Reading Journal 2024: Small Mercies
Author: Dennis Lehane

I’m typically not a mystery-thriller guy. I find them difficult to get into and usually not very interesting. This is especially true when they have a murder mystery element. There are, however, a couple of authors that are must reads, and even must buys for me from this genre. Dennis Lehane is one of them, having penned one of my all time favorite reads (Mystic River). Once again he has written a winner in Small Mercies, which, while deviating ever so slightly from the more complex narratives of his earlier works, retains his ability to breathe genuine character development and important thematic focus into his genre based stories.

Here he is utilizing a familiar motif and genre construct to explore the real world setting of Boston in the summer of 1974. I could feel the period piece dripping off the page with some wonderful and subtle uses of descriptive. I also felt the palpable energy and urgency of the racial tensions plaguing Boston at this time, revolving around the infamous implementation of a busing plan as a way of tackling the segregation problem, which had led to the rift between inner city and suburb. Whatever tropes might be in play here, they feel new and fresh and vibrant.

The context also feeds into one of Lehane’s great strengths, which is establishing the moral complexity of the themes he is exploring. Much of this centers on the book’s main character, a single mother who’s daughter has gone missing during an especially fraught and dangerous time. The moral questions reach from segregation and racism to the different internal and spiritual crisis that she faces over the course of the book. Most of the book is told from her perspective, so we spend a good deal of time with her specific arc, one that is then accented by the handful of characters that surround her, including the detective. It is defintiely a propulsive read to this end, having a really strong sense of the slow build, but one which unfolds with a fervent pacing from chapter to chapter.

Love when I find authors who are so reliable for me personally. The thrill of waiting for the next one, picking it up upon release, and ultimately diving in. Only to start the process all over again.

Reading Journal 2024: Ireland: A Novel
Author: Frank Delaney

Delaney’s imaginative exploration of the identity and history of Ireland hinges on this one, single conviction- you cannot come to know Ireland simply through a distant and cold articulation of historical facts, you can only truly know Ireland by hearing and experiencing its stories. The stories of its people, the stories of its places. If the blurring of lines between facts and imagination might leave a modern reader uncomfortable, it is perhaps the modern reader that has become resistant and incapable of grappling with truth. This is, after all, the nature of myth and myth telling, not to anchor us in untruths, but to open us up to something that is more true, about ourselves, our world, about the greater realities that shape our world… about Ireland.

History can never be understood as facts, it can only be rightly be understood as story.

Delaney frames his novel about Irelands storied history around an interconnected relationship between a young boy and a traveling storyteller. As this young boy listens to the storyteller, he learns about Ireland. And as he learns about Ireland, he learns about himself. And as he finds himself in the story of Ireland, he comes  to learn about the world.

The book is structured around different stand alone stories that form its chapters, with the story of the storyteller and this young boy forming a connective piece between the chapters (stories). As the novel progresses, the boy grows into a man, and with this Ireland grows into a people and a country. Disconnected stories come alive in a singular narrative arc.

As someone with Irish blood, and as someone who has yet to have the privilege of visiting this land, I have long understood the Irish connection to this land. The story is one rooted in the cycles of exodus and return, but just as this connection persevered the imagination and the art of storytelling in the midst of one of the worlds darkest periods, so does it preserve this same imagination today. One of the most remarkable things about Ireland is its undying sense of preservation and its unique spirit in the face of change. I often wonder if this spirit is ingrained, even in those with Irish heritage who have never set foot on the land, in some connective fashion. When I encounter its story, something in me feels heard and understood. As though my love of story, my fascination with the spirit, my longing for myth to recapture my imagination and liberate it from the trappings of modernity, has a root and a reason. Where this need to fiercely hold on to wonder understands its nature as having a context.

This is the stuff Delaney helps to bring to the page. I have to imagine that this book is meant to be heard rather than read. A way of recovering that deeply held connection between Ireland’s literary history and its surviving oral culture. Perhaps when I revisit it I will take this approach.

