In 1992, when the series started, I was just starting to really get into comics. They opened a brand new comic book shop just blocks from our high school and I couldn’t have been more excited. I even remember the very first comic I bought with my own money, rather than one that I begged my mom to buy for me at the grocery store. (It was Wonder Man #15, but I digress.)

As much as I would love to talk about Wonder Man, I want to focus on a different Marvel character: an X-Man I discovered by watching season two of the cartoon series: Kurt Wagner, a.k.a. Nightcrawler.

If you know the comics or have even seen the 2003 X-Men film sequel X2: X-Men United, then you have a general idea of not only who but what Nightcrawler is: a furry, blue-skinned man with deformed hands and feet and a prehensile forked tail. Based on appearances alone, it would very easy for anyone to label him a “demon” or at the very least a bad guy. But there’s trait that Kurt has that sets him apart from most of his fellow mutants: he is a devout Christian.

Now, many superheroes in both the Marvel and DC universes could easily be looked at or labeled as Christian. While one could make assumptions about many of them, and while others profess a belief in some form of Christianity, it’s often pretty inconsistent or vague.

Kurt Wagner is special in that he leaves no doubt. He is a strong Christian who has a strong faith.

I could try to go into explicit detail on how Nightcrawler has been a beacon of light in the darkest times of the Marvel Universe, but the guy’s been around for over thirty-five years. Plus, aside from the shear volume of material, I simply don’t know the comics well enough to do that.

I do, however, want to return to my first point: the animated series. The episode was simply titled “Nightcrawler” and was a standalone story that didn’t tie into any previous plot lines (as many episodes in the series often did).  In fact, the premise was very simple: Gambit and Rogue decide to go skiing in Germany, chaperoned by a grumpy-as-usual Wolverine. When Logan hears rumors about a demon in a nearby town, he jumps at the opportunity for adventure and drags along his fellow X-Men.

It’s at a local monastery where they meet Kurt, or Nightcrawler, as he was known to the traveling circus performers who raised him. The rest of Kurt’s backstory plays out in a very Frankenstein-ian fashion as we see torch-wielding mobs comprised of frightened townspeople chasing him and persecuting him. Throughout all of it, though, Kurt harbors no bitterness or anger toward them. In fact, he loves them — a sentiment the skeptical X-Men don’t understand. Despite their doubt, Nightcrawler continues to boldly proclaim his faith throughout the episode, especially to Wolverine.

An inevitable confrontation with this mob (stoked by a particularly hard-hearted member of Nightcrawler’s monastic order) and a fire in the monastery creates the climax of this episode. In the end, though, peace and reconciliation descend upon the town and Nightcrawler is accepted among the townspeople. Even so, Wolverine can’t shake his usual pessimism. He fumes about how the monastery has been burnt down despite their efforts to protect it.

Kurt’s response is astonishing: “[I]t was only stone and mortar. The foundation God has built in our hearts can never be destroyed.”

Sounds like something out of VeggieTales, doesn’t it? And Wolverine’s reply: “Man…I don’t get you.” How true a response to such unswerving faith; it’s something the world has a hard time understanding.

Nightcrawler remains persistent. He gives Logan a Bible with pre-marked passages personally for him. While that could have been the end of the story, we soon see an epilogue: Rogue has been touched by the faith of the monks and, following an argument with Gambit, begins to wander the streets. She stumbles into a church and discovers Wolverine kneeling at an altar.

It’s here that we discover one of the verses Kurt picked out for Wolverine. He reads aloud: “I will give thanks to you, O Lord. For though you were angry with me, your anger turned away and you comforted me. I will trust and will not be afraid.”

After reading these verses from Isaiah 12, Wolverine bows his head in prayer, and Rogue leaves the church with a tear running down her face.

Nightcrawler’s mutant ability may be teleportation, but his true power is his faith — a faith in Jesus Christ, lived boldly and without compromise or apology, visible for all to see.

The movie is based on the book The Borrowers by English author Mary Norton, and revolves around a small species of people who stand little more than four inches tall and their encounters with their larger human counterparts. And because this is a British-based book, the United Kingdom will be getting their own version with their own dubbing. Here’s their trailer:

Two separate dubs in the same language isn’t unheard of in film: Quebec and France occasionally get different French dubs, as do Portugal and Brazil for Portuguese. But with this story’s distinct British origins (enough so that a live action film is coming out on British television this Christmas), it’s rather expected that they’d want to hear this story with their own take on the dialogue.

