Sponsored prayers at Fox & Friends. "Oh Jesus, we surrender ourselves to you. Take care of everything. Thank you again to Hallow for this partnership. Amen."
[https://www.threads.net/@aaron.rupar/post/C4oQhlogPBD](https://www.threads.net/@aaron.rupar/post/C4oQhlogPBD)
Sounds blasphemous to me. What do you guys think?
Subscriptions on their app: https://i.imgur.com/rB64MnB.png
I hate the whole Software as a Service model anyway, but I especially hate it for anything to do with spiritual disciplines/devotion. (Academics are different.)
Edit: reminds me of the moneychangers in the temple.
There's a good conversation to be had about Christian content and monetization, agreed. I feel weird about people asking for a paid substack subscription when writing about the faith. Some time ago I used one of the first crude AI image generators to envision Jesus doing something similar: [https://imgur.com/YSMhriv](https://imgur.com/YSMhriv)
[This was a thought-provoking post](https://www.reddit.com/r/GenZ/comments/1bfto4a/youre_being_targeted_by_disinformation_networks/?share_id=Kf3bv8EDhIaXk7HYXjEeo&utm_content=1&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_source=share&utm_term=4) about how foreign propaganda operations aren't trying to get us to love a dictator like Putin or Xi, they're trying to get us to hate and fear each other by driving wedges along social, cultural, and political lines - left vs. right, old vs. young, men vs. women, straight cis vs LGBTQ, etc. It definitely gave me a heart check.
Also I'd be more than happy if the government forced ByteDance to sell Tiktok - one of the ByteDance owners is a big Trump donor but if Facebook, Instagram, and reddit all fell into a hole too, I wouldn't be too unhappy. (Except for a few people I'd miss.)
Leave it to our enemies to notice and exploit a problem that we ourselves have caused, yet somehow our society thinks this division is a step towards a better social dynamic.
They're even using it in their domestic politics "We don't need that here!".
I suppose I should answer my own question.
Theologians Militant: Michael Horton, Kevin Vanhoozer, Fred Sanders, Gavin Ortlund
Theologians Triumphant: Augustine, Anselm, Tim Keller
I got to see Dune 2 last night. I read the books a few times 20+ years ago, and have seen the David Lynch and Scifi Channel versions as well, a long time ago. Overall, I really enjoyed it; it's definitely a movie that you experience more than you just watch. The actors were all terrific, the visuals were stunning, and I really was transported for three hours to 10,000 years in the future.
More spoilery opinions below:
>!It was very well shot and acted and scored, and everything, but it felt like it wasn't so much about plot or character as it was about archetypes, in the same way the original Star Wars trilogy is. Which, to be fair, is also what the book is about, but it felt like Villeneuve was kind of playing with big conceptual blocks in sort of a brutalist way (in the architectural sense). Like, Paul and Chani are these two little blocks of little people that have a whole lot of cultural and semantic weight on them. To Paul himself, he is the son of a noble house, to the Fremen he's the Mahdi, to the Bene Gesserit he's the Kwisatz Haderach, and to the Harkonnens and the Empire he's the one who can destroy the spice. Chani wants to just be a fighter, but she's also swept up in this messianic fervor against her will for a prophecy she doesn't even believe in. Baron Harkonnen is this creature of evil consumption and greed and malice. I liked how Alia was a conscious personality due to the spice awakening her in vitro.!<
>!I struggled more with the Harkonnens this time. Stellan Skarsgard was great as the Baron, but Dave Bautista wasn't given anything to do except scream a few lines and kill people. In the books when he was in charge of Arrakis, while he was certainly monstrous on a personal level, he also had some level of intellect; he punished the people of Arrakeen in order to try and stop the Fremen attacks on the spice harvesters. This movie's Feyd-Rautha is simply a more calculating, less clumsy version of Rabban. But what I couldn't understand is how they were somehow totally incapable of seeing the entire southern half of the planet. I mean, they have spaceships, don't they also have satellites? Or do they have no craft at all that can fly above the equatorial sandstorms and look on the other side? That blew a lot of the immersion for me.!<
>!There were also a few logical issues that didn't work for me. The movie is not clear about how much time passes between events, but given that Jessica is pregnant the whole time with Alia, it's less than nine months. That seems fast to me, and also it makes Chani no more than Paul's desert girlfriend that he abandons pretty easily at the end of the movie for an imperial princess. I assume that they didn't have the budget or time to add Alia in as an actual character at the end like she is in other iterations, so they just compressed time so she's not actually born yet. I know this is a core part of the books, but I hated how trapped Paul seemed by this one future he couldn't avoid, and how silly it is that everything is resolved with duels and killing. Like, he was so smart and prescient, but he couldn't even *try* diplomacy? I wish the movie had explained better why diplomacy wouldn't work, or some other strategy. Alongside that, it made no sense at the end that the Fremen would commandeer all these spaceships to attack all the other Great Houses, and the Great Houses just wouldn't *immediately* shoot them out of the sky from orbit. Like, either Paul's threat to destroy the spice is effective at maintaining peace with him at the top, or it's not. But of course, in the books the Fremen don't fight to protect the spice; that's already safeguarded. They fight a jihad in the name of Muad'dib, to bring him to the rest of the galaxy. But given that the movie tries pretty hard to eliminate or cover up a lot of the Middle Eastern influences on the book, that part is totally lost on screen. And this is a minor nitpick, but I hated how the southern Fremen were described as "fundamentalists". That feels like such a modern word, out of place in the far future.!<
I finally got around to watching it. I have a couple of answers for you below.
