Maneuvering Metaphors

Posted on July 3, 2024 by awtraughber

Reflections on Mortal Goods by Ephraim Radner, Part Five

About a month ago, back with The Lord of the Rings was back in the theater, I posted some thoughts about the place of metaphors (a piece also inspired by something posted over at Mockingbird).  A big part of what Radner is doing with Mortal Goods is attempting to present a constellation, perhaps, of guiding metaphors for Christians in the 21st century trying to live faithfully and, ultimately, politically.  The post a month ago mentioned the metaphor of the pilgrim.  Radner embraces pictures of the sojourner, the peasant, and the one who gives back to God what comes from Him, one who offers.

One thing I like about Radner’s disposition in the book is that he knows that being a sojourner, a holy peasant, one who offers, is not something that comes naturally: it must be taught.  Radner often places himself at some level of opposition to Augustine in his thinking, but he does find a solid point of agreement with him in this:

This is where Augustine rightly focused his concerns as his pastoral career unfolded, even as the social scaffolding of his world began to crumble about him: one must teach offering; one must learn it. If the church has a peculiar political vocation, one that is just hers alone, perhaps it is this teaching and learning.

Radner sees this as a key part of pastoral work, but it is therefore more broadly to be true of the church in general: to teach and learn what it means to offer back to God these things He has given us.

And this is where Radner turns back to a wider swath of Scripture, particularly the Old Testament and New Testament narratives, which are full of people like (and unlike) you and me.  (This is also a point where I feel a strong connection between Radner and the thoughts of N. T. Wright and Kevin Vanhoozer, who assert that Scripture teaches us how to live fittingly in God’s story.)  And so we see what God has said through the lives of Adam and Eve, Moses and Miriam, Deborah and David, warts and all.  Because (channeling early 21st century Donald Miller) that’s also the way story works.  You see the struggle of the good and bad, you almost unconsciously put yourself in their places, put on their lives and decisions, and see what could and should have been done (and how God can use every last bit of it).  Radner again:

We live among and as a set of mortal forms that are simply given us by God, and it is these we feebly order or are ordered by. The interplay between the two— God’s giving and our ordering— is disproportionate.

And (one of my favorite lines in the book so far:

. . . a beautiful life is one that the Scriptures somehow utter and whose utterances the human creature gratefully assumes.

Here Radner echoes the thoughts of Augustine:

. . . the truly good life of any Christian, navigating the miseries of this world as a pilgrim, lies in obediently ordering the love of God and neighbor in the course of mortality’s pinching environment.

The good life is a rightly ordered life, one whose affections have been adequately calibrated to God and everything that He has given.

The contemporary church, by the way, is full of guiding metaphors and mission and vision statements.  And that’s “above and beyond” their confessions and creeds.  At their best, these churches ask a certain kind of “ordering of life” from their congregants.  Expressive individualism makes that tricker than it used to be, I imagine.  And the explosion of a business/marketing mindset can also make a rightly ordered life trickier (particularly in the dynamic tension between God and the church, if that makes sense).  Seeing Radner trying to help us slow down and understand our place in the bigger story is a good thing, a helpful way for us to make sense of the metaphors we live by.

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Made in the Midbar

Posted on July 2, 2024 by awtraughber

Reflections on Mortal Goods by Ephraim Radner, Part Four

One of the first “5-minute finds” that we do in our senior-level class involves the ancient concept of eudaemonia, the term the ancient Greeks used for a good or flourishing life.  Every culture has an example of what constitutes a “good life,” and any given culture might have a picture of it with some variation.  It’s interesting watching Ephraim Radner make sense of the idea from a particularly Christian perspective while weaving in a major thread from the Old Testament.  It’s a move that he almost has to make, since once of his goals is to focus on the here-and-now and let the supernatural seep through.  And so the journey of the people of Israel is vital to what he wants to communicate in Mortal Goods.

Early in the book, Radner picks up own the language of sojourning, of being “on the way” in some sense or another.  The earliest positive example of this would be rooted in the Exodus narrative.  The book of Numbers is important for Radner here, as

. . . the Hebrew name midbar (wilderness), taken from Number 1:1, is more telling.  A midbar is an open tract of land, not always a desert in a modern sense, but land without roads or settlements. And the book of Numbers is properly read as a vision of sojourning, of life in the trackless world, where Adam— that is, all the people— in his joys and frustrated needs receives life and death from God . . .  In this sense, the service that Moses lays out for Israel is itself a service of survival.

