Stuff! Stuff! Stuff!

1. Robert Jensen delivered a sermon at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin last Sunday titled "Hope is for the Weak":

When I assert that hope is for the weak, there is implied no criticism of hope or the hopeful. All it means is that hope is for us all, because we are all weak. We are human, and to be human is to be weak at times, to struggle with uncertainty, sometimes to lose our grip on ourselves and on the world. Hope is the name we give to our ability to persevere when we are weak, as we all inevitably are sometimes.

So, to claim hope implicitly acknowledges one’s weakness, which is a good start. Then we can see that real hope requires real humility. To claim to not need hope is the ultimate arrogance, a vain attempt -- and one that, in the end, will be in vain -- to ignore a deep yearning in us all. The weakest people in the world are the cynical, those who claim to have advanced beyond a need for hope. Cynicism is simply another name for moral laziness and cowardice; it is a way of choosing to give up without taking responsibility for the choice.

2. John Ralston Saul was recently interviewed by Mother Jones.

3. The King of Zembla, a distant northern land, has extremely interesting news:

Tim Lucas of Video Watchblog informs us that "Homecoming," the Joe Dante episode of Masters of Horror, has been warmly received at the Turin Film Festival. We are pleased to hear it, because the plot -- in which fictitious soldiers, killed in a fictitious Middle-East conflict, rise from the dead to confront a fictitious president, who sent them off to war based on a fictitious fictitious threat -- is likely to generate some controversy here in America.

We have recently watched a screening copy of this pleasing agitprop comedy, and we can assert with some confidence that you will not see a more aggressively Zemblan production this year or next. The episode premieres on Showtime three Fridays hence, December 2, at 10 PM EST/PST, with multiple showings throughout the weekend.