Film Journal 2024: Kung Fu Panda 4
Directed by Mike Mitchell

In terms of the franchise it’s a step below. Given that the franchise is one of the better ones, this fourth installment still stands taller than much of the animation that it shares space with. Thanks in large part to its beloved characters and its mix of human drama and high flying adventure, both of which are still very much alive and well.

Part of the issue, if I could take a stab at locating what that might be, is the weight that comes from needing to justify your existence in light of an already completed and stand alone trilogy. This is not a spoiler, as it makes this known in the opening minutes of the film, but the approach the filmmakers take here is essentially taking the story of the trilogy and wrapping it up in the notion of finding a successor to our now infamous Dragon Warrior. What it wants to suggest is that his arc cannot be fully complete until he becomes the very thing that helped bring him to where he finds himself at the end of the trilogy- a spiritual master or guide.

On paper it works, and is maybe even inspired. The challenge then is, to find a way to supersede the now predictable nature of the established premise, to breathe something unexpected, and indeed necessary, into the trajectory of the story. To give us the thing we didn’t know we needed from what is essentially an epilogue. On this front, it flirts with potential ideas, but it never really commits, leaving this an enjoyable but ever so slightly watered down version of its familiar self. What makes matters even more muddled is dealing with the obvious implications of its premise- will successor mean extending the shelf life of this IP until its dead in the water? If this is the case, it makes it even harder to justify this epilogue. Here it could have done well to take notes from Toy Story 4, a fourth installment that I feel belongs as the poster child for how to do an epilogue well (and it takes one note from that film, following its lead with narrowing in on Woody’s story and choosing to keep the Furious 5 out of the films focus).

For the moment though, it is definitely still worth seeing. More adventures with the beloved Panda is far from something that needs resisting, even if the inevitable reality of the sought after cash cow is.

Film Journal 2024: One Life
Directed by James Hawes

If I could make one, simple case for this film, it would be this- One Life is a family movie. And a necessary one at that.

Now, to be clear, the film deals with tough subject matter. It could be a lot for younger viewers. But where I think the film takes strides to wade gently into this darkness, it does so with a visible intention to celebrate the joy and the light. As the film’s main character suggests at one point in the film, a true to life and self proclaimed ordinary Britain who felt compelled to do whatever he could, precisely because he could, to help countless children caught in the most horrific of circumstances (Nazi Germany), we need the power of the imagination to both foster and sustain hope. An imagination the main character needs as he finds himself caught between the dueling forces of defeat and perseverance.

I imagine this film inspiring dialogue across the generations that represent the family, each whom are given a voice and perspective in this film. It might be the case that Hopkins, who plays the aging version of this true to life character, gets most of the focus, but he is simply a starting point. A point of legacy that is both personal and collective. It is from this point that I think the dialogue can reach from the old to the young in ways that make sense of how it is our lives connect.

Speaking of Hopkins, if this film did nothing else it would surely invite us to reflect on his legacy, and what an icon he is as part of the film industry. It is fitting that he plays an aging persona taking stock of his own legacy nearing the end of his life, wrestling through the different ways to tell his story. Which, thematically speaking, is the thing I think the film as a whole really wants to explore. The tension lies within the sometimes insurmountable gap between these two thoughts,
Save one life, save the world
Set alongside this subsequent response by Hopkins’ character when it is suggested he had done enough. He replies by noting, “but it’s never enough, is it.”

The thoughts of a man facing the darkness, desperate to be a light, but doing so in the face of a reality that continues to threaten his ability to imagine that light. And if there is one place this tension pushes him, and us as viewers, it is towards the notion of community.

The final half hour of this film is especially powerful, and will be sure to generate a good deal of tears. A powerful conclusion to a compelling and harrowing journey, one which tries to reconcile tragedy with promise, despair with hope. Fitting then that such reconciliation might come from that connective image of the aging man and the innocent child walking side by side.

Film Journal 2024: Road House
Directed by Doug Liman

Did we need a remake? I’m not sure. But if you’re going to do it, casting a buffed up Jake Gyllenhaal in the role of Dalton is the way to go.

It is definitely by the numbers in a lot of respects, but the brooding, uncertain vigilante thing is still fun enough to give this thing that necessary spark.