Here Radner adds service to the idea of sojourning.  And that service, at least as it is articulated in the book of Numbers, appears as a kind of offering.  Numbers tells of the peoples way through the wilderness as a way of preparation to enter the Promised Land, including both narrative and laws.

Like that of a sojourner, the “way” through the wilderness, which is less a clear path than a wandering, is bound to the “way” of God’s commandments— a “walking” that both takes us through trackless desert and brings us closer to God.  Once they are no longer slaves to the world, Israel’s embededness in this world becomes the stuff of praise and faithfulness.  One cannot be a slave to what one offers up.

The last two sentences there are quite striking: a reminder of the reality of Israel’s calling as well as something deeply, devotionally true.

It is in the context of this sojourning as service, and ultimately as offering (“what one offers up”) that Radner lands on the image of the holy peasant.  It’s not a phrase that rings well in 21st century American ears, but there’s also something in it that resonates better on reflection.  Radner argues that much of human history is the story of the peasant.  The peasant-life will be key to understanding a Christian “politics” moving forward. Invoking the “Christian peasant” of days-gone-by, Radners defines mortal goods:

With each of the Christian peasants day’s came a prayer, and the prayers were wrapped around the content of the days— children, animals, gardens, feast days, marriages, bedsides, burials. All this was good, however hard and however brief. All this was good, not on its own, but because this is what God gives.

As Radner understands it, this is the heart of eudaemonia: what is good because it is what God gives.

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Sojourn

Posted on June 27, 2024 by awtraughber

Reflections on Mortal Goods by Ephraim Radner, Part Three

The third chapter of Ephraim Radner’s Mortal Goods is one that really sings to me.  After getting the lay of the land as a place and time for “evil days,” Radner dives right into what it means to try and live amidst those days.  He asks:

Where shall we escape the evil that turns each day into a test? How do we locate in time the way that the Good Life, however much entwined with “today” and thus with today’s evils, also engage something beyond such contemporary burdens? Another way of putting the question is, “Are we heading somewhere?”

Pilgrim JourneyI do think it is a step, not quite a leap, to go from being somewhere to heading somewhere on Radner’s part, as he is particularly concerned with the here-and-now.  But (he is aware that) the Biblical Story is full of movement: Abraham and Canaan, Moses and the Promised Land, a faithful family on the way to Jerusalem for a feast.  So even in a stationary life, there is a pull of some kind of movement.  Radner points to the Christian tradition’s image of “sojourning” as a way of understanding this movement, a way that is “both direction and posture, both of which are determined by a director and a form.”

There are Old Testament and New Testament threads for sojourning, what Radner points to in Psalm 119 as being “a stranger on the earth.”  And with the image of the stranger comes the image of the pilgrim, which also has root in the broader Christian tradition.  A great line from Radner about being a pilgrim:

To be a pilgrim is a life itself, not the end of a life.

Which is a great distinction and a good note.  Because the destination matters, and the destination is something like a step beyond the life itself.  And while Radner restrains himself from being to afterlife-centric (he is, after all, focusing on mortal goods), he does want his readers to see that the pilgrim/stranger life is intrinsic to the Christian life.  He goes on to say:

The fact that sojourning is the posture of a mortal human being simply means that the human creature is constantly being thrust back into a world of things, of created gifts and limitations, of swimming within them, of finding them ever anew and losing them ever anew, such that “newness” is both real and not capable of being tamed or manipulated— as much a source of fear, therefore, as of promise or hope.

In some sense, the image of the pilgrim/stranger is one doing his or her best to live well in the “now but not yet” of God’s kingdom.  Living in the tension of what is right in front of you and what is in the best part of your heart (should?) throw you back on that which does not change.  But Radner is also wise to note another dimension that exists for the Christian in this life:

The Christians Peter calls “strangers” (1 Peter 2:11) are not “on their way to Zion”; the are Zion in this place.  What they are close to is Jesus, whose own life is manifested in suffering, resurrection, vindication, and glory, the Word made flesh.

Lewis would call the church, the gathering of Christians in this life, an “outpost,” I think.  Lots of Christians would name it as such.  It’s meant to be a kind of precursor to the end of a pilgrim life, not everything eternal, but something closer in that direction or way of being.

All of this does make you wonder how comfortable we have become in the “now” that no longer really points to the “not yet.”  It leaves you wondering how well we see ourselves and our current predicament (or if the predicament even matters).  That good and healthy tension should always be there, should not come as a surprise to us.  It doesn’t mean that it dictates real hope and joy; it’s the knowledge of real joy and hope that makes the tension possible.

