncil February 19, 2018

This third transcript is Part 2 of the presentation Michael Heiser gave in 2013 to Future Congress 2. It’s entitled “The Post-Christian Future, Part Two, Pop Culture as High Priest of the Post-Christian Religious Worldview.

Part two is ~8500 words and includes 40 slides. All the material (and excerpts, below) is owned and copyrighted by Dr. Heiser and please consider supporting his work in creating, presenting, and posting such presentations on Youtube.

The excerpts, below, are 1/8th of the entire transcript. They are not a summary of the presentation.

Pop Culture as High Priest of the Post-Christian Religious Worldview

MH is Michael S. Heiser

MH: What I’m going to focus on is talking about the post-Christian culture post-Christian condition. And then sort of zero in on how in the post-Christian world what you’re going to see, as far as the morphing of Christianity. And I’m not saying that the morphing is going to be good. In fact, I’m suggesting that the morphing is not a good thing. And it’s really going to morph into something that’s actually very old. And we’ll talk about that at that point. So this is going to be sort of, hey here’s what I think it’s going to look like. And it’s not really just opinion because I’m going to show you what people are saying right now okay, the Futurists scholars and religious studies scholars and pop culture that sort of thing. And we will comment on it as we go.

MH: Techno-utopian values. The usual suspects, here: progress, purposeful evolution, human power over nature, material or technological advancement as the key to success in the future world, all that sort of stuff. Freedom really translates to don’t give me any rules or any dogma so I can be free — happiness and hedonism right in their presentation. The singularity, something we’ll talk about momentarily.

MH: But I want to zero in on this document: “A Cosmist Manifesto,” this one here, and here are the ten points. I’ve abbreviated the annotations for the cosmos manifesto, but here are the ten principles, ten points humans will merge with technology to a rapidly increasing extent. It’s a new phase of the evolution of our species.

MH: You might be thinking cyborgs here, which is one think about it. But if you know anything about nanotechnology that’s an invisible integration. That’s something you never see, but it has the potential. Once you have control over every atom in your body I mean you know every molecule you can change the human species as we know it. And this is going to be and is now, I mean, you can buy whole books on the ethics of nanotechnology. I’ve read a couple of them this year again to get my head into the sequel to the novel. And they’re talking about things like elimination of disease, optimizing the human DNA for its various potentials, and they’re really ultimately talking about immortality because you’re dying cell by cell and every cell is made of molecules and at you know that sort of thing. Well if you can control and release nanobots into the body so to speak that instantly repair cellular loss you have potential immortality other than somebody you know shooting you in the head or something like that I mean you get the idea. You will not age you will not decline as a physical specimen. So this is how it’s going to be cast, but this is the sort of merging they’re talking about, too. It’s not just what we would sort of think of as a cyborg.

MH: So what’s the theological cost? Well, we become divine apart from God’s plan of glorification.

MH: It redefines salvation only in terms of the end, glorification, rather than it dismisses the means which is the cross and the whole reason for it which is sin.

MH: I drew this from my series I did on The Da Vinci Code, someone out there may have seen.

MH: So, what is Gnosticism? The basics. Well, the Gnostics believe that there is something they refer to as the true God or the light or pneuma, which is spirit. And isn’t God a spirit, doesn’t John 4 say that? God is a spirit; he’s pre-existent, God is preexistent, uncaused, and perfect? Sounds pretty biblical, so far.

MH: Gnostics imagined the true God of being both male, the Father, and also female. And the reason they thought this was because everything else that exists is produced by this God.

MH: Now, in terms of cosmology, the highest Aeon is called, in Gnosticism, the Logos. Is that a familiar term? Okay, this is the highest son of the true God, the Logos. The first aeon, the first emanation, the first act of the father, he is the entire likeness and image of the true God. And these are Gnostic statements okay. He’s the form of the formless, the body of the bodyless, the face of the invisible, the word of the unutterable and all these things. And he actually possesses the knowledge of all the eons. He is unquestionably superior. He’s the top dog, the top Eon.

MH: Now, the Logos right here again is the top, and together the law goes with the true God, the father and mother element in the true God, form the Triad. Let ‘s just call it a Trinity and be done with it. It’s not the same as a Trinity. If you know your trinitarianism, this is not same. But they’re using the three language.