Boasts a few memorable action sequences as well, featuring some understated stunt work. Definitely decent enough for some Friday night home viewing.

Film Journal 2024: Love Life
Directed by Koji Fukada

A film about loving from a distance. Or perhaps about loving through the distance.

As an intimately drawn human drama, grief creatss this distance. Pain creates this distance. The complexities and struggles of relationship, especially familial relationship, creates this distance. Muteness and the physical barriers to communication create this distance.

On a functional level, the fact that so much of this film speaks using Korean sign language becomes a powerful tool for imagining the idea that love can breach this distance. On a spiritual and philopshical level, it is the simple presence of peope thrust into the shared space of mutual experience that becomes a way of understanding how love can breach this distance. Not as an abstract and culturally conditioned word, but as a lived expression.

Film Journal 2024: Inside The Yellow Cocoon Shell
Directed by Bên trong vỏ kén vàng


Features one of the most engrossing and powerful opening shots I’ve seen in a long while. A single take shot that establishes the films thematic interest in a profoundly visual and visceral way.

This debut (and yes the fact that this is a debut is astonishing) will challenge even the most patient of viewers- this is slow cinema with a richly drawn contemplative edge- but for those willing to invest it offers a transformative experience that explores the edges of some of life’s biggest questions.

A crucial aspect of that opening shot establishes a studied contrast in sensibilities. We meet three individuals, one who is a devout believer, the other a skeptic and an atheist, and the third an agnostic who states a desire to believe in the face of very real ambiguities.

It is this middle ground that frames the journey, following this third individual as his world is unsettled by sudden tragedies. He seeks the mystery that the films controlled approach, filled with roaming long takes and quiet detail, keeps present but hidden at the same time. If nothing else, what the film reaches to uncover is an inner longing, that desire to believe, suggesting that such a truth is compelling in it’s own right, even if we aren’t able to fully grasp the thing we long for. It is, nevertheless, the thing that keeps us seeking, the thing that continues to push and pull us forward amidst the ambiguities, or perhaps into the ambiguities.

And if the films title has power, it is precisely because these are the spaces where we are able to be formed and transformed by the unseen realities that run underneath. The spaces where the hidden begins to become visible, where once our eyes glanced over the spaces and details around us, fresh details and awareness begin to emerge. The essence of a spiritual awakening, one not built on certainty but on a willingness to seek.

Reading Journal 2024: Goodbye Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land
Author: Jacob Mikanowski

“This is a history of a place that doesn’t exist.”
So begins the prologue of this much anticipated boook. Took me a while to get around to it, mostly due to the lengthy wait period at the library. Now that I’ve had the chance to read it, Mikanowski did not disappoint.

One of the reasons why I wanted to read this book is because, ever since our brief time in Ukraine, I’ve been endlessly fascinated by this region and its history. To me, this truly was a foreign land, an enigma fueled by a stereotypical portrait The author wastes little time etablishing the fact that even the label “Eastern Europe” is a stereotype, coined by outsiders in response to the second World War. One of the outcomes of this phrasing is that it becomes a barrier in two ways- for the people on the inside who “want to escape being associated with Eastern Europe”, and for the people on the outside failing to understand the intricacies and diversity of this region, something Mikanowski argues is its most defining characteristic.

There are three primary expressions of this diversity that carry through the book: Language, ethnicity, and its primary expression, faith/religion. It is this last one that represents the region’s greatest contrast with the West, and for that matter the East. Given how the region is positioned, the developing Empires on either side of it, something that never developed in this central region, caused it to become a space where different relgious expressions were forced to live and co-exist together. As the author puts it, “Eastern Europe thus became a haven for religious misfits and heretics.” Or, as he puts it, “a place for seekers”, where their “idols were poets and short story writers” rather than generals or saints.

From this emerged the distinct character of a region that existed in a disparte state, lacking a singular narrative or origins story, let alone a coherent collection of co-existing narratives and origin stories. And, as the author points out, without a real sense of their history, or histories. “Awarness of ones origins is ilike an anchor line plunged into the deep without which historical intuition is viritually impossible.”

