My New Best Friend in Mexico

Last fall I spent three days in San Cristobal, the town where Vicente Fox, former President of Mexico, grew up. The town is in the Mexican state of Guanajuato, and is really one of the most picturesque places I’ve been in a long time. Fox invited a few of us to spend some time with him at his compound, which now houses his presidential library and leadership institute, Centro Fox. I had breakfast with him and his wife Marta in the very room where he used to have his meals as a little boy, growing up on the surrounding ranch.

Much of the ranch still exists, surrounding Centro Fox. We talked at his breakfast table, then later in his office under a portrait of him and Marta, and then we walked through the Centro Fox grounds, looking through his presidential memorabilia. Most of what we talked about is in the January 2012 edition of San Diego Magazine, in my story The Fantastic Mr. Fox.

I hope this is just the beginning of my conversations with him. He’s worth listening to. Here are some photos of Centro Fox and the nearby city of Guanajuato.

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Discovering John Polkinghorne

Click picture to Order Book

So after about three years of working on it, my book on John Polkinghorne, the world class physicist, Anglican priest, and all-around clear thinker, is now out in the US! I wrote it with another clear thinker, the provocative Karl Giberson, of Boston.

I am very excited to see Polkinghorne’s approach to faith and science out in the public in this way. He has written more than 30 books about the relationship between the two, but no one has written about him in this way.
Also, I was on KPBS Radio (the San Diego NPR affiliate) recently to talk about it, and I thought the interviewer was terrific. That made it a much more enjoyable and fruitful discussion. You can listen to it here.

Last month I had a piece in USA Today on Polkinghorne and why it’s okay to doubt, and on the same day I got my contributor copy of the Saturday Evening Post, which also has a story of mine on the scientist/priest. So it’s been all Polkinghorne for me lately. Pay attention to him. He’s worth listening to!

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Decisions, Decisions

My wife and I saw the movie The Trip with friends recently, and of the many hilarious and occasionally poignant scenes, one in particular stayed with me enough that I tried to apply it to my son yesterday. The movie features two British actors/comedians who are spending a week traveling across England to experience some of the finest restaurants in order to write about them. The viewer gets the feeling that neither of the actors has really reached what each would consider the stardom that he is capable of, but one is clearly more frustrated by this than the other. So they get to talking about what price they would pay in order to win an Oscar. They even discuss whether they would allow one of their children to get a disease (non-fatal, of course), if it meant winning the award.

Which led me to ask a similar question to my son who, along with his wife, are in San Diego for a while before they return to Guatemala, where they teach. My son also makes movies, and I asked him to put himself in that scene from The Trip — if he knew his child would live, would he let the child suffer in exchange for winning an Oscar? Eventually he and my wife turned the table on me. How much suffering would I allow to gain a Pulitzer? It’s a great discussion. I won’t bore you with our conclusions (believe it or not, I was the most conservative of the three), but it did get me to thinking about the filmmaker Tom McCarthy, who portrays decision making better than most directors I’ve watched.

McCarthy attentitively listening to my question

McCarthy’s most recent film is Win Win, starring Paul Giamatti, and one of the takeaways from the movie is that little decisions matter. Giamatti makes some little decisions that he thinks no one will notice, and he even makes them for the right reasons. He’s trying to make ends meet and he’s trying to not stress his family. But, as McCarthy shows, little decisions lead to big consequences.

One of the main characters in another McCarthy movie, The Visitor, also is confronted with a decision. The decision he makes there cascades into many, many more significant events. I don’t want to give plots away here, so I recommend your watching both Win Win and The Visitor to see what I mean.

photos by Bronson Pate

I talked about this with McCarthy when he was in San Diego this spring, promoting Win Win. We talked about decisions, morality, and what it means to wrestle (sometimes literally) with your own inner angel or demon. You can read my interview with him in Risen Magazine here. Check out Risen Magazine anyway. They have some wonderful interviews and stories on pop culture through the prism of faith, hope and love.

Final word about Tom McCarthy: In addition to his being a marvelous filmmaker and director, he does some acting. He’s been in the movies Syriana, Good Night and Good Luck, and was the despicable newspaper reporter (thanks for making us look even worse, Tom) in season 5 of the television show The Wire. But what made me admire him even more, was his essay in the book Things I’ve Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Me. The book is a collection of funny stories from comedians, many of which are pretty bawdy, but McCarthy’s stood out to me as one of the funniest and most skillfully written. Titled “Don’t Leave Too Much Room for the Holy Spirit,” he tells of finding the letters written to him decades earlier by the girl he longed for at a church youth camp. This is the girl he square-danced with, getting the courage to go to her after his camp counselor said, “So you should marshal forth into the dance tonight with the confidence of God’s perfection regardless of your size, your shape or your overbite!” That’s all the encouragement he needed.

Little decisions lead to big consequences — in movies, life, and square dances.