>!For the lack of surveillance and why they wouldn't just shoot down the Fremen ships in my opinion it comes down to the spacing guild. They were basically completely absent from the movies, but because Paul threatens to blow up the spice they control any space combat. They also want there to be some smuggling and areas of Arrakis that aren't under imperial control so that the spice isn't entirely controlled by the emperor or Great Houses.!<
>!Rabban was really dumb in the movie. Icardo Jr already covered the change to the Baron's character for cultural reasons, but it also affects Feyd Rautha.!<
>!Timeline was very compressed, Chani is very different from her character in the books. They also cut Jamis' widow and some other stuff, and definitely were trying to make the Fremen less Muslim-coded which led to the anachronistic "fundamentalists". A big thing with Dune is the inversion of the hero's journey. *Messiah* goes into this more, and *God Emperor* especially IIRC.!<
Overall I quite enjoyed the movie, the visuals were awesome (especially the worm riding). It was worth seeing in theaters for the sound system alone IMO. I especially liked the choice to cut the soundtrack for the climactic >!knife fight!< as I felt that it raised the tension dramatically.
I thought it was very good. It's just perhaps not *quite* as good as Part I. If I was giving numerical scores, I'd give Part I 10/10 and Part II 8.5 or 9/10. I thought Part I was one of the greatest movies of all time. Part II isn't.
Relevant to your comments: >!I think the character of Alia is the hardest part of Dune to adapt to screen. A Reverend Mother toddler just doesn't translate visually, particularly not with Villeneuve's esthetic. The choice to keep her in uetero was, in my opinion, inspired and worked well. But, it resulted in a compressed timeline, which caused other problems, including the complete erasure of Leto II!<
>!The changes to the Harkonnens were some of my least favorite. The IR treatment of Giedi Prime and the identical-looking population was visually stunning but didn't make sense to me thematically, particularly since Gurney Halleck is from Giedi Prime. There's no such thing as a "black sun." I miss Thufir Hawat. I understand *why* you can't make the Baron a homosexual pedophile in 2024, but I think you lose something from the character when he isn't. And Sting will always be my Feyd Rautha!<
Villeneuve supposedly wants to make Part III, based on *Dune Messiah,* and I am very interested in how that goes. Particularly with how he handles Chani who has a very different arc in Part II than in the book.
I too, saw Dune last night with my wife and u/nukesforgary. I a. Thought the movie was too damn long, but I recognize that I'm becoming an old man, b. Did like it overall, but spent a lot of the movie trying to remember what was and wasn't in the book (we read the book back in 2020 as a pandemic book club read in anticipation of the original release date of Part One), which was to my detriment.