This is the first time in the director’s chair for Hiromasa Yonebayashi, a young man who has worked with Ghibli projects that include animation on Spirited Away and Ponyo. Getting some young blood into the world of Ghibli is something of an important move for the company: co-founder (and face of the company) Hayao Miyazaki is now in his 70s, and the less active Isao Takahata is 76. The two of them are responsible for fifteen of the studio’s twenty-one feature films.

The Secret World of Arrietty is coming out in North America is February 17, although it’s been out in the UK (who incidentally have a far more interesting website for the movie than Disney does for the US) since July 29 and will be out on disc there in early January.

Now there have probably been people on earth who fit this description, but other than Jesus, people could make arguments for or against lots of people. I’m personally more interested in events that are “ta’veren”. Events that change the course of one’s life. We probably all notice big events such as the birth or death of a loved one, marriage, or moving to a new place, but I love looking at tiny events that at the time seemed largely insignificant that have since grown to be life-altering.

Such a “ta’veren” event occurred for me five years ago and Seinfeld was at the center of it, but I didn’t have a name for it until I started reading the Wheel of Time series.

I didn’t grow up watching Seinfeld, but I remember watching the final episode when I was in high school, knowing it was of some historic significance. I didn’t realize then the impact that Seinfeld would have on the rest of my life.

When I arrived at college, I became friends with a Seinfeld fanatic. This was before the DVDs had come out, and through his friendship I watched no fewer than four episodes a day in syndication for a few months.

I grew to love the show. I bought all of the seasons on DVD as soon as they were released and I watched every minute. After college, as I was working in campus ministry at a university while my friend remained a student, I had an idea that forever changed my life and my ministry. It was a “ta’veren” idea.

At the university, we had morning chapel five days a week and my idea was to bring Seinfeld to chapel. I had spoken in chapel a few times before I had this idea, but I had never been so nervous in my entire life as the time leading up to Seinfeld Chapel. I told a few people about it and the word spread like wildfire throughout the campus.

At the time, we didn’t have a projector or screen in the chapel, so I recruited three friends to help me in acting out the scene I had chosen, which involved the following clip.

While people loved the idea, what people couldn’t get over was that my friend Matt, who agreed to play George, volunteered to cut his hair into a horseshoe pattern and dye it. I can’t say he looked very much like George, but the laughs took forever to calm down once he walked onto the stage. Matt also voluntarily took two large bites of onion on stage, tapping into his inner Costanza.

To connect the message to Jesus, I contrasted George’s inconsistency with God’s never-changing constancy. We also sang the song Nothin’ in honor of Seinfeld – the show about nothing (though I don’t think very many people understood that was the entire reason we chose that song).

I was very nervous throughout the entire twenty minutes of chapel. It wasn’t until the president of the university shook my hand and said, “Well done,” that I realized it had truly gone well and I wouldn’t be labeled a heretic.

It was just one small idea that led to that chapel, which led to a few dozen others in the same vein. This led to a Bible study utilizing concepts from Firefly, which led to me beginning to write a book about that Bible study, which led me to write for Faith & Geekery.

And it doesn’t stop there. That one idea will continue to inform and influence my ideas on ministry, culture, and life. “Ta’veren” indeed.

What “ta’veren” moments have you had in your life? Are you watching for God to work through the small moments that might otherwise seem insignificant?

I grew up in the church, and my cousins and friends who did the same all went out as well. We dressed up for public school, where the Sunday School teachers and church elders taught and smiled at our silly costumes. (I went as Orko one year and Garfield another. There may or may not be photographic evidence.)

This was pretty much the way it went for years. Kids dressed up, ran around town, and sometimes got together afterward to play games. The only worry for us in the mid-80s was the scare of checking for razors or needles in our candy — we never thought about scary things like the occult or Satanism. Even our church (a fairly conservative one) let the kids sing a song about Halloween at one of the concerts; I believe it had to do with God seeing through our masks to love us as we were or something like that.

So the whole “should kids go out on Halloween?” question was never an issue in our house. When I was in junior high I discovered the now-discredited Mike Warnke and all of the anti-Halloween media that came along with him. It was really my first hint that people equated all of those silly costumes and kids yelling “Boo!” when you opened the door with evil. And I’m still there; I want kids to have a perfectly good reason to run around the neighborhood and ask for candy.