Here in lies the paradox though, on two primary levels. First, what seems like a positive (religious diversity and coexistence) actually bears out something other than harmony. This lack of harmony just gets expressed in different ways within the regions localized nature, ways that are arguably more succeptible to the challenges of global and territorial unrest. Later on in the book he touches on how this would feed into the regions developing relationship with the West. With the West as one imposing Empire with interest in territorial allegiances and control, attmpts to influence and/or control Eastern Europe actually became a means for this region’s stubborn resistance to colonization to penetrate or push back on Western ideas and interests. Secondly, part of this stubborn resistance emerges from the simple nature of its lack of a clear origins story. As history tends to go, crisis binds people together, and that binding becomes a means of forming a narrative, or requires a narrative. And that narrative becomes the identity of a people and a place. What has been labeled Eastern Europe remained undefined partly because of the ways its pagan origins were never recorded. When Chrisianity penetrated the region, as it did most of the world, the end result was an unintended mashup of pagan traditions and Christian practices/beliefs. One of the most unique marks of the region, and something I experienced during my time in Ukraine, is its fusion style that emerges from the simple fact that paganism persisted there the way it did without anyone actually knowing anything about its origins and character in this region to this day. It created this odd paradox in that “pagan chieftans” became “Eastern Europe’s first Christian kings” and so on and so on. In a very real sense, if Christianity outside of Eastern Europe became easily coopted by politics and nationalism and Empire, within Eastern Europe the fusion allowed a pervasive belief in the supernatural to be the very thing that protected the area from this. However, this also kept it from forming a cohesive national identity.

One of the most expressive examples of this is the history of the Slavs, which we genuinely know next to nothing about in terms of origins, and yet have been at the heart of the push and pull of the region in either direction, both sides wanting to lay claim to this history.

The book goes on to detail the history of the three primary relgiions coexisting- Jews, Mustlims and Christians, including a subsection called “Heretics”, giving each group a historical overview. All of these histories help to explain further how this diveristy fostered a climate of necessary segregation within the regions different local expressions, fueled as it was, likewise, by the regions fascination with and worship of language. This then plays out into the more familiar narratives of the regions inevitable clash between communism and fascism. By and large the parimary threat to this region was facism, even though conceptions of the West, fostered as it is through the use of the label “Eastern Europe”, has tended to elevate communism in its narrative. If the regions three-fold charcterization of diveristy- language, diversity, religion- allowed it to tame and use communism through the cycles of revolutions and counter-revolutions (not to mention, the untamable nature of the central region became the Soviet Union’s eventual downfall, precisely because it had been imagined it as a gateway into the rest of the world), it had no such defence against fascism. Which is partly why the region became so particularly vulnerable in the second world war, and utlimately defined by it with a sort of intimacy the rest of the world can never truly understand.

One of the final notes in the book recognizes the region’s tendency for forgetting. Of histories getting lost to history. And yet, in some odd way, this is precisely where history continues to get preserved and persists in the uniqueness of the region. A region that is still subservient in many ways to the Empires that lie on either side of it, but which also refuse to allow this to reshape them in an image not their own, even if that image is not always understood or articulated. It remains nevertheless embedded in the experiences of a localized people, enough so that it can wield a national identity amongst the reality of territorial sacrifice when necessary, but never at the expesnse of its diversity. Here the past continues to matter, but in ways that remain fluid and responsive. And, of course, complicated and complex.

Film Journal 2024: Immaculate
Directed by Michael Mohan

That final 5 minutes though. This is next level stuff from Sydney Sweeney.

For all the ways this checks conventional boxes, how it tells its story and some of the turns it takes makes this one a bit unconventional in its approach. Some of it works better than others. There is a significant shift that changes the direction of the story at just over the halfway point that I felt was rushed and a bit forced. The time it gives to Sydney Sweeney’s character, a nun who transfers to a convent in Italy, really worked for me, especially in the first half. I think it earns the gradual transformation we see her make, and it accentuates the different relationships in the convent in ways allow this to become something of a character study.