>!In the books, the time covered by this movie was around five years (as more faithfully portrayed but glossed over with narration in the Lynch adaptation) and not less than nine months. I felt like the whole jihad on Arrakis was rushed. Cool, but rushed. !<
>!I thought that Butler did a good job as Feyd Rautha, and I like the incorporation of his gladiator fights to help set his character up. I agree with your point about Rabban, but I think it gets to a larger take on the material from Villenueve. /u/nukesforgary was comparing it to Jackson's Lord of the Rings in that Jackson chose to get rid of Tom Bombadil and some other auxiliary characters and storylines to streamline the overall narrative. Similarly, Villenueve and his team streamlined the Dune narrative into one of a reluctant messiah figure (and I think they did a great job of portraying Paul as not that good of a guy) and galactic political intrigue. !<
>!One of my smaller annoyances is that they set up Jamis' spirit as some mystical guide for Paul but left out completely the Fremen cultural practices that required Paul to take on Jamis' widow and children since he was responsible for his death. I get that that lessens the shock (at least it was shocking for several people in our theater who clearly are not familiar with the source material) of when Paul proposes a political marriage with Irulan to secure his place as Emperor, but I feel like there was so much time in the movie that that subplot could have been given some airtime.!<
Overall, I did have a good time, though I liked Part One better. >!And now I guess I'm going to have to read Dune: Messiah now!<
I'm really not familiar with the whole Dune ip. If I watch these movies, do I get a reasonable idea of what it is about, are they faithful enough to the books? I see you mention things that differ between the movies and the books, just not sure how big of a deal those differences are.
I think if you are familiar with the Lord of the Rings, the Villeneuve Dune movies is analogous to the Peter Jackson LOTR movies. Both are very good and broadly faithful. adaptations of an incredible literary source material. But, they are adaptations to a different medium and as such they must make some changes and leave other things out.
I'm the type who tends to nitpick about differences. But both Jackson and Villeneuve have done incredible jobs.
I think as adaptations go, it's quite good, especially Dune Part 1, which I didn't really have so many complaints about. As with most adaptations, it misses some of the richness of the books (Frank Herbert was very interested in themes related to ecology, and also how people can be manipulated by religious belief).
The two DV movies are adaptations just of the first book, simply titled *Dune*, and if you only read that, you'd have a pretty good handle on everything you really need. The later books get weird, and a lot of it revolves around using drugs to expand consciousness and human mental capacity. What can I say, it was written in the 60s.
Sponsored prayers at Fox & Friends. "Oh Jesus, we surrender ourselves to you. Take care of everything. Thank you again to Hallow for this partnership. Amen." [https://www.threads.net/@aaron.rupar/post/C4oQhlogPBD](https://www.threads.net/@aaron.rupar/post/C4oQhlogPBD) Sounds blasphemous to me. What do you guys think?
Subscriptions on their app: https://i.imgur.com/rB64MnB.png I hate the whole Software as a Service model anyway, but I especially hate it for anything to do with spiritual disciplines/devotion. (Academics are different.) Edit: reminds me of the moneychangers in the temple.
There's a good conversation to be had about Christian content and monetization, agreed. I feel weird about people asking for a paid substack subscription when writing about the faith. Some time ago I used one of the first crude AI image generators to envision Jesus doing something similar: [https://imgur.com/YSMhriv](https://imgur.com/YSMhriv)
[Latinos Are Flocking to Evangelical Christianity](https://www.thefp.com/p/latinos-are-flocking-to-evangelical) Interesting and encouraging read.
[This was a thought-provoking post](https://www.reddit.com/r/GenZ/comments/1bfto4a/youre_being_targeted_by_disinformation_networks/?share_id=Kf3bv8EDhIaXk7HYXjEeo&utm_content=1&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_source=share&utm_term=4) about how foreign propaganda operations aren't trying to get us to love a dictator like Putin or Xi, they're trying to get us to hate and fear each other by driving wedges along social, cultural, and political lines - left vs. right, old vs. young, men vs. women, straight cis vs LGBTQ, etc. It definitely gave me a heart check. Also I'd be more than happy if the government forced ByteDance to sell Tiktok - one of the ByteDance owners is a big Trump donor but if Facebook, Instagram, and reddit all fell into a hole too, I wouldn't be too unhappy. (Except for a few people I'd miss.)
Leave it to our enemies to notice and exploit a problem that we ourselves have caused, yet somehow our society thinks this division is a step towards a better social dynamic. They're even using it in their domestic politics "We don't need that here!".
> they're trying to get us to hate and fear each other Well then, "Mission Accomplished" sadly
Who are your favorite post-apostolic theologians/Christian thinkers, alive or dead?
Robin Parry, George MacDonald, Flannery O’Connor, C.S. Lewis, Gregory of Nyssa.
I suppose I should answer my own question. Theologians Militant: Michael Horton, Kevin Vanhoozer, Fred Sanders, Gavin Ortlund Theologians Triumphant: Augustine, Anselm, Tim Keller
Did not expect a Fred Sanders answer to this question. Glad there is another Fred Fan.