While this holiday is controversial, it wouldn’t hurt to get a good view of the history of Halloween. There are ways for the discerning believer to be involved and have fun — and even shine a light. For example, Jeffrey Overstreet has a very interesting — and balanced — perspective on the purpose of “horror” for us as Christian that you may want to check out.

Yes, some groups have co-opted Halloween for their own ends, and there is a lot that goes along with Halloween that you should want to avoid. But that’s not unique to Halloween; for example, Valentines Day has been taken over by those selling promiscuity and Christmas has been taken over by those selling consumerism, so there are aspects and excesses of every holiday that we here wouldn’t endorse, either.

With that in mind, here’s a list of what I think are some good dos and don’ts for Halloween. If you take the kids to the neighbors to trick-or-treat or take them up to the church to have a party — both are fine. But take heed nonetheless:

• Do Let your kids play dress up for one day. If you want to curb the blood and guts, that’s completely understandable. If you’re worried about skimpy outfits seemingly designed for little girls, I’m with you there. Still, there are thousands of other possibilities.
• Don’t make your kids dress up as their favorite church reformer for Reformation Day. In Protestant circles (specifically those in both the Lutheran and Calvinist backgrounds), it’s become fashionable to rebrand October 31st as a day to get all the family and kids together to commemorate the start of the Christian Reformation. While it might be a good church history lesson, that’s not exactly something that may translate as “fun” for children. The daughter probably doesn’t want to be “Martin Luther’s wife” again this year (female reformers are scarce), and your poor son can’t even pronounce Huldrych Zwingli. Besides, this could get a little gory: many reformers were burned at the stake, provided they weren’t beheaded first.
• Do have candy ready for the kids. If you’re sensitive to the diabetic kids or worried about all that sugar, find some alternatives like pretzels or Play-Dough.
• Don’t hand out tracts or answer the door just to tell kids you don’t celebrate Halloween. John Fischer has a great essay about being a light to the neighborhood by simply handing out candy and enjoying the festivities.
• Do watch It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. If you want something a little different and historical, listen to the original War of the Worlds radio broadcast, which aired the night before Halloween in 1938 and caused enough panic that Orson Welles famously went on the air at the end of the broadcast to chastise the audience.
• Don’t go out trick or treating if you are over 13. If you are in college or older, expect to say the line “I got a rock” more than once.
• Do take the kids to a church-sponsored event that has games, candy, and other little kids running around in costumes — if this event is incredibly fun and aimed at giving the kids a memorable night as opposed to keeping them away from “worldly” influences. Let them have fun for the sake of having fun, just like their friends at school or next door are.
• Don’t sponsor a “Hell House” or something similar. Total absence from God’s grace probably shouldn’t be considered a form of entertainment.
• Do dress your kids up, and do take a lot of pictures for future humiliation at graduation or weddings.
• Don’t dress up your dog for Halloween. Really. They don’t understand it, and cannot be blamed for leaving a “treat” on the couch later on.

Imagine where geeks would be if this club had never been started: no Lord of the Rings, no Chronicles of Narnia.

The complaint of Lewis and Tolkien still exists in the geeks of today. We can’t always find the books we want to read.

Fellow geeks, meet brother in Christ and brother in geekery Jeff Gerke of Marcher Lord Press.

Jeff started Marcher Lord Press after coming to a similar realization as that of Tolkien and Lewis. His solution was to publish the books he wanted to read — a more efficient system, in my opinion.

Marcher Lord Press publishes Christian speculative fiction. What’s that? Science fiction, fantasy, superhero, supernatural, dystopian and more. It’s geeky stuff all done from a Christian worldview, a natural ally of Faith & Geekery.

Jeff agreed to answer a few questions about Marcher Lord Press that will hopefully whet your appetite and lead you to some good books.

FG: What makes Marcher Lord Press unique or peculiar?

JG: We bill ourselves as the premier publisher of Christian speculative fiction. I chose that phrasing intentionally to stake out my territory. MLP was pretty much the first kid on the block to do nothing but Christian SF, fantasy, and other speculative subgenres. So we were premier in the sense of first. Now we’re no longer the only game in town, as I anticipated. But if you look at our trophy case and the major awards we’ve won and continue to win in our category, I think we can still make the claim that we’re the premier publisher of Christian speculative fiction in the other sense of the word, as well.

FG: What kind of readers enjoy your books?