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Along Comes Mary

Before I interviewed Mary Karr this year at our Writer’s Symposium, I read or re-read everything of hers I could find. Her memoirs, Liar’s Club, Cherry, Lit, her poetry, her essays, her introduction to a new edition of T.S. Eliot’s poetry, the works. She writes the way some people play basketball — with elbows up. Get too close and you get an elbow in the face. Sometimes that’s how I felt when I read her stuff. Her writing is so harsh, so beautiful, so edgy, so poetic, so mean, so descriptive, so, so, human. Imagine then, what it was like to hang out with her for a couple of days talking about writing and life. She spoke in a chapel service and got a sustained ovation that I rarely see. After that chapel talk, when she and I walked across campus so she could speak to a poetry class, students stopped their conversations, turned toward her, and applauded. It seemed as if they were applauding how refreshingly blunt she was, how much she had overcome, how redemptive her story was. Personally, I think they were applauding the Truth. They heard it and saw it in Mary Karr. Here’s my interview with her.

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While Most People Talk About Rob Bell, I Actually Talked To Him

Bell was at our Writer’s Symposium in February, just before his Love Wins book came out and just before Time Magazine put his book on the cover, and the national talk shows interviewed him, and some religious leaders renewed their labeling of him as a heretic. A lot of religious leaders like the book, and are secretly relieved that it’s out there, but many are afraid to admit it because they think they will alienate some in their congregations. I actually read Love Wins (lots of people complain about it who haven’t read it) and liked it. C.S. Lewis had some similar views in his book The Great Divorce. And Lauren Winner, another Writer’s Symposium alum of years past, wrote in the New York Times Sunday Books section that Bell’s views were discussed back in the 1800s.

In this interview we talk about writing, but we also get into some of the criticism he has received over the years. He was very transparent in this conversation.

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The Kids Are All Right

No, this isn’t a movie review. It’s my sentiment after my wife, daughter and I visited our son and his new wife Amy in their own habitat in Guatemala over Christmas. Blake and Amy got married in July in Kansas City, honeymooned for a few days, and returned to Central America to teach. They had taught at separate schools in Honduras a year ago, but found this school in Xela, Guatemala, more to their liking for this year. I wrote about their (and our) Honduras experience — the beauty, the heat, the mugging, the cow’s head that we had to recover, in the Literary Journal called The Hummingbird Review, started by the brilliant writer Luis Alberto Urrea and his equally brilliant friends. You can read that story here.

Christmas in Guatemala was spectacular. We hiked a volcano that had erupted just months prior — it was like walking on the moon, only the landscape was black. Across a valley we could see another volcano erupt every two hours. On Christmas eve we went to mass at the main church by the central park, crammed in with thousands of others. After mass we celebrated the birth of Jesus and the lack of fireworks laws for about three hours by shooting every conceivable rocket, cracker, mini-b0mb — you name it. Felt like Christmas in Baghdad.

What impressed me about the experience is that the kids did all the planning and thinking to make this successful. They’re in a different country, nothing is easy, they’re making very little money, and they’re figuring it all out. They planned so far ahead that we were able to bring a lot of ingredients down for Christmas dinner. With one exception. Who knew that you couldn’t have an unopened can of yams in your carry-on bag? Not sure about their flammability, but the dour TSA agent apologized as she tossed the can in the trash. I considered saying “Don’t touch my yams,” but even I can dial it back.

We got to see where they worked, ate, shopped, slept, got taxis, did laundry, bought water (nope — you can’t drink it from the tap), met friends, got money, made their lives as adults. My wife and I almost never acted like parents, because we were too dependent on them for everything. They had to interpret the world for us. Sometimes their best answer was “I don’t know.” Interesting role reversal.

I had one parental moment where, on a volcano, I began calculating how much daylight we had left. It was a difficult climb up, and I couldn’t even see the kids, who were exploring a cave beyond another ridge. We had originally taken a different path up this volcano, but were encouraged to go back by some locals, who told us that the path we were on was only used for making sacrifices to the devil. This was a better path, but apparently I still had a little sense of peril in the back of my mind.

When the sun started going behind the peak, I knew we didn’t have loads of time to get down the path. We didn’t have flashlights or headlamps. It would be tricky in the dark.

“Come on back,” I yelled to no one. Long silence. This went on for about 20 minutes. Call and no response.

Eventually they appeared from another part of the volcano and we headed back down. We had plenty of time. I was wrong. Apparently my Eagle Scout training was good only in North America.

“What were you worried about?” one of them asks. “I don’t know,” I said.

Actually, I’m not worried at all.

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Waiting for Guggenheim

Davis Guggenheim and me

I have to confess that the real reason I wanted to interview Davis Guggenheim was not because I thought his new documentary Waiting for ‘Superman’ was superb. Actually I DID think it was superb.

Nor was it because I thought An Inconvenient Truth was excellent — which I did. And for which he won an Academy Award.