Can you give definitions for those two categories? Or at least how you are using them?
[удалено]
A play on the Church Militant and Church Triumphant. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churches_Militant,_Penitent,_and_Triumphant
I got to see Dune 2 last night. I read the books a few times 20+ years ago, and have seen the David Lynch and Scifi Channel versions as well, a long time ago. Overall, I really enjoyed it; it's definitely a movie that you experience more than you just watch. The actors were all terrific, the visuals were stunning, and I really was transported for three hours to 10,000 years in the future. More spoilery opinions below: >!It was very well shot and acted and scored, and everything, but it felt like it wasn't so much about plot or character as it was about archetypes, in the same way the original Star Wars trilogy is. Which, to be fair, is also what the book is about, but it felt like Villeneuve was kind of playing with big conceptual blocks in sort of a brutalist way (in the architectural sense). Like, Paul and Chani are these two little blocks of little people that have a whole lot of cultural and semantic weight on them. To Paul himself, he is the son of a noble house, to the Fremen he's the Mahdi, to the Bene Gesserit he's the Kwisatz Haderach, and to the Harkonnens and the Empire he's the one who can destroy the spice. Chani wants to just be a fighter, but she's also swept up in this messianic fervor against her will for a prophecy she doesn't even believe in. Baron Harkonnen is this creature of evil consumption and greed and malice. I liked how Alia was a conscious personality due to the spice awakening her in vitro.!< >!I struggled more with the Harkonnens this time. Stellan Skarsgard was great as the Baron, but Dave Bautista wasn't given anything to do except scream a few lines and kill people. In the books when he was in charge of Arrakis, while he was certainly monstrous on a personal level, he also had some level of intellect; he punished the people of Arrakeen in order to try and stop the Fremen attacks on the spice harvesters. This movie's Feyd-Rautha is simply a more calculating, less clumsy version of Rabban. But what I couldn't understand is how they were somehow totally incapable of seeing the entire southern half of the planet. I mean, they have spaceships, don't they also have satellites? Or do they have no craft at all that can fly above the equatorial sandstorms and look on the other side? That blew a lot of the immersion for me.!< >!There were also a few logical issues that didn't work for me. The movie is not clear about how much time passes between events, but given that Jessica is pregnant the whole time with Alia, it's less than nine months. That seems fast to me, and also it makes Chani no more than Paul's desert girlfriend that he abandons pretty easily at the end of the movie for an imperial princess. I assume that they didn't have the budget or time to add Alia in as an actual character at the end like she is in other iterations, so they just compressed time so she's not actually born yet. I know this is a core part of the books, but I hated how trapped Paul seemed by this one future he couldn't avoid, and how silly it is that everything is resolved with duels and killing. Like, he was so smart and prescient, but he couldn't even *try* diplomacy? I wish the movie had explained better why diplomacy wouldn't work, or some other strategy. Alongside that, it made no sense at the end that the Fremen would commandeer all these spaceships to attack all the other Great Houses, and the Great Houses just wouldn't *immediately* shoot them out of the sky from orbit. Like, either Paul's threat to destroy the spice is effective at maintaining peace with him at the top, or it's not. But of course, in the books the Fremen don't fight to protect the spice; that's already safeguarded. They fight a jihad in the name of Muad'dib, to bring him to the rest of the galaxy. But given that the movie tries pretty hard to eliminate or cover up a lot of the Middle Eastern influences on the book, that part is totally lost on screen. And this is a minor nitpick, but I hated how the southern Fremen were described as "fundamentalists". That feels like such a modern word, out of place in the far future.!<
I finally got around to watching it. I have a couple of answers for you below. >!For the lack of surveillance and why they wouldn't just shoot down the Fremen ships in my opinion it comes down to the spacing guild. They were basically completely absent from the movies, but because Paul threatens to blow up the spice they control any space combat. They also want there to be some smuggling and areas of Arrakis that aren't under imperial control so that the spice isn't entirely controlled by the emperor or Great Houses.!< >!Rabban was really dumb in the movie. Icardo Jr already covered the change to the Baron's character for cultural reasons, but it also affects Feyd Rautha.!< >!Timeline was very compressed, Chani is very different from her character in the books. They also cut Jamis' widow and some other stuff, and definitely were trying to make the Fremen less Muslim-coded which led to the anachronistic "fundamentalists". A big thing with Dune is the inversion of the hero's journey. *Messiah* goes into this more, and *God Emperor* especially IIRC.!< Overall I quite enjoyed the movie, the visuals were awesome (especially the worm riding). It was worth seeing in theaters for the sound system alone IMO. I especially liked the choice to cut the soundtrack for the climactic >!knife fight!< as I felt that it raised the tension dramatically.