JG: The most awesome kind of people, of course! I like to describe our readership as “Christians who shop at ThinkGeek.com” or “Christians who would love to go to Comic-CON.” That’s our core demographic: the Christian geek. The Christian fan of Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, The Avengers, and Big Bang Theory.

But there is a larger demographic out there of people who would love our books and are only now discovering us. These are the Ted Dekker fans, the Christian readers who know they love Ted’s books but haven’t realized there are other books out there by other Christian authors that they would enjoy just as much.

Many novelists, myself included, began writing fiction because we said, “Shoot, no one is writing the kind of novel I want to read. I guess I’ll have to write it myself!” Marcher Lord Press started out in a similar way. I said, “Shoot, no one is publishing the kind of novels I want to read. I guess I’ll have to publish them myself.”

So I started out to publish Christian fiction for people like me: adult Christian geeks. Over the years, though, I’ve found that many of our readers are younger, in their teens. So we’ve decided to begin publishing YA novels as well. Our first launch into YA will be this coming April with the release of Failstate, a novel about a superhero reality TV show, by John Otte.

FG: What advice can you give for aspiring authors of Christian speculative fiction?

JG: Learn how to write great fiction. If you’re already writing in these genres, then I don’t have to tell you to go out and learn about them. The vast majority of Christian speculative fiction authors I’ve met are people who already love and know quite a bit about the genre. What they lack is the basic fiction craftsmanship that applies to any genre.

Whether you’re writing a bonnet and buggy romance about Jedidiah and Rachel in Pennsylvania or a vampire thriller on Mars, you still have to understand POV, show vs. tell, and how to write great dialogue.

I’ve written three books on how to write better fiction, so consider availing yourself of one or more of them. The Art & Craft of Writing Christian Fiction, Plot Versus Character, and The First 50 Pages. I also have set up www.FictionAcademy.com and the writers helps links at www.WhereTheMapEnds.com to provide tips for novelists. And I teach at writers conferences across North America every year. I’m doing my bit to help novelists improve.

Also, know that traditional Christian publishing houses are not usually interested in speculative fiction. Some are trying some YA speculative, and I hope they succeed. But most will not want your fantasy or SF. So consider the small presses, the micro-presses, and the niche publishers. And don’t rule out self-publishing. It is very often the way to go in this publishing revolution in which we find ourselves.

FG: What is on the horizon for Marcher Lord Press?

JG: More of what we’ve seen now, I hope and pray: more great Christian speculative fiction, more awards, and a growing reader base. Word is getting out that there’s a serious player in the game now, and we’re enjoying all the benefits that come with word of mouth marketing.

We’ll be exploring new areas of publishing in this space: the YA books I mentioned (and many others that I didn’t mention), superhero fiction, and hopefully steampunk, urban fantasy/vampire, alternate history, and more, plus the core fantasy and SF books we love so much. And we’ll still be bringing the best bonus editions of the classics in our genre.

Because I still want to read this kind of fiction, so I guess I’ll need to keep publishing it!

Jeff and Marcher Lord Press have just published their October 2011 new releases and they are available.

The Avengers definitely qualifies.

Comic book fans (and even viewers of Marvel movies since Iron Man who have been paying even marginal attention) know that for the last few years, the House of Ideas has been building toward an epic cinematic team-up.

The official synopsis:

Continuing the epic big-screen adventures started in “Iron Man,” “The Incredible Hulk,” “Iron Man 2,” “Thor” and “Captain America: The First Avenger,” “Marvel’s The Avengers” is the superhero team up of a lifetime. When an unexpected enemy emerges that threatens global safety and security, Nick Fury, Director of the international peacekeeping agency known as SHIELD, finds himself in need of a team to pull the world back from the brink of disaster. Spanning the globe, a daring recruitment effort begins.

Long before the announcement was made, fans started wondering who in the world would dare to step up and helm a project like this. When the story broke that Joss Whedon would serve as both writer and director, there was very nearly a ticker-tape parade in celebration. Joss is known for his witty dialog and deft handling of large, multi-faceted groups of characters, and ever since his fantastic run on Astonishing X-Men a few years ago, I can think of no one better to make this movie actually happen.

Now, after months (years!) of teasers, the first real look at The Avengers has hit the net. Check it out, start salivating, and mark your calendars for May 4, 2012.

