Film · Prime Video · 2021

The Case for Heaven

Bring your questions. Do not confuse a documentary's comfort with a proof you did not examine.

Lee Strobel's method is the interview: people, near-death accounts, a case built the way a brief is built. A house that believes the resurrection does not need a brief to be allowed to hope, and a house that does not believe should not be sneered at for wanting more than interviews. The film is on the side of hope. Hope is a virtue when it stays answerable to the dead you have actually buried, and a product when it only soothes.

Watch it as an argument, not as a vision. Then do the harder thing the camera cannot do, which is to pray or to admit you will not, out loud, without the music.

The eight

Industry
5/10
Journalism as the method.
Household
4/10
Grief is the doorway.
Piety
7/10
The aim is heaven, argued.
Courage
5/10
He asks in public.
Republic
4/10
A personal case more than a people.
Temperance
5/10
Earnest.
Truth
5/10
An argument is not yet a testimony you have tested.
Stewardship
5/10
Use it to return to the text, or not at all.

Live historicallyRead one chapter of a scripture you claim, slowly, and sit with the parts you skip.

Film · Prime Video · 1999

10 Things I Hate About You

The bet is the sin. The poem is the repair. Older teens, with the bet named.

Someone is paid to take the difficult sister out so the younger one can be dated. That is a use of a person, and the film knows it before it decides to be charming about it. Kat is not a problem to be solved. She is a girl with a standard, some of it pride and some of it sense. The poem works because it is specific and public and ashamed. A romance that ends on a confession is better than one that ends on a wink.

The Shakespeare underneath is a harsh play. This softens it into a high school, which is a mercy, and keeps the money, which is the part you have to say out loud so a teenager does not learn that being purchased is a meet-cute.

The eight

Industry
4/10
School, a bet, a band.
Household
5/10
Sisters under one roof, mismanaged by the plot and then restored.
Piety
3/10
No creed. A conscience in the last scene.
Courage
6/10
The poem is said in public.
Republic
4/10
A campus that treats a girl as a door prize.
Temperance
5/10
The scheme is rebuked, late.
Truth
7/10
The confession is actual.
Stewardship
6/10
The poem is the part to keep.

Live historicallyIf you started a friendship as a strategy, confess the strategy.