Still Stirring it Up

Here is an interview that I did a few months ago for the web site Patheos. I expect lots of email for suggesting that EWTN and CBN are doing more harm to the Church culturally than Hustler and Big Love.

Bring it on.

Some newish thoughts here as I have been in semi-interview retirement this past year and have had time to put some things together. Here's a new one:

I am a political animal in many ways. It's a big hobby for me. But I have, with the rest of my generation, almost completely lost confidence that real good in society can be achieved through politics. I don't think that's the pathway to lasting good. I think that politics can clear the field for good to be done, but I don't think it actually achieves anything. I think culture is what creates good in the world. That's the realm of the artist: the storyteller, the musician, the poet. And I see myself as a storyteller.

Also some of my favorite beasts to beat. Like this familiar and (beloved) psychoses:

Things are changing, too. The boomers are dying and ceding power, and the power is going into the very troubled, introspective hands of the Generation Xers, people like Jason Reitman, who made Juno and what I consider this year's best film, Up in the Air. These folks are completely ambivalent about the promises of the sexual revolution. They don't have other options, but they know the way they were raised was wrong.

You're starting to see this in so many movies. I think four or five of this year's academy award nominees are very hopeful pictures. They're seeded with hope, not infected with the kind of cynicism that the boomer generation had come to. The boomers, after exhausting themselves with every kind of sexual license and permissiveness and me-centeredness, basically had come out with a "whatever" attitude in their movies. That is not the spirit of the Gen-Xers.

Thanks much to the very patient Timothy Dalrympal for transcribing my hour-long rant.