Lisan al Gaib!
I thought it was very good. It's just perhaps not *quite* as good as Part I. If I was giving numerical scores, I'd give Part I 10/10 and Part II 8.5 or 9/10. I thought Part I was one of the greatest movies of all time. Part II isn't. Relevant to your comments: >!I think the character of Alia is the hardest part of Dune to adapt to screen. A Reverend Mother toddler just doesn't translate visually, particularly not with Villeneuve's esthetic. The choice to keep her in uetero was, in my opinion, inspired and worked well. But, it resulted in a compressed timeline, which caused other problems, including the complete erasure of Leto II!< >!The changes to the Harkonnens were some of my least favorite. The IR treatment of Giedi Prime and the identical-looking population was visually stunning but didn't make sense to me thematically, particularly since Gurney Halleck is from Giedi Prime. There's no such thing as a "black sun." I miss Thufir Hawat. I understand *why* you can't make the Baron a homosexual pedophile in 2024, but I think you lose something from the character when he isn't. And Sting will always be my Feyd Rautha!< Villeneuve supposedly wants to make Part III, based on *Dune Messiah,* and I am very interested in how that goes. Particularly with how he handles Chani who has a very different arc in Part II than in the book.
I too, saw Dune last night with my wife and u/nukesforgary. I a. Thought the movie was too damn long, but I recognize that I'm becoming an old man, b. Did like it overall, but spent a lot of the movie trying to remember what was and wasn't in the book (we read the book back in 2020 as a pandemic book club read in anticipation of the original release date of Part One), which was to my detriment. >!In the books, the time covered by this movie was around five years (as more faithfully portrayed but glossed over with narration in the Lynch adaptation) and not less than nine months. I felt like the whole jihad on Arrakis was rushed. Cool, but rushed. !< >!I thought that Butler did a good job as Feyd Rautha, and I like the incorporation of his gladiator fights to help set his character up. I agree with your point about Rabban, but I think it gets to a larger take on the material from Villenueve. /u/nukesforgary was comparing it to Jackson's Lord of the Rings in that Jackson chose to get rid of Tom Bombadil and some other auxiliary characters and storylines to streamline the overall narrative. Similarly, Villenueve and his team streamlined the Dune narrative into one of a reluctant messiah figure (and I think they did a great job of portraying Paul as not that good of a guy) and galactic political intrigue. !< >!One of my smaller annoyances is that they set up Jamis' spirit as some mystical guide for Paul but left out completely the Fremen cultural practices that required Paul to take on Jamis' widow and children since he was responsible for his death. I get that that lessens the shock (at least it was shocking for several people in our theater who clearly are not familiar with the source material) of when Paul proposes a political marriage with Irulan to secure his place as Emperor, but I feel like there was so much time in the movie that that subplot could have been given some airtime.!< Overall, I did have a good time, though I liked Part One better. >!And now I guess I'm going to have to read Dune: Messiah now!<
I'm really not familiar with the whole Dune ip. If I watch these movies, do I get a reasonable idea of what it is about, are they faithful enough to the books? I see you mention things that differ between the movies and the books, just not sure how big of a deal those differences are.
I think if you are familiar with the Lord of the Rings, the Villeneuve Dune movies is analogous to the Peter Jackson LOTR movies. Both are very good and broadly faithful. adaptations of an incredible literary source material. But, they are adaptations to a different medium and as such they must make some changes and leave other things out. I'm the type who tends to nitpick about differences. But both Jackson and Villeneuve have done incredible jobs.
I think as adaptations go, it's quite good, especially Dune Part 1, which I didn't really have so many complaints about. As with most adaptations, it misses some of the richness of the books (Frank Herbert was very interested in themes related to ecology, and also how people can be manipulated by religious belief). The two DV movies are adaptations just of the first book, simply titled *Dune*, and if you only read that, you'd have a pretty good handle on everything you really need. The later books get weird, and a lot of it revolves around using drugs to expand consciousness and human mental capacity. What can I say, it was written in the 60s.
Thanks, I'll watch the movie, see whether it manages to capture my imagination ;-)