I spent a lot of time in their house, especially before I started school. They always seemed to love watching TV. I remember watching The Price is Right, Wheel of Fortune, Matlock, and Murder She Wrote with some frequency. I also remember they enjoyed watching 60 Minutes and 48 Hours and being very confused by the titles. Well, 60 Minutes made sense, but I didn’t understand how a TV program could suck up two whole days of programming.

Forty-eight hours…two entire days. When I taught English in Turkey, our courses were 48 hours of class time spread over four, six, or eight weeks. By the end of each course, I generally felt like I had been able to build a relationship with each of the students.

I’ve now been in Frankfurt, Germany, working with youth and education at Trinity Lutheran Church for six weeks, the typical length of one of those 48 hour classes. I have begun to wonder how long it will take before I spend 48 hours with any of the youth. If the only time I spend with them is on Sunday morning for one hour of youth Bible study, I will reach the 48 hour mark somewhere around Thanksgiving 2012. No joke. It will take over a year. Even with normal events and activities, which might take three or four hours, reaching 48 hours by Easter 2012 still might be difficult.

Isn’t that interesting?

Doesn’t that speak to the usefulness of a church lock-in? Or a retreat of some kind?

I’d like to invite you to just think about how long it would take you to spend 48 hours with different people who are in your life — your spouse, your kids, your parents, your friends, your co-workers, your grandparents, your Godparents, your pastor, your teachers, your youth leader.

Some of us are at a big time disadvantage when it comes to building relationships, yet relationships are one of the most important parts of vocation for pastors, youth leaders, Godparents.

When I was a kid, I could spend 48 hours with my grandparents in the span of two weeks. In the two months we were in the states most recently, I spent as much time as I could with my grandparents. Thinking back, I think I made it up to about 20 hours with my dad’s parents (the ones from the farm). With my mom’s mom, I might have made it up to four hours. It makes me feel terrible and very guilty that if you added up all of the time I’ve spent with my mom’s mom over the past 10 years, you might make 48 hours.

How we spend our time is important. It reminds me of this clip from Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.

The time we have has been gifted to us as an act of grace. How much time are you spending with the one who gifted you with the time you have? It’s hard to say, isn’t it? Time with God seems to come in short bursts for me — a 30-second prayer here, a five-minute study of a Bible verse there.

I invite you to re-evaluate how you are spending your time and who you are spending your time with. Who or what are you giving your time to? Who or what needs your time, but isn’t getting enough of it? When you say, “I don’t have time,” what do you mean?

Thank you for giving your time to read this. I hope it was encouraging. I hope we can spend more time together in the future.

Author’s note: This post was originally posted at my wife’s and my personal blog: http://twostorytellers.wordpress.com.  Clarifications have been added for those who don’t know me personally. 

Maybe that’s why I like running Linux all these years later.

Like those old programming guides, Linux encourages you to get involved in the process of making your computer work. As an operating system based on open-source projects, it has a commonality with those early projects. And with the recent celebration of Linux’s twentieth anniversary, it’s surprisingly everywhere — even if you don’t notice it. From the growing Android mobile OS to Wi-Fi routers to Entertainment systems on airplanes, Linux is in a lot of places that you may not expect.

The desktop environment, on the other hand, is still a little less Linux-populated. There are plenty of good reasons for this, one of the biggest being compatibility issues. Those into gaming are still usually left with finding alternate ways to getting their games to work, and for many the thought of editing config files isn’t exactly in their plans for the evening before playing Portal. Netflix still isn’t available on Linux without some serious hacking (although that appears to be changing), and iOS products are still hit-and-miss at best. This might keep casual people off the OS, but for those who like to try something different, there are plenty of projects out there that make Linux worthwhile.

So…here are five projects for the beginning Linux user to try.

A few notes before we begin, though: for all of these projects I’m recommending downloading a distribution of Linux Mint 11 or higher. There are many good Linux distros out there, and for the most part, this isn’t a slight to any of the others. Mint is based on the popular Ubuntu Linux, which in and of itself is also good for beginners. Mint is a little more user-friendly at the moment, and it also gives you the added bonus of having most of the codecs and internal programs (like Flash and MP3 support) ready to go immediately.

Also possibly the best way for you to experiment with this is to download the ISO and burn it to a CD/DVD. Most modern computers will automatically boot from the optical drive. If you want a little more speed and and want to save your work, find a spare flash drive and install Linux directly to the USB drive. Many programs can help you do this, but starting with PenDriveLinux might give you the most help.

