It’s been nice having a season of The Flash that hasn’t centered on a villainous speedster. The unfolding story of the Thinker has brought a nice twist to some familiar tropes of the superhero television genre. The through-line of the “passengers on the bus” is also a nice way of broadening the shows antagonists (at least until this past week).
Here’s the trailer for the next episode, which drops in a couple of weeks.
The CW is putting Supergirl on hiatus for a few weeks so that DC’s Legends of Tomorrow can have a solid Monday night run. Here’s the trailer for this next Monday’s return of our time-correcting team.
Listen for the comment made by Hemsworth about ten years and things coming to an end . . . I think we have every reason to believe that Avengers 3 and 4 will be complete game-changers for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Here’s a video concerning the MCU’s 10th Anniversary.
And here’s the Super Bowl trailer for Avengers: Infinity War, which drops in three short months.
Okay. Only one . . . maybe two . . . more movie trailers for the week. As much as I’d like to think that my taste in movies transcends franchises and sequels, there is something wonderfully comfortable about a series that pushes the limits while putting most of the toys in the box by flick’s end. Which is one reason that Mission: Impossible- Fallout will probably be so enjoyable. Here’s the first trailer for the movie, which opens in July.
Well, the full trailer is much better than the teaser played during the first commercial break of the Super Bowl. Even still, the jury will be out for a while on this one.
The struggle I foresee this movie having is that it’s the first Star Wars movie that many of think should actually be more funny than not. We expect lots of quips and banter that doesn’t’t just amount to comic relief. It will be interesting to see what, if any, balance actually occurs.
Friday night saw the “wrap” of the Agents of SHIELD lost-in-the-future saga. It will probably go down as one of the best arcs of the show’s run. Now we’ve got a month to wait before the second half of the season airs. Here’s the promo for the return, which looks to be a little bumpy (and with no acknowledgment of what ails Coulson).
This last part of the second season of The Good Place has seen the “existential quartet” confront “the Judge” to plead their case as changed people. Last week we say each member face a challenge, a test, to see how much they had actually changed. Here’s Tahani’s test:
The season finale aired Thursday night, and I just got the chance to catch it. Perhaps the only thing more surprising that the way the first season ended is the finale of the second. It took things in what is probably the most obvious direction . . . which I didn’t see coming at all. And all while using the language of ethics. And it also folded back into something from the middle of the first season, which was pretty cool.
We’ve probably got a good while to wait for the third season. Which is fine as long as they concoct a season as wonderfully enriching and twisted as this one.
One of the things that we talk about in our classroom discussions about ethics is the category of ethics known as “descriptive ethics.” It really is as simple as the term itself: descriptive ethics is concerned with communicating what is seen concerning a particular group of people or a particular topic. It’s also the one question on the test that everyone should get correct.
A great example of descriptive ethics dropped this last week. The Barna Group (along with Impact 360) released a sleek and sobering look at today’s teenagers: Gen Z- The Culture, Beliefs, and Motivations Shaping the Next Generation. One of the odd dynamics of the last few years (at least from my vantage point) has been the shift in cultural discussions to young adults (and away from youth). As a teacher, I often have to take things written concerning college students and extrapolate down to high schoolers. So it’s refreshing to find something that deals with this particular moment in the life of teenagers. As such, it’s kind of brought back a strand of joy and challenge that I haven’t experienced in a few years, this idea of a report like this and the conversations that it can open up.
The question, of course, becomes “how do we effectively and purposefully pursue those questions?” particularly if they are questions that many of us have forgotten how to ask.
One of the most interesting trends in the book, but the way, is to see some of the ideological shifts that have taken place between millennials and “generation z” kids. Granted, and Barna points this out, these Gen-Z kids are still being formed, so things are still up for grabs. But while you can’t quite say that Gen-Z is more conservative, they are a little different, a little more open-minded in a healthy way.
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Two other quick observations/thoughts:
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One last thing of note from the book’s beginning. Without going full “Benedict Option,” the president of Barna, David Kinnaman, notes an ideological shift from “Jerusalem to Babylon” in terms of culture and the role Christianity plays in it. Instead of “faith at the center,” we now see “faith at the margins.” A “simple life” has been replaced with a kind of “bitter/sweet tension.” And while the idol in “Jerusalem” was “false piety,” the idol of this new “Babylon” is “fitting in and not missing out.” And so the question stands: “Are we making disciples for Jerusalem when we need to be making disciples for Babylon?”
(image from barna.com)
From a recent homily concerning Thomas Aquinas, given by Fr. Aquinas Guilbeau, OP, someone I follow on Twitter.
The monk lives close to God through the ora—the prayer—of his life, which takes its preeminent form in the liturgy. The monk lives close to the things of God through the labora—the work—of his life, which is intellectual and not only physical. The monk interrogates the soil as his tills it. Through study and observation, the monk inquires about the causes and ends of the things before him. He poses the question “What?” to them. “What is this?” It’s a holy question. With it the monk probes the things that God has made, coaxing them to reveal their hidden, divinely given essences. This interrogation of things perfects the monk’s prayer, for through his questions the monk discovers the divine ideas inscribed in things, and thereby he absorbs the wisdom of the one who made them all. Besides being a holy question, “What?” is also a very practical one. Its monastic use has given the world many gifts: early medicine, Belgian beer, and the wines of Burgundy, as well as Gothic architecture, the scholastic method, and the science of genetics. Of course, monks aren’t the only ones to ask the question “What?” But given the graces of their vocation, monks are often good teachers of how to ask the question rightly.
The Good Place on NBC has always been an amazing little show. Now that the main characters have taken leave of the “Good Place,” things have gotten even weirder . . . and better . . . and more ethically challenging. Here’s a clip from this week’s episode, where the Ethics Quartet makes their way to the Judge, only to find a . . . burrito?
Space Enough, and Time 