MH: Last point: there’s a whole scholarly book. This is University of Chicago Press this, and this is a dense read, it’s a scholarly book called mutants and mystics science fiction superhero comics and the paranormal. And guess who wrote it? Our friend Jeffrey Kripal. He has an entire chapter if you’re into UFOs this will be shocking to you. his entire last chapter is on Whitley Strieber and communion. The whole purpose of the book is to show how comic books, and specifically the alien theme, has been a useful and wonderful and delightful vehicle for transmitting the truths of Gnosticism. I mean, they’re not secretive about this. It’s just, here it is, you know?

MH: I highly recommend that you read this. He argues that much of the recent popular culture of the u.s. Comes from what we used to be called the paranormal. He has a third book called authors of the impossible where he as an academic says academic scholars ought to own up to the fact that paranormal stuff is real. And he’s arguing in favor of paranormal stuff within the account.

MH: He even goes into Madame Blavatsky. None of this is new. The whole alien thing is just rehashed Gnosticism slash occultism slash theosophy slash whatever, fill in the blank, for a technological society. That’s all it is. And this is what’s going to reach the masses.

MH: And what I’m telling you this whole presentation comes down to this: the adaptation is going to be led by people who know what they’re doing and will control the vocabulary and teach others. They will teach others to mine the vocabulary and morph the theology, and it’s only going to take a generation before that becomes the articulation of what Christianity is.

Believers

Transcript: The Post-Christian Future, Part 1 — Michael Heiser

By divinecouncil February 16, 2018

As described in a recent post, there are all kinds of great uses for transcripts, and I’ve started creating them for video and audio materials important enough to have in text format.

The first transcript I completed is of a documentary interview with Jordan Peterson conducted by David Fuller for Rebel Wisdom entitled, “Truth in the Time of Chaos.” You can find that transcript on McGillespie.com.

This second transcript is the first part of a presentation Michael Heiser gave in 2013 to Future Congress 2. It’s entitled “The Post-Christian Future, Part One, Thinking Theologically About the Utopian Impulse as a Perversion of the Judeo-Christian Worldview.”

(Note: I’ll be posting the transcript on the forum. What follows, here, are short excerpts)

The presentation was given while Mike was preparing to write the sequel to “The Facade.” Part one is ~9000 words and includes 25 slides. All the material (and excerpts, below) is owned and copyrighted by Dr. Heiser and please consider supporting his work in creating, presenting, and posting such presentations on Youtube. The transcript is merely an attempt to make video and audio material more accessible.

Road Map

MH is Michael S. Heiser

MH: There’s always been sort of this impulse to either create the perfect society or more pertinently, force it on people. And so, I see looming on the horizon a new effort at creating a wonderful, blissful, totalitarian state and I want to sort of pursue that a little bit and talk about it. And again, for those of you here, and for those of you who listen later to the presentation, I just want to get you thinking about why it is that this always seems to rear its ugly head and why even Christians, at times, are not immune from this notion that we can make things perfect, that we can just make it alright if we did this, that, and the other thing, everything would be ok.

MH: So, I want to try to think theologically about those things, and we’ll see what happens. So, here is our roadmap for the day.

Definition & Relevance

MH: So, first part: definition and relevance. Utopia as you may or may not know, again, is this idea of a perfect human society. The term itself refers to an ideal place that actually doesn’t exist.

MH: It’s imaginary, you know, it’s conceptual. It’s this grand wish, something that can’t be real in the real world but boy we wish it was, that sort of thing.

MH: And again the breakdown of the term utopia: no place, a good or no place. And you’ll see it spelled either with the “e” or with the “o” forming the “u”, in either case. But it actually could have either derivation depending on who’s using it.

MH: An imaginary world where social justice is achieved, whatever that means, and the means of guaranteeing all that is secure. That’s where the control comes in. So that’s what we’re talking about. And as far as the impulse, what are the elements?

Examples

MH: And HG Wells, of course, a lot of a lot of their thinking was influenced by eugenics. To create the ideal society you need ideal people, right? You need to sort of weed out the unfortunate or less desirable elements to the human population. So that was very common in the United States. A lot of later not-so-eugenic theory and practice was drawn from American and British writing. Those were the seed beds to some of those things that we would come later on.

MH: Marxist Leninism, of course, this would be the Lennon experiment with Marxism. Of course the Revolution of 1917. You know, again, the working class. We’re going to create the community where the worker is in power. Ostensibly, this is how it’s marketed. This is how it’s put forth.

How It’s Sold vs. Actual Result

MH: Nowadays we refer to eugenics as genetic engineering and genetic selection. Genetics is just the new eugenics. And I’m not here to demonize all genetic research because that would just be ridiculous too. But, once you have the power of the genome in your hand, eugenics is really easy. You know, it’s just it’s just how do we how do we accomplish this thing we can easily do now on a wide scale? That’s the only question you need to ask.