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Letters for Evil Days

Posted on June 26, 2024 by awtraughber

Reflections on Mortal Goods by Ephraim Radner, Part Two

In the last few weeks of my spring course, we use 1 John as our opening Scripture.  The letter allows for a number of call-backs to both the Old Testament and John’s Gospel.  He often refers to his readers as “dear children,” which is an opportunity for me to remind my students that he’s not being dismissive so much as he is showing compassion and care for them in a world of darkness and light.  I was glad to see Ephraim Radner reference 1 John as an example of a “letter to children,” which is what Radner intends Mortal Goods to be.  Radner explains:

I want my children to live well.I want them, as I will explore the matter, to live a good life, perhaps even “the Good Life,” as philosophers have envisaged it.To do that, however, they must be willing to inhabit a common space where God gives all, where all is taken away, and where, in the midst of this grand movement, a few clear lines of divine glory are etched, received, and followed.

He also says something in reference to the call in Ecclesiastes to remember God in our youth that has stuck with me (and might work its way into a talk at school next month):

“Remembering thy Creator” now, for the young, is of paramount importance because the discipline of remembering is learned early on, if it is to be used at all.

Radner, like so many others, feels a real impetus for passing down what he believes and lives.  A big part of what I like about the first half of Radner’s book, though, is his choice to take time to set real context.  Because, in a sense, advice is always contextual.  And while the context he gives isn’t necessarily bad news, it is a reminder that things aren’t (nor have they ever been) as rosy as they might seem:

If we wish to help our children live the Good Life, we must surely ask where, in fact, the Good Life is to be lived. And the answer is “in the midst of evil days.” Perhaps not always, not for everyone. But it seems that this is the time in which I am now writing, and it is also so for those to whom I write: the days are evil indeed.

Radner gets this idea, or at least this particular wording from Paul’s challenge in his letter to the Ephesians to make the most of their time, because the days are evil (5:15-16).  But it’s not a total either-or for Radner.  Life is rarely that cut-and-dry:

The Good Life is possible, surely, in the midst of any “day,” good or evil. For God offers goods, and hence the Good itself somehow, in the midst of all days, since every day is his. He calls us into the good of living “in and through.” And for this, God gives grace that is joined to the very limitations that shape our burdens.

Radner points out an interesting thread in our 21st century America struggles.  As he sees it, the struggle starts with irresolution and leads to a growing sense of impossibility:

The experience of irresolution— of not “solving” the problems one can identify— appears to be growing into a larger vision of impossibility that touches on a loss of faith in family and communal identities, in legislative and broader political systems, in religious claims themselves (not just “institutions,” a problem in earlier ages), in the future itself.

Radner gives no easy answers, of course.  He’s really just getting started in his overall argument.  One could easily make a connection between the “abnormal politics” previously mentioned and today’s “vision of impossibility” than many people live with.  These are especially great questions for the church, though many of us won’t particularly like where Radner leads . . . which is another reason he is worth listening to.

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Concerning Mortal Goods

Posted on June 25, 2024 by awtraughber

Reflections on Mortal Goods by Ephraim Radner, Part One

The most unfortunate (but also necessary) cut that Peter Jackson’s team made to the cinematic version of The Lord of the Rings is, without a doubt, the scouring of the Shire.  In Jackson’s version of the LOTR ending, Frodo and his companions return to the Shire one year after their journey began, all clad in the refinement of the outside world.  They are met at first with odd glances but seem to assimilate easily back into daily life (with the exception of Frodo).  In Tolkien’s novel, the hobbits return only to find that Saruman and his henchmen have made an industrial wasteland of the Shire, leaving Frodo and his companions to lead a rebellion to save the Shire.  The whole tale, on could say, was to prepare the halflings for this final, home-front battle.

That was, after all, what the hobbits had left the Shire for in the first place.  And while the length in space and time of their journey grew, their hearts were never far from home.  That’s why Sam tries to remind Frodo of so many good, small things as they attempt to climb Mount Doom . . . and why it is tragic that Frodo has lost such memories because they have been displaced by Sauron’s Eye.  And while Jackson tried to make nods to the scouring (as with the mirror of Galadriel scene), it was just too much for the end of an already-long movie.  So some things that should not be forgotten can be lost, depending on the medium and how you understand what is important in life. To have saved the world and lost the Shire would have been too much for our heroes.  Those were always the stakes; the novel just reminds us how very real those stakes were.