No, the real reason I wanted to interview him was that his documentary It Might Get Loud is one of the best music documentaries I’ve ever seen. It’s a beautiful mix of character development, history, imagery, setting, all leading to a great guitar showdown with Jack White, Jimmy Page and The Edge. I was so impressed with the storytelling aspect of the movie that I haven’t gotten it out of my mind.

So when I got to the hotel where I was supposed to meet him and talk about school reform and his newest documentary, I arrived early. That meant I got to see him interact with other reporters and photographers, take calls, deal with PR people. He was no diva. He looked people in the eye, answered each question patiently — even the ones he’s already answered a thousand times.

When the interview began I told him how much I liked Waiting for ‘Superman,’ and he politely thanked me. But I soon brought up It Might Get Loud and the storytelling quality to it, and we were suddenly talking very animatedly about different parts of it, about the essence of storytelling, about why stories matter. Oh my. Then we went down to 5th Street in downtown San Diego to take some photos. We never did stop talking about storytelling.

Which, of course, made it worth the wait.

I have heard criticisms of the ‘Superman’ movie — that it is supposedly anti-teacher, that it sets charter schools up as the heroes, that reformers like Michelle Rhee and the rubber rooms where teachers waiting to be disciplined are already gone, so it’s already out of date, that it didn’t take into account the learning environment in students’ homes.

 I didn’t see it as anti-teacher. My kids had mostly great experiences with their public school teachers. I saw it as anti-incompetent teacher, and anti-tenure so it was impossible to get rid of bad teachers. My kids had a few of those, too, and the schools were stuck with them.  And I say that as a tenured professor. 

I also didn’t see it as pro-charter schools as much as it was pro-reformers who were working to make things better. As for the elements in the movie that no longer exist, well, that’s what happens with a non-fiction story. You tell the best available version of the truth at the time.

For stories to work, there have to be protagonists and antagonists and characters who want to accomplish something but have impediments keeping them from getting what they want. That’s the case for It Might Get Loud, as it is in Waiting for ‘Superman.’ Unfortunately, the characters in ‘Superman’ were the five children who simply wanted a better education. There were plenty of things keeping them from getting what they wanted. Including a lottery. 

Their futures were on little balls with numbers on them, coming out of a tumbler. Who wins, who loses, determined by a casino-type game. Futures based on luck. I left the theater wondering why this was okay in this country.

Possible new name for this documentary? It Might Get Sad.

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So This is What a Birthday Party for Intellectuals Looks Like

How can you not feel smart in this town?

Recently I attended a conference at Oxford University called God and Physics. More than 100 scientists, philosophers, theologians and others gathered for a few days of lecture and discussion on topics raised in the writings of John Polkinghorne.

The conference was a celebration of Polkinghorne’s 80th year, so it was essentially a birthday party for this award-winning, knighted, physicist-priest-theologian. Many of the people there were those I had only heard of, always in reverential tones. I had read some of their work in preparation for the book I am writing about Polkinghorne, but to be in the same room and around the same dinner table as Ian Barbour (credited by many to start the modern discussion about science and religion), Michael Welker, Nancy Cartwright, Keith Ward and others, was daunting.

John Polkinghorne in Oxford

Exciting, too. They were quite gracious and interesting. I told none of them that I almost failed physics in college because I liked golf more than going to labs. My professor gave me a D- once he extracted a promise from me that I would never take another physics course. I thought of him frequently as I sat through these lectures on string theory, chaos theory, cosmology, quantum theory, space and time, multiverses, critical realism, divine kenosis, to name just a few topics. There was even a little World Cup discussion. There were, after all, physicists from the Netherlands in the group.

Here are some of my favorite statements from the conference:                                                                                                          

Two of the most significant voices in the religion/science discussion, Ian Barbour, left, John Polkinghorne, and me

“John Polkinghorne always has catalytic insights to get ideas moving if they are stuck. He both reduces complexity and enhances complexity.” Michael Welker

“The function of the universe is to update from one set of numbers to a new set of numbers.” Graduate student giving a paper called “Cosmic If Statements.”

“When I say ‘is,’ what I mean is ‘maybe.’” Nancy Cartwright.

“The laws of physics don’t lie. They just don’t tell us all the truth.” John Polkinghorne.

“God and Physics, huh? Which side are you on?” Passport Control officer upon my arrival at Heathrow Airport, London, when he asked why I was coming to England.

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My One Shot at Being a Commencement Speaker

In a moment of either weakness or desperation — maybe both — the president of the university where I teach asked me to be the 2010 commencement speaker. Not at another school, mind you, but our own Point Loma Nazarene University. I thought about it, consulted with my advisors, and did it anyway. Here it is. It’s 10 minutes.

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You Gotta Love It When A Reviewer Likens Your Book to a Coen Brothers Movie

That’s what this reviewer did in the prominent magazine Books and Culture. She said that if only the modern day Job character in the movie A Serious Man had read my book, he wouldn’t have been so confused. You can read the review here.

Next on my list of books I’ll be writing will be responses to Fargo and the Big Lebowski. I wonder how Dude Hides in Plain Sight would go over?

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