MH: Politically, of course, world peace freedom from crime which in their right mind would oppose that? Well, I’m not opposed to that. I am opposed to statist fiefdom. If you’re a statist, you are anti-individual. Think about that. That means if you’re in control you get to criminalize practically anything. Criminalize self-protection —that would be like gun laws taking guns away okay. We’re going to criminalize your ability to protect yourself. Why? Because your emphasis is on the state, the utopia, as opposed to the individual.

MH: Citizens self-sustenance, we talked about that with the food supply. You have each individual state, state being defined as country here, trying to implement their view of perfection, their view of the ideal situation. But ultimately you have a push toward global government.

Progress or Human Control?

MH: Progress, human improvement, science & technology. Human control is what this means in our day and age. So, whereas we would call it progress human improvement through science and technology what it really means is control of people through science and technology.

MH: We have information control. In other words, we’ll fill your head with what it needs to be filled with. Knowledge is power. It’s easy to propagandize things like the political process. Eugenics, that’s progress because we’re weeding out…we’re clearing out the gene pool there and that a good thing. Police state we have to have a police state to enforce progress. Commerce comes under state control. Basically, everything you do, if it’s viewed as being an impediment to progress, then it needs to be controlled or eliminated. We have to be able to keep the progress going. We don’t want progress to stop.

MH: Now, utopian impulse as a biblical perversion. And this is where your handout comes in I’m going to go through this quickly, and I’ll tell you what the handout supplements.

MH: Here are the fundamental myths of utopianism. The idea that humans are perfectible, that’s a myth. Either on an individual level or a corporate level, it ignores human capacity for evil. It ignores you know the condition of the heart. But it’s a myth that drives utopianism. The other myth is that you can force human perfectibility. That just isn’t going to work. So enforcing an Edenic state. In other words, it would be Eden by human effort. Eden created by a ruling human elite.

Babel and Myths of Utopianism

MH: Babel is a big deal with this because if you understand what’s going on at Babel a ziggurat, Tower of Babel, was built to bring the divine to earth. We’re going to build you a house we’re going to build you home because gods live on mountains so let’s like build our own mountain so that the deity will come here and when he comes here we can negotiate; we can we can kind of barter.

MH: It’s the same logic of idolatry. The ancient person wasn’t wasn’t an idiot he knows that this thing he just made isn’t his creator so why do they make idols? Because they believe deities can be summoned to reside there; you locate the deity. This is why Israel was forbidden to make graven images because Yahweh cannot be tamed. Yahweh will not be brought anywhere for negotiation. That’s up to him. It’s a completely different perspective on it. But you have the same thing going on with Babel. We are going to reestablish Eden we are going to bring the deity back to earth. We’re separated from the deity now we got kicked out in all that stuff we’re going to bring the deity back down to earth, and then we’re going to you know do all this stuff, all this good stuff. Well, again it’s a usurpation of God’s plan God’s punishment. Humans trying to remedy and re-kick-start what they ruined. Babel is sort of the beginning living illustration of this idea that hey let’s bring heaven to earth. Utopian thinking. Heaven is not going to come to earth until God wills it and not before. But that’s what the utopian misses or hates take your pick, one way or the other.

Art

When Christian Artists Learn Apologetics

By divinecouncil February 13, 2018

Apologetics gives artists confidence to speak into the darkness.

Article by Alex Aili for “A Clear Lens“.

During the first class of the morning at the small Christian college, our professor stopped the lecture and used his walking stick, curiously similar to a wizard’s staff, to step from behind the podium to the front of the class. He did this when he really wanted us to listen.

He leaned on the staff as if he was Pastor Gandalf and scanned the class before muttering a kernel of weathered wisdom. It was a heartfelt opinion, but it resonated with the force of a command: “Christians ought to be at the forefront of every discipline.”

Are we at the forefront of the Art that’s shaping our culture?

No. We’re lagging, relying on tropes and stereotypes to preach simplistic sermons when people want to experience compelling stories (although The Case for Christ is a recent example of success).

So yes, we must learn how to make better art, but what good is that if we aren’t speaking the same language as the culture around us?

In Apologetics and The Christian Imagination, Holly Ordway insists that the lost meaning of Christian terminology is what prevents many believers from being intelligible to unbelievers. For example, our world doesn’t hear “Jesus,” “faith” or “sin” as defined by Christians. She argues that an effective, and underused, way to reclaim lost meaning is to create art with sound doctrine (her specific focus in the book, however, is apologetical literature).