Mortal GoodsThat thread from The Lord of the Rings is what comes to mind as I think about the first half of Ephraim Radner’s Mortal Goods.  It is a book about knowing what you are fighting for, especially when there are competing scopes of importance.  Radner suggests that the important things are the “mortal goods” of life, and that they are the things that proper politics should be about.  Over these next couple of weeks of “ordinary time,” the plan is to write through some of Radner’s points from the book’s first half, which is all about “the good life.”

Radner’s book begins with age, illness, and Covid, which had become something of a great equalizer for most of us.  He found himself wanting to write a letter to his children that would communicate “a sense of what makes life valuable.”  He calls these things “goods that are part and parcel of mortal life, the life God has given us and that, in a sense, must be who we are if we are not to be God.”  These things, Radner asserts, demand our tending, even if we don’t quite know how.  Radner acknowledges that for many people throughout history, the arena of politics has been a way of caring for such things, at least until recently, when the aim of politics seems to have changed greatly.  The book’s argument seems simple:

If “politics,” in a general way, refers to the deliberate judgments and decisions ordering our corporate existence, then our Christian calling is to limit our politics to the boundaries of our actual created lives and to the goods that stake out these limits: our births, our parents, our siblings, our families, our growing, our brief persistence in life, our raising of children, our relations, our decline, our deaths.  These mark the goods of our lives along with the acts that sustain these good, like toil and joy, suffering, prayer, and giving thanks.  Christian politics is aimed at no more and no less than the tending of these “mortal goods.”

It’s worth noting that Radner sees two kinds of “big picture” politics.  The first is normal politics, which he defines as “playing one’s role in whatever system of governance one finds oneself living within, according to the rules of the system.”  This sounds to me like “peace-time politics.” The second is abnormal politics, when there is a threat that stands opposed to a system of “mortal goods.”  Such politics “is almost always engaged in the midst of and through the means of catastrophic realities.”  One could argue that we live in an era of abnormal politics, where catastrophe is experienced all the time by everyone, which is why it feels like everything is always up for grabs (and therefore we remain in panic mode).

As I mentioned earlier, the first half of Mortal Goods focuses on the context and scope of “the God-given good life.”  And while Radner deals regularly with New Testament texts and contexts, much of his overall argument is rooted in an interesting reading of the Old Testament, particularly with the Israelites between Egypt and the Promised Land.  While I don’t agree with everything Radner asserts, I do believe he has something important to say, if only to remind us, like Bilbo reminds Gandalf in the cinematic version of the story: “it is no bad thing to celebrate a simple life.”

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Technology and Trust in the Classroom

Posted on June 22, 2024 by awtraughber

While I am grateful for a break from school, my heart and mind are never far from the classroom.  As the teachers-only portion of the school year ended, I was already brainstorming ways to encourage students to as (better) questions.  Earlier this week, on getting a better sense of what my fall line would look like, I started imagining better ways to frame the content of a course I have not taught in some time.  And yesterday my mind turned to my junior-level class, which includes the reading of How to Think by Alan Jacobs.

Jacobs occasionally writes for The Hedgehog Review, which makes a point of reflection on contemporary culture.  And that often includes things at the intersection of technology and education, which Jacobs has said a lot about.  Yesterday’s post by Jacobs had to do with student writing and the technological advances that make writing with integrity difficult.  Such technologies, chatbots in particular, are inspiring a greater and greater “vanishing of trust” between teachers and students, something he as tried hard to work against:

I don’t like this collapse of trust; I don’t like being in a technological arms race with my students. So over the years I have developed a series of eccentric assignments. These days I rarely assign the traditional thesis essay—an assignment I always hated anyway, because it makes both the writing and the grading utterly mechanical—but instead assign dialogues between two literary theorists, or an imaginary correspondence between two novelists, or just an old-fashioned textual explication: Take this passage and explain to me, I ask them, without paraphrase, what it’s doing, what’s going on in it. And those assignments have, as it were, taken us back in time, back to the time when commissioning was expensive and therefore rare: the online paper mills, after all, don’t have a stack of conversations about The Brothers Karamazov featuring Dostoevsky and Jane Austen. It’s been a very successful strategy… until now.