The horror worked for me too, built as it is on growing sense of paranoia. We see this take root in the opening 10 minutes, and when the truth does come to the surface, it’s ready to go all in. It leaves some space to weave in some existential quandaries about suffering and death, faith and miracles. There was room to do more with these aspects of the story, but they do add some substantive quality to the film.

I was glad to be able to see this one with a packed house. Defintiely the ideal way to see it. Especially for that ending. Did I mention the ending? It’s next level stuff.

Reading Journal 2024: Field Notes For the Wilderness: Practices For An Evolving Faith
Author: Sarah Bessey

We all bring ourselves to the things we read and watch. To try or want to remove ourselves from the equation so that we can speak to something truly objectively would be to miss the point of why we read and why we watch. We can not experience or grow if we fail to recognize where we sit as an essential part of the conversation.

This is especially the case with a book like this, which is bound to find people on all different points of the faith journey it wants to explore, namely those who have or are in the process of deconstructing and/or reconstructing (which she acknowledges is a tired phrase). If I may offer one small point of objective measure, I feel like I can rightly say that the book’s primary audience would be someone in the early parts of this journey. Field Notes For the Wilderness is very much a book for those who find themselves in a space they don’t know how to explain or describe, with its later chapters then describing to that audience, from the perspective of one well travelled wrtier, the sort of community of wilderness people they might expect to find.

So where do I find mysellf in all this? I’ve travelled the path she describes. I am of the generation who first encountered this notion of deconstruction in writers like Brian Mclaren and Rob Bell, and I am well versed in the larger community (the Evolving Faith community) Bessey has helped to foster and grow, including being an avid listener of Pete Enns and follower of Barbara Ann Taylor and the late Rachel Held Evans (who’s book Wholehearted Faith was nothing short of transformative).

What she has to say about the process she is engaging is deeply familiar to me, and much of this served as a reminder of the sorts of emotions and questions and challenges and experiences that first led me into that wildnerness space. I know first-hand what it is to experience those things and ask those questions and face those challenges and lose your sense of community and belonging in the process of simply attempting to be honest about where you are. The culture which I grew up in is one where you are either in or you are out based on your affirmation of a particular set of doctrinal beliefs, and to find yourself at odds with even one is to find yourself cast out. I’ve been called the devil. I’ve been called worse.

Here is the thing though. I’ve also experienced something similar from those in the wilderness. Don’t get me wrong, Bessey says all the appropriate things in the book. She speaks of making room for all, of remaining open, of learnning how to be for and not just against, of rejecting the notion that deconstuction/reconstruction (or her favored term, evolving faith) must look one way. The problem is, I’ve experienced enough to know this is not how the wilderness community gets established. Perhaps it comes with more than a little irony in tow, but I know first hand the singular way of thinking that one encounters in these communities, and how quickly one finds rejection if they don’t reject the right doctrines, tow the right lines, or if they take a slightly different path back into faith then the norm.

And to be sure, it is every bit as lonely of an experience as challenging your old paradigms to begin with. You might not be called the devil, or worse, but it can feel like you are being deemed a figurative version of the same thing. Most common is simply silence. The quiet rejection that tells you that you are not of one mind, and therefore there will be no theological conversation. The lines have been drawn between conservative evangelical/reformed christiantiy and progressive christianity, with no liveable space outside of these circles.

I have no doubt that Bessey is a great, well meaning person. I’ve benefited from her podcasts and speaking and writings. Similar for many within the wilderness community. There is much in this book that resonated for me and helped reframe things I thought I knew (permission to not be the perpetual cycnic is a good one). There was also some portions that reminded me of my personal struggles, despite Bessey doing a good job of attempting to counter a good deal of what I described above. The problem is, she fits firmly within that evolving faith community. She shares a language, shares in that experience and the “evolved faith” that emerged from it. I don’t quite belong. I know that. Even as I also don’t belong in those same ways within the communities she and others deconsructed from.

Of course, none of that is a direct criticism of the book. It is well written, very aware, and I have no doubt many will find it extremely helful.