In a word, Christian artists need to learn apologetics in addition to their craft. If you have the creative drive and you believe Jesus is the Son of God, then learn apologetics. Know what you believe and why. Your art will be better because you’ll be confident enough to tackle tough issues.

Christian artists don’t have to hide in the realm of “self-expression.” If we study apologetics, the more we’ll naturally see how we can demonstrate Christianity’s implications in our work.

For a start, here are 4 habits to ignite artistic apologetics (although my primary focus is narrative art, creators of other forms may still benefit).

Develop the Worldviews Behind the Central Conflict

Art enables us to raise deep worldview questions without coming across as hostile. How? Well, in storytelling, there is a single question called the dramatic question, which involves the protagonist’s (main character) central conflict with the antagonist.

This clash arises from conflicting desires, which arise from conflicting values, which are motivated by their conflicting worldviews (or perhaps variations of the same worldview).

To put it plainly, the main character wants something and the bad guy wants something else. But they both can’t get what they want because they value different things, so a conflict arises.

For example, the dramatic question of The Lord of the Rings is: “Will Frodo destroy the ring?” And the antagonism is that Sauron wants to reclaim it.

If desires drive characters, values drive desires, and worldviews drive values, then destroying the ring drives Frodo, selfless heroism drives his desire to destroy it, and Goodness motivates his selfless heroism.

With Tolkien creating this conflict, we are drawn in. We want to know what happens to Frodo.

When we empathize with characters by vicariously experiencing their journey (not to mention the world they inhabit), we participate in the worldviews involved in the story as well, albeit indirectly.

So whether we agree with it or not, we let the protagonist’s worldview speak as we follow the story because the answer to the dramatic question unearths deeper worldview implications based on which desires were met and which values are maintained.

How do we develop the expertise to naturally develop worldviews into our art? For starters, learn the craft of dialogue, character development, sentence structure, description, scene structure, etc. Study award-winning stories and the conflicts that generate them. Take a poorly-rated movie, TV show, or song and rewrite it. Then use that as an inspiration or primer for your own work (don’t plagiarize, obviously).

All it takes is the desire to learn. Ask experts. Google it. YouTube it. The Internet Age has its benefits!

Embedding worldview into the central conflict is perhaps the most important element in creating art because when it’s done right, deep questions are raised, which demand inward attention on the audience’s part.

Wrestle with the Darkness

Christian art cannot be pigeonholed into what is family-friendly (although the genre is necessary), aesthetically unambitious or, worst of all, thinly-disguised proselytization. It requires provocation with novelty and sound theology with beauty. It must engage with our world and be relevant.

Please read the rest of, “When Christian Artists Learn Apologetics.”

Education

Transcripts for Writers, Believers, & Outliers

By Terence Gillespie February 6, 2018

(Photo credit: SNL screen capture)

I’ve spent the past two weeks coming up with a format to create and disseminate transcripts of video and audio materials I find important enough to have in text format.

With the proliferation of videos and podcasts, transcripts have become more useful in my work. As a writer and teacher, transcripts enable me to:

Skip long videos and podcasts (by reading or scanning them, instead.)
Search hundreds of videos, podcasts, or lectures by keywords.
Listen and read at the same time.
Come back up to speed quickly on an “old” video or podcast.
Quote the text without having to transcribe or retype.

I use DevonThink to store, scan, and search thousands of documents. Transcripts make videos, podcasts, & lectures available to that research workflow.

As each transcript is completed, I’ll make them freely available on either DivineCouncil.org (Spiritual) or McGillespie.com (Business, Family, Legal, Government, Health, Personal.)

Note: Each transcript (pdf) will be digitally signed by yours truly for web security. If you see my digital signature, you’ll know the document has not been altered from the signed original.

Dissociative Trance Disorder?

Bishop Barron Isn’t Ready

Jeffrey B. Russell’s Says it Best

Spectral Frequency Displays

Searching Filenames is Easy; Searching File Content is Hard

Acrobat Pro

DevonThink

Recommendation

God Exists

Paul, Apostle of Christ

Behind the Scenes

EWTN Interview Jim Caviezel, Raymond Arroyo

Full of Grace

Full Movie

Pop Culture as High Priest of the Post-Christian Religious Worldview

Road Map

Definition & Relevance

Examples

How It’s Sold vs. Actual Result￼

Progress or Human Control?￼

Babel and Myths of Utopianism￼

How It’s Sold vs. Actual Result

Progress or Human Control?

Babel and Myths of Utopianism