I have thought deeply for some time now about how I encourage students to read (both How to Think junior year and then Mere Christianity in senior year) and reflect on what they have read.  The struggle has included making most of the reading take place in class and then having students complete reading journals in class.  Sometimes it works; sometimes it becomes oddly burdensome for everyone, especially when students are absent.  And while I don’t think my students are yet prone to use outside AI programs for the readings, it’s always a possibility (which is why the paraphrase thing is both necessary and tricky).

I do like Jacobs’s idea of “eccentric assignments,” though I often use those more for lecture material than for reading assignments.  Maybe there’s something to be said for putting those two parts of the course into greater contact with one another?

The piece ends with two possible ways forward.  The first is where many of us in education are currently landing (for good and bad).  The second is more hopeful but also more of a challenge:

The second possibility requires great courage, a courage I am not sure I possess. I am moved to consider it by reflecting on something T. S. Eliot wrote in 1944, a sentence I often have reason to quote: “Not least of the effects of industrialism is that we become mechanized in mind, and consequently attempt to provide solutions in terms of engineering, for problems which are essentially problems of life.” With this sentence in mind—or rather, with the evident truth the sentence points to in mind—I could simply make the assignments that I believe best suited to what I want my students to learn, and then turn to them and ask: “What are the ‘problems of life’ that incline so many of you to turn to the chatbots rather than do these assignments?” If I could get honest answers to that question, then we all might be in deeper waters than we’re prepared for. But maybe the deeper waters are precisely what university education should be aiming for.

You can read all of the post here.  And you can follow Jacobs’s blog here.

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On Space and Time

Posted on June 18, 2024 by awtraughber

Every now and then, things line up and I come across different internet posts that deal with the topics mentioned in this site’s title: space and time.

Seth Godin recently shared his thoughts on the difference between a boundary and a limit.  (It’s always interesting to see where people draw lines with similar concepts.)  Godin asserts that the two concepts “serve different purposes.”  He writes:

Boundaries can give us room to innovate and thrive. Budgets, schedules and specifications all exist to show us where the safe areas are.  Sure, go to the edges and challenge the boundaries, that’s why they’re there.

But limits aren’t boundaries. Limits are the end, the danger zone, the thing to avoid.

I like the distinction.  “Limit” has a bite to it that “boundary” doesn’t.  The potentially frustrating thing is when communication is lacking and boundaries and limits are blurred and you are punished for pushing a limit that you thought was a boundary.  It would be an interesting thought exercise for those in leadership to think through the distinction in concrete ways.

+ 

In his June 16, 2024 “Notebook” entry titled “Having Time,” Bishop Erik Varden shared a quote from Mother Maria Gysi about time:

Time is so little connected with actual work. It is something quite different, I believe. It is the absence, or relative absence, of pressure on the mind.’

Varden agrees, saying that “the secret is to learn to resist the pressure, or to let it, I suppose, just pass through one.”

I like the thought.  Because it really is the “pressure on the mind” that you feel that makes the work work.  I suppose things done as a result of procrastination are good pictures of this.  To be able to work without that pressure may be a rare gift.

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Just As I Am [June 17, 2024]

Posted on June 17, 2024 by awtraughber

I’m about a week and a half into summer break.  I try to do the sensible, mature thing and use this kind of time for responsible things like medical appointments and such.  Today was my visit to the optometrist, where everything was fine- no reading glasses yet, though it’s closer now than last time.  Last week was an oil change for the car and a doctor’s visit and bloodwork.  I’ve tried these last two years to be more intentional about these things (previously I’ve been most consistent with dermatologist and dentist- it was time to expand, I think).

Beyond that, I’ve tried to maintain some kind of routine with some success.  Most weekday mornings I go to the gym just like during the school year.  Come home, clean up, and then head out for a simple breakfast and quiet time before heading over to the state library to do some reading and writing.  I try to hit my favorite downtown spots for lunch during break, as they aren’t really options during the school year.  Today it was the chicken salad sandwich at the Hulu Deli down by the main post office.  The afternoons have been for errands or more writing.  Some of that writing includes note-taking from recent non-fiction.

I decided last week to listen to whole albums as I walk downtown each morning.  I decided to start with the music of Andrew Peterson since it is well-known and appropriately upbeat and thoughtful for the season.  I was once again reminded of this wonderful song from his 2003 album, Love & Thunder. The song title, also the title of a great hymn, will now be used for these more “week-in-review” type posts.