1) Resurrect an Old Computer

There are quite a few distros of Linux that are intended to give life to an older computer. The OS does a fine job on computers that are otherwise thought to be too archaic. It may not make them run like a brand new machine, but it can still get the computer going with a few modern conveniences like word processing, chat, web, and music. You could even load it up with some vintage and retro games by adding DosBox to the setup.

Where to start:
Tiny Core Linux is a bare-bones Linux installation that includes a graphical user interface (GUI) and a modern-looking desktop. It can be downloaded as a 10MB ISO file and burned to a CD, or attached to a flash drive if your old computer has a USB connection. From there it can be installed and used with a little but of help from TCL’s website. Within a few minutes of loading up TCL, I was able to download the lightweight but modern Midori broswer, and had it up and running. TCL keeps a list of software on their website that you can download from their own app repository. It’s not going to blow away anything new, and your cell phone has more power and memory, but it’s certainly a way to get something up and running again.

If the computer was made within the past decade or so, give something like Xubuntu or Lubuntu a spin. Both are variants of the popular Ubuntu distribution, but with less resource-heavy desktops and applications. They may not shine as much as the others, but they can easily get something up and running again.

2) Run an easy-to-use media center on the TV.

With video cards dropping in price and TVs being made with more and more inputs, it’s become even easier to hook up a computer to your TV and have it work rather well. Add to this the growing amount of online video, the impressive amount of storage available on newer hard drives, and the ease of ripping your own DVDs to the computer, and running everything from your computer gets easier every year.

Where to Start:
XBMC is an open-source project that was originally intended to run on an Xbox, but it can be used on anything from Windows to Mac to Linux these days. Setting this up on a computer allows you to aggregate your videos, music, and pictures with ease; and plug-ins will let you watch video with online sites from YouTube to the big networks. There’s even a remote for iOS and Android to control it via your phone.

There are plenty of other options as well, including the more robust Boxee, which has a line of boxes that act as standalone devices for connecting the TV to the Internet.

In Part 2 of this post, I’ll cover three more projects that you can do as a Linux beginner to both get to know the OS a bit better as well as to enjoy some pretty cool DIY computing.

Warning: Spoilers ahead.

The series shows a dystopian future for North America. Ravaged by natural disasters of every kind and a large war, a new country, Panem, is formed. The country’s controlling city, the Capitol, forms thirteen districts. The districts wage war against the Capitol and the Capitol wins. To show its dominance, the Capitol obliterates District 13 and puts forward a punishment called the Hunger Games in which chosen members of the districts’ children are forced to fight to the death in an outdoor arena. As further punishment, it is televised and all citizens are required to watch.

Dystopian indeed. Fast-forward 74 years from the beginning of the Hunger Games and the story begins, focused on Katniss Everdeen, the storyteller and heroine of the series.

In reading the series (which you absolutely should do) I discovered two things were glaringly missing from the storytelling.

Firstly, the rest of the world is not mentioned at all. The story gives no explanation for what may have happened to Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, South America or any other landmass you can think of and it also doesn’t give any explanation as to why the people in these places don’t intervene to stop the horror that occurs annually in Panem.

Secondly, religion is not mentioned at all. It is not alluded to. It is not a cause for fighting. Religion doesn’t exist. To be honest, I don’t know how to feel about this glaringly purposeful act of neglect by the author. The timeline is a bit unclear, but I think it is safe to say this story would be centuries from now, but not millennia.

It’s hard to pinpoint the author’s motivation. I like to think that perhaps she felt a lack of religion was the only way to make the lack of morals present in the idea behind the Hunger Games believable. On the other hand, the idea that a place like Panem could exist without pockets of underground believers boggles my mind.

Despite the glaring lack of faith in the trilogy, the series does have faith-applicable recurring themes running throughout it. Sacrifice, compassion, hope and love headline the list.

Sacrifice

The entire crux of the story is bent on sacrifice. Katniss volunteers to compete in the Hunger Games so that her sister, Prim, doesn’t have to. Throughout the series, she risks her life to save others and others risk their lives to save hers as well.

Compassion

Panem is not a very good place to live, especially District 12, where Katniss lives. People never have enough food, and accidents occur in the coal mines with some frequency, stealing the lives of the district’s inhabitants. Katniss’s first memory of Peeta, her fellow competitor in the Hunger Games, is of him having compassion on her, finding a way to give her bread as she and her family near starvation. Compassion is very clear in Katniss’s family, especially her mother and sister who are both healers, taking care of injured people even though their patients have no way to repay them.

Hope

The style of first person storytelling allows the reader to see just how difficult it is for Katniss to have hope, how she gives up, how she knows death is coming only to be miraculously saved. Hope comes and goes for Katniss, but it propels her forward in ways that only hope can.

Love

Above all else, love is obvious in the Hunger Games trilogy. Katniss’s love for Prim, Peeta, her best friend Gale, her district, people in general, all of the love that is in her is what seems to make her an easy target for the Capitol to take advantage of her.

While those very Jesus-like attributes are present in The Hunger Games, one attribute that is lacking is forgiveness. In my opinion, this is one of the only problems with the series; forgiveness of others, forgiveness of self, forgiveness in any way is not important, really in any character at all. As I said before, compassion for those who are supposedly innocent is there, but forgiveness for those who have intentionally done wrong is nowhere to be found.

The penultimate thing I want to say about The Hunger Games, as both a compliment and a criticism, is the way the series handled deaths. There were a lot of deaths in this series. Some of people you loved, some of people you hated, some of people you weren’t sure about, some of people you didn’t know at all. The way Suzanne Collins showed death reminded me of Slaughterhouse Five: “So it goes.”

I think the author’s point in such deaths is pretty simple. War sucks. Death sucks. People shouldn’t be killed by other people. I largely agree with that idea.

Initially I compared this series to Harry Potter and Twilight. I still haven’t read Twilight (and have been discouraged from reading it over and over again). I have read Harry Potter (three times now) and I can say that whatever happens with the popularity of The Hunger Games, the Harry Potter series, at least in novel form, will always be better and I think deaths are what separate the two.

It’s not that J.K. Rowling does a better job of choosing who dies and who lives; it’s that she shows how deeply it affects the people who knew the deceased people. The best example is Harry’s reaction to Sirius’s death and the conversations that follow with Dumbledore and Nearly-Headless Nick. Those dialogues evoke such incredible emotion and do such a great job of balancing hope and despair that the reader is shaken to the core. We don’t see Katniss having those profound reactions and conversations even though she’s telling the story. She could make us feel what she feels but due to the action, the pacing, or whatever else, we just never see it like we should, especially in the third book. The deaths are in every instance (aside from Rue’s) lacking the desired emotion.

Finally, The Hunger Games trilogy should certainly be on your reading list and on your movie watching list. (Doesn’t the trailer look amazing?) It is a great exploration of psychology, sociology, anthropology and science fiction. It makes you think. It encourages you to have compassion. It persuades you to keep turning the pages (or keep pushing the button that leads you to the next screen).

There’s news about Pixar’s future plans, and those worried that the recent sequels (and depressing headlines about Disney’s philosophy behind projects) might find a little comfort in the news. Pete Docter is at the helm again, although this one might be more sci-fi than his previous movie Up. All we have right now is a Twitter-sized synopsis, so that will have to do:

From director Pete Docter comes an inventive new film that explores a world that everyone knows, but no one has seen: inside the human mind.

That’s it for now, other than Indie-Wire‘s comments that the movie will be about the formation of ideas and is being called “ambitious” by Pixar. This from the company that brought you a post-human world without dialogue for half the movie.

But that’s just 2013 (after they release Brave and their next sequel, Monsters University), we’re already hearing stories about 2014: the future of Pixar involves dinosaurs.

What if that life-changing asteroid missed Earth? Director Bob Peterson’s hilarious tale depicts a world where dinosaurs never went extinct.

It’s another Tweet-friendly line, but it gives us a little idea of where they could go. This one will be directed by Bob Peterson, who has been around Pixar for a while as a writer and story artist. He also voiced two characters that I wouldn’t have expected to come out of the same mouth: Doug the Dog from Up and Roz from Monsters, Inc.

Of course, the upside of a lot of this is that Pixar is getting out of its sequel era that started with Toy Story 3 last year. While Toy Story 3 was considered to be great in its own right, Pixar had really been on a roll with original films: Ratatouille, WALL-E, and Up were considered some of their strongest work, and easily some of the best films on the past few years. With the company allowing their artists to drive the company, they’ve made themselves the animation studio to watch and see where the medium is going.

I’m happy they’re allowing us to be along for the ride.