Other than that, I’ve been rewatching the short-lived sci-fi western Firefly on Hulu and Spaced, one of my all-time favorite sitcoms now on Roku.  I did finish Moonbound by Robin Sloan.  It is a wonderful book that turns left when you often think it will turn right.  Sloan really has created a modern sci-fi masterpiece with the adventure of Ariel de la Sauvage in a world 11,000 years in the future.

I have been called back into work a couple of times since the last day of the semester.  Mostly interview stuff with some department business mixed in.  Hoping to get most work stuff taken care of before heading to the mainland in a couple of weeks.

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One More LOTR Post for the Week!

Posted on June 14, 2024 by awtraughber

I did not plan on there being so much Lord of the Rings content on the site this week, but I’ve got one more LOTR post to round things out.  A few weeks ago, Amazon dropped the teaser trailer for season two of The Rings of Power.  I wrote a bit about it here.  I finally got around to watching the Nerd of the Rings breakdown of the trailer (who knew you could say so much about so small a thing?).  It’s a fascinating watch. Spoilers, obviously.  

It is worth reiterating the point made in the video that a number of these scenes could come from visions and dreams, which mean they don’t necessarily reveal much at all.  I agree with the creator: let’s not make the Stranger Gandalf.  There are other, more interesting, stories to tell at this point.  I get the sense, though, that they are going to do their best to pack a lot into this season.  I’ve half a mind to go back and watch season one before the August drop-date for season two.  We’ll see.

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Revisiting the Ring

Posted on June 12, 2024 by awtraughber

LOTRAs I mentioned earlier, this past weekend was a Lord of the Rings weekend.  Regal at Dole Cannery was showing new remastered versions of the extended editions of the trilogy.  While not my my first time seeing the extended editions in the theater (they finally released the extended The Return of the King last year, if I recall), it was my first time to see them all in succession in a theater.  And it was highly enjoyable.  Some thoughts about the extended movie trilogy as seen in theaters:

+ The Fellowship of the Ring is still the best.  The extended scenes flow perfectly.  Granted, this is the extended version that I’ve seen the most.  I also take some joy in seeing movie locations that I visited years ago while in New Zealand that only appear in the extended version.

+ It was interesting to watch FOTR post-Rings of Power season one.  While I don’t think it’s necessary to see ROP Galadriel as the same as the one in Peter Jackson’s work, seeing Blanchett’s moment at the Mirror with Frodo did have more “historical” depth than I had expected.

+ The extended edition of The Two Towers makes for a better story, but not necessarily a better movie.  The additions of the struggle in Rohan add some great context.  The Fangorn Forest additions are nice and welcome, as are the extended scenes with the elves.  I got a better sense of what Jackson was going for by adding the elves to Helm’s Deep.  It’s funny, though: in the theatrical release, I felt like everything was too Helm’s Deep-centric.  This time, it felt like way too much time was spent actually getting to that final battle.

+ I’m not a big fan of Arargorn’s arc in TTT, particularly after he is dragged off the cliff.  But I will say that this clip with Eowyn (and Gimli) is still hilarious all these years later:

+ I did think the Faramir additions in the last half of the movie were nice additions, even though I do think they get Faramir almost completely wrong.  I had forgotten how much of this material was added into the extended edition.  And we even get a pre-ROTK appearance from Denethor, which I had forgotten about.

+ By the time watching The Return of the King rolled around, I found myself most interested in paying attention to the pacing of the story, especially how Jackson toggled between events inside and outside of Mordor.  The pacing held up really well.  And I didn’t mind the slower cadence of Aragorn and Frodo in the closing scenes.  In fact, the whole unending-epilogue feeling of previous viewings was lessened overall, which was nice.

I did have one recurring thought throughout each viewing: that Peter Jackson did so well with so much of the material is utterly amazing.  So many great shots that have become iconic.  So many great visuals that toggled from broad vistas to character close-ups.  So many things were put together perfectly.  It’s funny, I felt that instantly about Avengers: Infinity War (which never should have worked out as well as it did) and then again with Avengers: Endgame (to a lesser extent).  But this just confirmed that Peter Jackson did it first and best.

It will be interesting to see how often movie theaters brings these movies back. Harry Potter shows up every few years.  I get the sense that might happen often with some Marvel movies (particularly Spider-Man).  I can’t imagine the Hobbit movies will ever get this treatment (and I firmly believe the extended versions make those movies better, too).  But I think once every five or ten years would be great for these movies.  Time will tell.  It really was nice, though, getting to revisit the ring like this.

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